GUNNISON, CO – A woman who couldn’t find a direct flight from Los Angeles to Gunnison, Colorado bought a ticket to Kansas City, Missouri instead. She then faked a heart attack when her United flight was close to Gunnison. The 36-year-old woman, Ashley Fields, wanted to visit her twin sister, Jo, who lives in Gunnison.
A flight attendant recalls that “this passenger kept asking me for hours if we were close to Gunnison yet. She wore me out. I kept going up to the cockpit and bugging the pilot. We were both sick and tired of it.”
When the plane was fifty miles east of Gunnison, Fields clutched her chest and started to make noises like she had heard in movies when someone had a heart attack. She put on such a good show that Captain Bryan Westholm decided to land at the closest available place: Gunnison County Airport. The Boeing 777 came to a stop about a mile past the end of the runway. An ambulance was waiting.
The EMT who took Fields to the hospital watched her behavior when the ER doctor and nurses were not with her. “She was laughing on her cell even though she pretended to cry and to have such terrible chest pain ten seconds before.”
Hospital staff got suspicious when Fields’ sister and her husband showed up in the ER less than thirty minutes after the ambulance got there. Fields told her doctor that her pain had suddenly cleared up. She said, “The food on the flight sucked. I think that’s what did it to me.” She left AMA.
The nurse who was assigned to Fields in the ER tried to sell the story to CNN and MSNBC, but neither company wanted to carry the story because it could encourage copycat behavior. “No airline passenger would ever know if their flight would lose a few hours due to a stunt like this,” said Bryant Williams at CNN.
Neverkidd enjoys writing for GomerBlog because that lets him continue this unbroken record of never kidding. He is the author of “True Tales from a Physician Assistant,” which he wrote using a random pen name, available on Amazon here.
