2010 Austin Suicide Attack

On the morning of February 18, 2010, Andrew Joseph Stack III set fire to his North Austin house, drove to a hangar he rented at Georgetown Municipal Airport, and took off in his single-engine Piper Dakota aircraft. Roughly ten minutes after takeoff, he deliberately crashed the plane into Building I of the Echelon office complex in Austin, Texas, a four-story building whose top three floors housed an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) field office employing 190 people. The crash produced a large fireball and explosion. Stack died in the crash, as did Vernon Hunter, a 68-year-old IRS Revenue Officer Group Manager. Thirteen other people were injured, two of them critically.

Before the crash, Stack posted a suicide note to his website. Metadata on the document showed it had been composed starting two days earlier and saved numerous times, with the final save shortly before the attack. In the note, Stack expressed anger at the government, corporate bailouts, several named companies, unions, insurance companies, the Catholic Church, and particularly the IRS, describing a long-running dispute with the agency over taxes and debt. At the time of the crash, Stack's accountant confirmed he was being audited by the IRS for failure to report income.

In the aftermath, a bystander used a truck-mounted ladder to rescue six people from the building's second floor, and a nearby firefighter hazardous-materials training team that witnessed the crash responded immediately to fight the fire and conduct search and rescue. Authorities briefly evacuated Georgetown Municipal Airport to search Stack's abandoned vehicle, and NORAD launched fighter aircraft from Houston as a standard precautionary measure.

Federal and local officials, including the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and Austin's police chief, stated the attack did not appear linked to organized international terrorism, with the FBI initially investigating it as an assault on a federal officer rather than as terrorism. Some members of Congress and commentators publicly disputed that characterization, describing the act as domestic terrorism, while an academic quoted in coverage said the incident lacked a clear political demand and appeared to be a personal, cathartic act of violence. Stack's website was taken offline at the FBI's request, and social media groups supporting him were removed by the platform.

The IRS reported spending more than $38.6 million in the aftermath: about $6.4 million to recover documents and resume operations in the damaged building, and more than $32 million to review and enhance physical security at IRS facilities nationwide. A subsequent government audit found that the security-review contract had been poorly managed and inefficient. The Echelon building was repaired and reopened by December 2011. Vernon Hunter's widow filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against Stack's widow, alleging a failure to warn others of a foreseeable risk.