Eunice Stone was hungry. That’s all. Just hungry. There are seventy restaurants in Calhoun, Georgia. Eunice chose the Shoney’s Restaurant on Red Bud Road; she pulled into the parking lot after 10 am. Eunice and her young son sat themselves down and perused the kid-friendly menu. It was Thursday, September 12th, the day after the first-year commemoration of the flying-fuel-bomb attacks on the World Trade Center that had reduced two thousand eight hundred human beings to bloody pulp, bone fragments, and fingernails.
As Eunice Stone and her son enjoyed breakfast, three swarthy men of Middle Eastern descent swept into the vacant seats near them. One of the men sported a full beard and white skullcap that would not have attracted the least bit of attention in a Kabul street bazaar, but this was Calhoun, Georgia, a town of seven thousand souls and a scant five miles north of Lily Pond and 5-and-a-bit miles southeast of Sugar Valley or 5 miles west and a little south of Crane Eater. To the three Muslims, Kambiz Butt (25), Ayman Gheith (27) and Omar Choudhary (23), it was just a stop off I-75 South.
In any case, it was about 10:30 in the morning. The Cactus Keith and Ray Miller Show on WJTH had just left the air and the Chris McKenzie Afternoon Show was in full swing. As Eunice Stone and her son enjoyed breakfast, the three strangers began an animated conversation. Eunice recollected: “At first, you know, I just went ahead with my breakfast. But they were laughing. And I have very good hearing.”
Recounting snippets of overheard conversation, Mrs. Stone said she heard one of the men say: “If they mourn September eleventh, what will they think about September thirteenth?” A moment later, she said, one of the men asked, “Do you think that will bring it down?” To which, she said, another man responded: “Well, if that doesn’t bring it down, I have contacts to bring it down.” Said Eunice, “To me, that meant they were planning to blow up something.” “I’m not an eavesdropper,” she continued “but when you hear something like that, you can listen and when they started talking about bringing it down and they were going to Miami, I thought something was fishy. They said ‘We have to go; we are already behind. We have to quit stopping.’” Did she hear what was to be brought down? “No,” said Eunice, “I didn’t, but they were determined to bring it down, whatever it was. It really scared me. I was scared. As soon as they started getting up and making preparations to leave, I told my son, ‘Let’s go.’ He said, ‘We don’t have the check yet.’ I said we would get a check. So they got up. The one guy had a credit card in his hand and they went up to the front and they paid with the credit card. We were behind them but kinda back a bit. As soon as we walked up, we got our check and paid. I got a crayon from the kiddie basket and wrote down one of their license numbers, and got a make and model on the car.” She continued: “I just, you know, something was not right, so we went to our car and it was 10:50 when they pulled out of the parking lot, and we went to our car and notified Georgia State Patrol, because they got on 75. I figured that was the best [agency] to notify.”
Eunice was a bit perplexed by the men’s clearly-spoken American English: “Well, we hesitated to call anyone because we thought they were just playing us, you know. I thought that I was going to sound silly if I called somebody, but then I thought it was the right thing to do. But if it turns out to be nothing, then it is just nothing. But in my heart, I knew it was the right thing to do because they scared me.” She added: “I am not a prejudiced person, but when they started laughing about 9/11, that is when I really thought, ‘Wait a minute: why would anyone laugh about 9/11?’”
When Eunice Stone called the Georgia State Patrol to report what she had heard, a nationwide alert was issued by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. By early morning of Friday the thirteenth, the trio of Muslims had reached the bend in I-75 east of Naples, Florida where it curves eastward through the Everglades. One of their two cars ran a toll booth without paying the toll. A police car gave chase. After an eight-mile pursuit, the officer pulled one of the cars to the side of the road. The second vehicle then returned to join the roadside convocation.
The would-be escape artists were apprehended at two in the morning. In the tense aftermath of the first 9/11 anniversary, an already poised police force was quick to respond. They arrived in force. Bomb-sniffing dogs were very excited by the two cars. A remotely-operated robot was brought in to search both automobiles, a cumbersome process that is rather like performing brain surgery while wearing boxing gloves. The cars were carefully swabbed to recover any existing explosive residue. These procedures took hours to perform. All the while, the cross-Florida highway, known affectionately as Alligator Alley, was closed to all traffic. Countless uncomprehending motorists were stranded.
