EX-BOUNCER’S WILD FLIGHT HOME
An ex-bouncer at a Faneuil Hall bar was the first person to grab the man accused of attacking a flight attendant on a plane heading to Boston, throwing the suspect down to the ground and helping restrain him from hurting anyone else on the chaotic United flight.
“I just have a hard time allowing someone to assault a flight attendant,” Jeff Neil told the Herald on Thursday, recalling how it all went down on Sunday’s flight from Los Angeles to Boston Logan International Airport.
The 52-year-old Exeter, N.H., resident was heading home with his wife Libby after they had watched their son Adam play lacrosse for Clemson’s club team out on the West Coast over the weekend. Their daughter Raye also plays lacrosse for UConn.
On Sunday, the New Hampshire couple boarded the 6-hour flight home, with no idea all hell was going to break loose about 45 minutes before the plane was set to land.
The Neils were sitting in row 21, seats D and E (aisle and middle), while Leominster man Francisco Torres was in the row in front of them.
“We started to realize he had an anxious look on him,” Jeff said. “It really started to go bad when the flight attendant asked him if he had tried to open the emergency door. Then he went from zero to 60 real quick.”
Torres began making terrifying threats, saying he was going to “kill every man on this plane” and warning that there would be a “bloodbath everywhere.”
People were trying to calm Torres down, including a woman who told him that he was scaring them.
“He said he wasn’t going to stop,” Jeff recalled. “You could just tell that he wasn’t going to go down easy, and he wasn’t just going to sit down and be quiet on his own. It probably wasn’t going to end well.”
“This man was not thinking on all cylinders,” he added. “He was acting disturbed, and I just wanted to help people and make sure everyone could walk away from this safely.”
After Torres went on his rant from his seat, he popped out into the aisle and went into a defensive stance. Jeff then stood up in the aisle and followed Torres, as the suspect approached a flight attendant with a broken spoon.
“Dude, I’m telling you right now,” Jeff can be heard saying in a video of the scene. “I’m telling you right now.”
Torres is then accused of trying to stab a flight attendant in the neck. With the broken metal spoon, Torres allegedly hit the flight attendant in the neck three times.
Quickly, Jeff got to Torres as the suspect tried to assault the flight attendant.
“I wrestled with him a bit, and threw him down to the ground,” said Jeff, who decades ago was a bouncer at Hong Kong in Boston.
The Peabody native now works for a software company (Tact.ai) that sells software to pharmaceutical companies, a far cry from kicking drunken college kids out of the Faneuil Hall bar.
Several people on the plane jumped on top of Torres to help restrain him.
“It wasn’t just me,” Jeff emphasized. “I may have been the first one to stand up when he became aggressive, but a lot of people came together to help. A woman comforted my wife during the pile. There was a lot of humanity on that plane when push came to shove.”
Torres apparently tried to bite Jeff at one point.
“Another guy helped relieve that issue for me and restrained him,” Jeff said. “We all worked together when we had to.”
A lot of people were obviously in shock on the plane.
“I always have faith that an aircraft is most likely a very safe place, but you need to have your head on a swivel,” Jeff said. “There are people who could be having a mental breakdown, and we need to understand that collectively we can all work together to walk away from something safely.”