He and his wife Jean were flying to Yosemite for a holiday with her brother and parents. Offered seats on an earlier flight when they reached Newark that morning, they took them. An electrical engineer from MIT with an MBA from Rutgers, he spent his retirement working with men struggling with drink and drugs. His Bible was recovered at the crash site, with a handwritten list of the men he was praying for.

Killed aboard United Airlines Flight 93, which came down in a field near Shanksville, Pennsylvania, on the morning of 11 September 2001. The aircraft had left Newark forty-two minutes late, which is the only reason those aboard learned by telephone what had already happened in New York before theirs was taken. They had about thirty minutes. They voted, and they went forward at the cockpit door. The aircraft never reached what it was aimed at.