After their apprehension, the Muslims behaved like jerks: they refused to answer even the most basic questions, as required by law; they refused to cooperate with investigators; they gave false information to the police; they concealed their true identities. There was also some confusion over the men’s driver’s licenses.
More than 100 officers from at least 20 agencies converged on the roadside stop. A like number of media personnel soon swarmed onto the site. The story was all over the morning news. The suspects were identified as residents of Illinois. Only one of the three was a native American; all of them were of Middle Eastern descent: Jordanian, Iranian and Pakistani.
Back in Chicago, relatives of the uncooperative Muslim suspects were quick to call Eunice Stone a racist. They denounced law enforcement and the news media as prejudiced people who just didn’t like Muslims. “Me and my brother and my whole family are just as American as anyone else,” declared Abdallah Gheith.
Seventeen hours later, when the swab samples came back negative for explosives, the three men were released without being charged. As they resumed their journey eastward to Miami, they were pursued by CNN helicopters which broadcast their journey live on television.
Calhoun Mayor Jimmy Palmer praised Eunice Stone: “Anytime that anyone makes an effort to save someone, that’s a good thing.” President Bush also lent his support. Calhoun resident Linda Shea said: “I think Eunice Stone is exactly the kind of person the president is looking for.” She added, “When you hear people gloating over 9/11, it’s worthy of taking notice. . .The government can’t do everything and be everyone’s eyes and ears. . .We, as private citizens, have to do what little we can to fight terrorism. I think it’s great, what she did.”
A large tattered American flag flies high above the garden in front of Eunice Stone’s grey two-story house east of I-75 in Cartersville. Neighbors described her as a quiet homemaker who kept to herself. Her husband, Billy Ray Stone, shooed away reporters, saying: “I think my wife did the right thing. That’s what they ask people to do. These guys say it was a joke? It was a sick joke. I praise her.”
Vernon Keenan, acting director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation said: “What she reported would lead a reasonable person to believe a criminal act was pending.” Florida Governor Jeb Bush remarked: “In this time of heightened vigilance, I think it is important to show that this system works.” Indeed it does. Collier County Sheriff Don Hunter described the roadside apprehension this way: “We had a very significant drill.”
Reporters for the Calhoun Times were all over the story in a New York nanosecond. According to the Calhoun Times, customers outside the Shoney’s buffet restaurant praised Eunice Stone. “If more of us did that, it could save more lives,” said William Broughman, a retired plumber from Calhoun. Mechanics at the Texaco station next to Shoney’s found it all unsettling. Said mechanic Ken Franklin: “September eleventh was enough. There didn’t need to be any more. Enough is enough.”
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At a hastily convened press conference in Davie, Florida, the Muslim trio offered a prepared statement. Only Kamiz Butt opened his mouth. The three men posed for cameras under the ever-watchful eyes of Altaf Ali, a representative of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The three admitted that they grew angry after a woman looked at them “suspiciously” in the Shoney’s restaurant; but Mr. Butt insisted, “Not once did we mention 9/11.” Mr. Butt said of Mrs. Stone, “She was probably eavesdropping on our conversation and might have heard a few key words that she misconstrued.”
Perhaps. And perhaps they thought that no one would lift an eyebrow as they wafted into the Georgia restaurant looking like something from the third reel of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia on the day after the commemoration of the mass murder of two thousand eight hundred people by practitioners of violent Islamic jihad.
Having put their spectacularly bad decision-making abilities on display before the whole world by giving false information to the police after an eight-mile pursuit through the Everglades, the trio of Muslims gave cold comfort to an ailing world by announcing their intention to become doctors. They said their destination had been the Larkin Community Hospital, a 112-bed facility in South Miami.
Dr Jack Michel, who is the chief executive and president of Larkin, said he had received more than 200 e-mail messages, some of them threatening. “Our primary objective is to take care of patients,” said Dr Michel, “I don’t know how that could be done with all this media attention.” Dr Michel said that the renowned trio was no longer welcome at Larkin Community Hospital.
