Local friends recall pilot who flew plane into IRS building

Joe Clerico remembers Andrew Joseph Stack III as just "Andy," a quiet, nerdy classmate at Milton Hershey School.

"He was an average person. Didn't show any signs of craziness," said Clerico, 53, a security-systems installer who lives on Fourth Street in Lancaster.

"He's world history now."

Bob Hawley remembers Stack's high intelligence and occasional habit of "accumulating a lot of wrongs" before reaching a point at which he would explode.

That was in 1974, when the three were classmates at what was then an all-boys school for orphans.

On Thursday, a far more disturbing portrait of Stack emerged — that of a deranged, frustrated man who held a deep mistrust of government and a particular grudge against the Internal Revenue Service.

Stack committed suicide by slamming his single-engine Piper PA-28 plane into an Austin, Texas, office building that houses the IRS, stunning those who knew him years ago in the 150-some-member Class of 1974 at Hershey. Also killed was an IRS worker.

"I just couldn't believe it," said Clerico. "It took a little while for me to put it together."

Stack was furious with the federal government — especially its tax code — because he believed it robbed him of his savings and destroyed his career while allowing corrupt executives to walk away with millions, according to his 3,000-word manifesto posted online.

Hawley, who lived in the same common housing unit with Stack during their years at Hershey, described his former classmate as "very intense."

"He was very tightly wound. He definitely had a temper, but not in a way that would suggest there was something that should have been done that wasn't done," said Hawley, a 1979 graduate of Lebanon Valley College who now lives in Alabama.

"He wasn't a raving maniac. He was a guy with a temper. He tended to accumulate a lot of wrongs. He would get to a certain point and explode," Hawley said. "He always had an us-versus-them mentality, but not unfriendly. Very smart. Very intelligent. A good musician."

Hawley, who played in the school's jazz band with Stack, said he was shocked and saddened by his former classmate's actions.

"I don't believe he was evil," Hawley said. "He was just terribly misguided."

Former classmate Bill Mottin told The Patriot-News in Harrisburg, where Stack lived while attending Harrisburg Area Community College, that Stack was "always a little off and unsteady."

"He also had a hair-trigger temper. Plus, he had a brilliant mind. Combined, they were a highly volatile cocktail just waiting to explode," Mottin, of Sewell, N.J., wrote to The Patriot-News.

Phil Day, another former classmate, told the newspaper that he had noticed in Stack a pent-up anger and a determination to remain separate from his peers.

"He was a part of the group, but he wasn't the party kind of guy," Day told The Patriot-News. "He wasn't the type that wanted to get together with his buddies. He was off on his own."

After his years in Harrisburg, Stack married and moved to California. He had a daughter, who married a Norwegian pilot; Stack went to Norway to visit her and his grandchildren each year.

"He was a good man. Frustrated with the IRS, yes, but a good man," Stack's former wife, Ginger Stack, told the Los Angeles Times from her home in Hemet, Calif. "I'm in shock right now. He had good values. He really did."

Stack, a 53-year-old contract software engineer, wrote that he spent months on the six-page diatribe in hopes that it would be therapeutic.

Instead, "there isn't enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken," Stack wrote. He lamented that he couldn't "gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head."

The letter is dated Thursday, with the years he lived: 1956-2010.

This article contains information from The Associated Press.

tmurse@lnpnews.com