[Unidentified Male:] The 29-year-old Horizon Airline employee has been identified is Richard Russell. Commercial aircrafts are complex machines. I don't know how he achieved the experience. It's going to disappoint them to hear that I did this. I would like to apologize to each and every one of them.
[Jeremy Kaelin, Worked With Richard Russell:] I was just shocked to see that someone who was so nice, so helpful, and caring
[Announcer:] This is NEW DAY WEEKEND with Victor Blackwell and Christi Paul.
[Christi Paul, Cnn Anchor:] Stunned and heartbroken. That is what we are hearing from the family of a man who died when he crashed a stolen plane. We have more on that story in just a moment.
[Victor Blackwell, Cnn Anchor:] Also ahead this hour, a year after violent racially charged protests in Charlottesville, Virginia, white supremacists and counter protesters are expected to rally again. This time in the nation's capital.
[Paul:] A CNN investigation forces Twitter to finally admit info wars violated its rules with its twisted messages of hate and racism.
[Blackwell:] And NASA launches a probe that will travel closer to the sun than any spacecraft before it as scientists try to unlock its greatest mysteries. Your NEW DAY starts right now.
[Paul:] One minute past 6:00 and so grateful for your company. Thanks for being here. You know, as he was flying that stolen passenger plane near Seattle Richard Russell calls himself a broken guy.
[Blackwell:] Now his family members say they are stunned and heartbroken after Russell was identified as the airline employee who took off from the Seattle airport in that empty plane and then crashed it an hour later.
[Mike Matthews, Friend Of Richard Russell's Family:] This is a complete shock to us. We are divested by these events. And Jesus is truly the only one holding this family together right now. As the voice recording show, Beebo's intent was not to harm anyone. He was right in saying that there are so many people who have loved him.
[Paul:] We are learning morning about Russell training on the ground there where he was authorized to tote planes to the gate but they do not believe he had a pilot's license.
[Blackwell:] And now as the criminal investigation begins, officials are working to recover the plane's data recordings and Russell's remains. Airport security experts point out numerous flaws in the system revealed by this incident. CNN correspondent Dan Simon is live in Steilacoom with an exclusive interview with one of Russell's former coworkers. The family is shocked and stunned and heartbroken. Did this coworker see any potential signs?
[Dan Simon, Cnn Correspondent:] Well, good morning Christi and Victor. We are getting a clearer sense of what Richard Russell was like as a friend, as an employee, as a coworker, and some of what you're about to hear may surprise you. I can tell you that Jeremy Kaelin worked alongside Russell for eight solid months. They primary handled the luggage there at the airport. And he says he got to know him well. He says this is somebody who had a lot of integrity, somebody who worked very hard, and somebody who had great sense of humor. He is also not surprised that Russell was able to learn a few things about aviation given certain aspects of his job. Take a look.
[Simon:] When you learn that it was your friend and former coworker Richard Russell who did this, what did you think?
[Kaelin:] Shock. He was really just super nice. Always laid back but super nice, super funny. And he would always go out and help others with his flights that he wasn't even assigned to help out with, or and when he was working with you on your flight he would work as hard as he could.
[Simon:] You saw the home video of him doing those maneuvers.
[Kaelin:] Yes.
[Simon:] He seemed like, to a certain degree, he knew what he was doing as a pilot or behind the controls.
[Kaelin:] Yes. Well, you can learn how to fly with flight simulators if you buy them. You can literally just run them on your PC, Mac, whatever. But it was also part of his job description on tow team was to operate some of the systems that were he was trained to do by Horizon Air which is part of the tow team. And so, essentially, he just took that knowledge and then built off of it.
[Simon:] Now Kaelin says there is so much information out there including YouTube instructional videos that can teach people how to turn on aircraft and how to do basic maneuvers so he is not surprised that somebody like Russell who had access to aircraft was able to do what he did. The key thing is access. Remember he passed a security check. Now of course all of this is being investigated by the FBI. They are going to be talking to friends and the coworkers, perhaps even Kaelin himself. And of course the investigation is also centered about 10 minutes from where I'm standing at that island where I can tell you dozens of investigators have been sifting through the debris. Victor and Christi, back to you.
[Blackwell:] All right. Dan Simon, live for us this morning. Dan, thank you very much.