This was bad news for the family of Ayman Gheith. Back in Chicago his brother Abdallah told the media: “My father passed away three years ago, and since then my brother has taken care of the family. We have no source of income right now. We’re waiting on him to finish medical school.” Good luck, Abdallah! Your brother has been playing bumper tag with the Florida highway patrol in the Everglades.
Way up north in the New York media market, left-wing lawyer Ron Kubi had a go at Eunice Stone (Curtis & Kubi Morning Show WABC Radio 9/17/02). Mr. Kubi, a former associate of the late William Kunstler, who is best remembered for his vigorous defenses of all things left-wing, no matter how extreme, shares the morning show with Curtis Sliwa, founder of the Guardian Angels, a posse of citizen crime stoppers. Sliwa is the conservative half of this improbable duo; Kubi is billed in station advertising as “Ron Kubi, who’s mommy is a commie.” Ron Kubi, an avowed communist who enjoys all the comforts of American capitalism, dismissed Eunice Stone is just another brainless, “big-haired” Southern woman. He offered that her natural social companions are “three-eyed cousin fornicators.” It was a broadside slander at the South. This smug northern urban sophisticate just couldn’t bring himself to believe that a Southern mother of two could ever make a prudent decision on a matter of public safety. His reference to her as “big-haired” is just a cheap shot. Photographs of Eunice being pursued by unrelenting media crews with shoulder-mounted cameras and ten-foot mike booms, show a stolid American mom in black slacks, a short-sleeved knit pullover and closely cropped hair. She’d rate a solid zero on anyone’s bimbo meter. So who’s the bigot here? Could it be the leftist urban shut-in who needs to experience a bit of American culture beyond the Manhattan megalopolis? Personally, I like Southerners. Any people who can use the words honor and patriotism without a hint of irony or embarrassment are all right with me.
The Muslim jihadists who tried to bring down the World Trade Towers in 1993 plotted their attack on America in a house that is a scant 4/5 of a mile from where this website originates. The Islamabombers had taken up residence in my home town. Their truck bomb exploded on February 26, 1993, blasting an enormous void in one of the World Trade towers. Six people were murdered. One thousand and forty two people were injured. The Islamabombers had hoped to topple one of the World Trade towers against the other and thereby murder many thousands of people. Their plot provides us with an X-ray photo of their very souls; it is a snapshot of their moral essence; it is all we need to know about them. They are moral aliens.
If mad-dog terrorists can infiltrate my sleepy little New Jersey hamlet, if they can hole-up in the house just down the road and incubate a plot to slaughter thousands of my fellow citizens, then who is to say that Eunice Stone is a silly woman for alerting the powers of law enforcement to what seemed to be the fragment of yet another Islamic blueprint for an attack on America? The Council on American-Islamic Relations can pout all it wants, but the simple fact is that America has not been repeatedly attacked by Uzi-packing Amish clergymen. Our newspapers have confronted us daily with the photos of hundreds of killers who wish us dead. None of them are Norwegians. No sane person will ever choose to un-know what he already knows to be true; to deny the evidence of our own experience is to prefer insanity. All of the people who have murdered our fellow citizens share a single religious-romantic mythology. Not one of them came from Iceland. We know what we know; we have identified the root culture of our enemy.
Eunice Stone had the courage to do what our government and her righteous upbringing urged her to do. She loved her fellow Americans enough to alert them to a possible danger that might have swept them away.
Life in Calhoun will soon return to normal; people like it quiet. Every year there is a reenactment of one of the bloodiest battles of the Atlanta Campaign, but nobody dies. The brochure says the “Calhoun retailers are friendly hometown people who give you personal care and extra service.” The Georgia Checker Tournament will be held at the Calhoun Recreation Department in October “as it has been for several years.” The Antique Engine Show featuring “antique engines from around the Southeast” will also be in October. There will be food and entertainment. The Quality Inn on Highway 53 East is pet friendly.
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Dang. Maybe I’ll go.
Thomas Clough