Patrick Critton
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Patrick Dolan Critton is a former teacher from Mount Vernon, New York who was arrested and convicted nearly three decades after a hijacking of an airplane traveling within Ontario[1]. Critton, who was a passenger on the plane, allegedly ordered its crew to fly to Cuba[2].
At the time of the incident, which occurred in 1971, Critton was a fugitive in New York City for a series of crimes, including bank robbery. He had fled to Canada, where he continued a life of crime.
On December 26, 1971, Critton boarded a plane in Thunder Bay, Ontario bound for Toronto. Armed with a grenade and a pistol, he demanded the plane to fly to Havana, Cuba, where he released all passengers and crew.
After arriving in Cuba, Critton served an 8-month prison sentence. Following his sentence, he first worked in the sugar cane industry. Two years later, he moved to Tanzania, where he became a teacher. He also married and had two children before returning to the United States in 1994, feeling safe from the time passed.
Critton remained a fugitive until 2001, when he was found by a detective through a Google search, which at that time produced a single hit with his name that revealed the location where he was teaching. The one hit was a March 2001 article describing his mentoring of black youth. (Today, a Google search for "Patrick Critton" yields around 200 hits).
Critton was arrested, coincidentally, around the time of the September 11 attacks. Fingerprints on a ginger ale bottle found on the plane linked Critton to the plane. Prosecutors, in order to avoid prejudicing the jury, based on the views of these attacks, portrayed Critton to jurors not as a terrorist, but as a kidnapper and robber whose motivation was to gain the flight to Cuba.
Critton received a five-year prison sentence for the crimes[3]. He was released after about a year.
