AUSTIN, Texas — Robin De Haven was driving the company truck to a job when he saw something that didn’t look right — a small plane, flying extremely low over a heavily congested area of Austin.
The 28-year-old Iraq war veteran recalled Friday how he then saw black smoke billowing from a glass building and rushed to the scene. There, where the plane had exploded into flames in a suicide attack fueled by anti-government hatred, De Haven found five people trapped on the second floor of the burning office housing Internal Revenue Service employees.
“I wanted to go help,” said De Haven, who works for a glass company. “I thought, ‘I’m going to go ahead and do it.’ I thought my boss would understand.”
He quickly hurled his 17- foot ladder onto the building, climbed up and went inside to help the workers escape.
Authorities have credited stories of heroism like De Haven’s for keeping the death toll so low in the crash Thursday.
The pilot, Andrew Joseph Stack III, and one other person were killed when the software engineer fueled with rage against the IRS slammed his plane into the Echelon 1 building.
Stack, 53, apparently targeted the lower floors of the office building, where nearly 200 IRS employees worked. Thirteen people were injured and one remained hospitalized at an Army burn unit in San Antonio.
Authorities have not identified the other person killed.
But in a message to employees Friday, IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman said the agency thinks an IRS worker was killed. He cautioned it hadn’t been officially confirmed.
In a ranting manifesto posted on a website, Stack lashed out at the government — especially its tax code — claiming officials robbed him of his savings and derailed his career.
In the note, Stack says he realizes “violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer.”
