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United Airlines passenger attacked while sleeping on flight from San Francisco: “His face was bruised and bloody”
A man on a cross-country United Airlines flight violently attacked a sleeping passenger, punching him repeatedly in the face until it was bloody, authorities said. A witness said the man who was attacked is deaf and nonverbal.
Authorities identified the suspect as Everett Chad Nelson, according to an affidavit from an FBI agent.
The incident unfolded Monday on United Flight 2247 about two hours after it took off from San Francisco International Airport for Washington Dulles International Airport in Virginia.
Nelson got up from seat 35F toward the back of the Boeing 737 and went to the lavatory near the front of the plane, according to the affidavit. When he was returning to his seat, he stopped at seat 12F and started punching the man who was sleeping there, according to the affidavit, which didn’t identify the victim.
Sandhya Gupta, who was sitting behind the sleeping man, watched the attack unfold.
“I will not forget the look in his eyes,” Gupta told CBS News. “I had not seen a look from anyone’s eyes like that. It was like he was seeing through the victim.”
According to the FBI affidavit, the attack lasted about a minute. The man screamed as Nelson kept hitting him and his blood was seen on the sleeves of Nelson’s windbreaker, a nearby seat and on the plane’s wall and window, according to the affidavit.
“I actually wondered does this guy have a weapon because I didn’t realize you could do so much damage with just your fists,” Gupta told CBS News. “… His face was bruised and bloody.”
Another passenger rushed up the aisle and wrapped his arms around Nelson to stop him, Gupta said.
“He didn’t fight the person who came to subdue him,” Gupta said. “It was like powering off a robot.”
A doctor on the flight ran toward the man who was attacked and started administering first aid, Gupta said. She said she realized he was deaf and nonverbal when he started signing at the people helping him.
According to the affidavit, the man sustained bruising to his eyes and a gash on his nose. Nelson didn’t appear to be injured, and there wasn’t any indication that the man fought back, according to the affidavit.
Nelson was taken to a seat toward the front of the plane and monitored by the passenger who stopped the attack, according to the affidavit. Gupta said he wasn’t restrained after the attack.
“He just went limp,” Gupta said.
In a statement, United praised the reaction of the passenger and crew.
“Thanks to the quick action of our crew and customers, one passenger was restrained after becoming physically aggressive toward another customer on a flight from San Francisco to Washington Dulles on Monday. The flight landed safely and was met by paramedics and local law enforcement,” the airline said.
Gupta said a flight attendant told her that Nelson claimed the man had attacked him in the street earlier.
“He kept texting, ‘I’m innocent,'” Gupta said.
The Federal Aviation Administration said in a statement it was investigating the incident. According to the agency, airlines have reported over 1,740 unruly passenger incidents this year and that such incidents have dropped from the record highs reached in early 2021.
Kathryn Krupnik and Ryan Sprouse contributed reporting.
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Bronze Age town with tombs full of weapons discovered hidden in Arabian oasis
The discovery of a 4,000-year-old fortified town hidden in an oasis in modern-day Saudi Arabia reveals how life at the time was slowly changing from a nomadic to an urban existence, archaeologists said on Wednesday.
The remains of the town, dubbed al-Natah, were long concealed by the walled oasis of Khaybar, a green and fertile speck surrounded by desert in the northwest of the Arabian Peninsula.
Then an ancient 14.5 kilometer-long wall was discovered at the site, according to research led by French archaeologist Guillaume Charloux published earlier this year.
For a new study published in the journal PLOS One, a French-Saudi team of researchers have provided “proof that these ramparts are organized around a habitat,” Charloux told AFP.
The large town, which was home to up to 500 residents, was built around 2,400 BC during the early Bronze Age, the researchers said.
It was abandoned around a thousand years later. “No one knows why,” Charloux said.
When al-Natah was built, cities were flourishing in the Levant region along the Mediterranean Sea from present-day Syria to Jordan.
Northwest Arabia at the time was thought to have been barren desert, crossed by pastoral nomads and dotted with burial sites.
That was until 15 years ago, when archaeologists discovered ramparts dating back to the Bronze Age in the oasis of Tayma, to Khaybar’s north.
This “first essential discovery” led scientists to look closer at these oases, Charloux said.
“Slow urbanism”
Black volcanic rocks called basalt concealed the walls of al-Natah so well that it “protected the site from illegal excavations,” Charloux said.
But observing the site from above revealed potential paths and the foundations of houses, suggesting where the archaeologists needed to dig.
They discovered foundations “strong enough to easily support at least one- or two-story” homes, Charloux said, emphasizing that there was much more work to be done to understand the site.
But their preliminary findings paint a picture of a 2.6-hectare town with around 50 houses perched on a hill, equipped with a wall of its own.
Tombs inside a necropolis there contained metal weapons like axes and daggers as well as stones such as agate, indicating a relatively advanced society for so long ago.
Pieces of pottery “suggest a relatively egalitarian society,” the study said. They are “very pretty but very simple ceramics,” added Charloux.
The size of the ramparts — which could reach around five meters (16 feet) high — suggests that al-Natah was the seat of some kind of powerful local authority.
These discoveries reveal a process of “slow urbanism” during the transition between nomadic and more settled village life, the study said.
For example, fortified oases could have been in contact with each other in an area still largely populated by pastoral nomadic groups. Such exchanges could have even laid the foundations for the “incense route” which saw spices, frankincense and myrrh traded from southern Arabia to the Mediterranean.
Al-Natah was still small compared to cities in Mesopotamia or Egypt during the period.
But in these vast expanses of desert, it appears there was “another path towards urbanization” than such city-states, one “more modest, much slower, and quite specific to the northwest of Arabia,” Charloux said.