Mid-air madness

That’s not really a combination of words I often see…

Less than a minute after an American Airlines flight took off from Savannah, Ga., for Miami on Monday night, a passenger began yelling and shaking. Flight attendants initially thought he was having a seizure.
But it turned out he was struggling because he believed a demonic spirit had invaded the cabin — and, at some point during the flight, began swallowing rosary beads to ward that spirit off.
As attendants approached the man, Delange Augustin, 31, he kicked one of them in the chest so hard that the attendant tumbled across the aisle and into a window on the other side of the plane, according to an arrest affidavit.
That’s when the cabin crew realized that Mr. Augustin, who was traveling with his sister, was not having a medical emergency. “Augustin’s choices appeared purposeful, though difficult to describe,” Savannah Solomon, a special agent with the F.B.I., wrote in the affidavit filed in the United States District Court in Chatham County.

Since the flight had only just started, it was easy enough for the pilots to turn around immediately and head back where it came from, but the guy kept freaking out:

In the detention center, Mr. Augustin’s sister told the authorities that they had been traveling to Haiti to “flee religious attacks of a spiritual nature,” according to the affidavit.
Mr. Augustin had told his sister “to close her eyes and pray because Satan’s disciple(s) had followed them onto the plane and the legion did not want the Augustins to make it to Haiti,” it said. He swallowed the rosary beads “because they are a weapon of strength in the spiritual warfare,” Mr. Augustin’s sister told Ms. Solomon.

I would question the bit about him not having a medical emergency; indeed I’d say BOTH of them are having one. And why would you fly to Haiti to escape from spiritual attacks? You’re going to the homeland of voodoo; if Satan is personally targeting you for some reason, wouldn’t he be even more likely to do it there? I see another article claiming the two are actually Haitians themselves, though, so maybe they were going there to use the, er, local knowledge? I don’t know, the whole thing is weird. I wonder what Satan’s putative agent made of it…