[Paul:] We want to bring in CNN transportation analyst Mary Schiavo. She's a former inspector general of the Department of Transportation. Mary, so good to see you. Again, thank you for being here. So this is what maybe some perplexing to some people. The tower knew that this was unauthorized departure. There were no routine procedures we had learned, the ramp, the ground, the take off clearances. None of that was given. So with that said let's put ourselves in the tower's position. You have got a guy in a plane who says, I'm taking off and I'm going, what option did they have?
[Mary Schiavo, Cnn Transportation Analyst:] At that point once he's literally once he's on the runway and rolling down the runway, none. I mean, we've all seen Hollywood blockbusters where police cars or fuel trucks are racing to try to get in front of a plane to stop it, but in reality the controller didn't have time to do anything. They well, from what we have learned, they knew that he was moving and he wasn't authorized to do that. But if he was heading straight to that runway and starting that takeoff role, that's it. You're going up at 134 miles an hour. That plane is lifting off.
[Paul:] As I understand it, correct me if I'm wrong, he was towing it but when you're towing it there is supposed to be by protocol somebody in the plane. There was not. At that point, does the onus fall on the airport or the airline?
[Schiavo:] It's the airline. The airline has the authority and ability to control their ground operations. They have their own dispatchers, their own sort of ground controllers. And so the tower might not have known. There would be no reason to tell the tower that they are moving and repositioning a plane on the ground. So they wouldn't have known that there was not someone in that aircraft. They they there's two different functions. You have ground control and then you have the tower that controls the takeoffs. So the tower probably didn't know that it was just one guy moving the plane around.
[Paul:] Now that somebody has seen this, is there concern, Mary, that it could happen again at another airport?
[Schiavo:] Well, sure. And it's been a concerned, literally, since September 11th, 2001. Controlling the 900,000 airport workers at the 450 airports, commercial service airports across the country has been a big issue. Congress addressed it again last year, the committee on Homeland Security. And there is you know, just a big question as to what to do as to keep the airports and the traveling public and the citizens over whose heads we all fly safe when you have that many workers and they have to be able to do their job. So I do assume that it will come up again but there was one clue that just leapt out at me and this is when this fellow was flying and he said to the controller he said, can I get the plane can you tell me how to turn on the plane's pressurization so I don't feel so light- headed? Well, he wasn't at 14,000 feet where you got light-headed or even over at 10 thousand where you need oxygen, so to me that was a clue and I think they will focus in on that too. Something was wrong, physically, I think, and mentally.
[Paul:] OK. So you're you're intimating that that because he felt light-headed at an altitude that you wouldn't normally be
[Schiavo:] Right.
[Paul:] perhaps there was something else going on with him?
[Schiavo:] Yes, yes, that was to me a clue.
[Paul:] OK. Mary Schiavo, thank you so much for sharing and for sharing your expertise with us. As always we appreciate you.
[Schiavo:] Thank you.
[Richard Preston, Imperial Wizard, Confederate White Knights Of The Kkk:] I've never terrorized a black person in my life.
[Sara Sidner, Cnn Correspondent:] Why not join the Kiwanis club? Why not call it something different?
[Preston:] Because again
[Sidner:] Why the Ku Klux Klan?
[Preston:] Because I want to see the clan to become what it once was.
[Rep. Tom Garrett , Virginia:] About Charlottesville with the director of the FBI amongst others and asked if Russian inter-meddling had to do with fomenting the flames of what happened in Charlottesville. I was told, yes, it did.
[Frank Meeink, Former Supremacist Skinhead:] Am I the guy who always brings anger and hatred towards every conversation I'm in? Or am I the guy who can bring peace and resolution to something by not degrading other human beings?
[Blackwell:] There is a state of emergency in Charlottesville one year, exactly one year after the violent and deadly protests in that small Virginia town.
[Paul:] Yesterday, hundreds of demonstrators marched through the streets of that city. Police came forward for the worst but the protests were mostly peaceful. Take a look here. They are going to be there is going to be the same show of force today when white supremacists hold the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville but a second rally is also planned at Lafayette Square near the White House in Washington. And that is where find CNN's Sara Sidner is right now. Sara, you've had some pretty interesting conversations around this.
[Sidner:] Yes. I think Charlottesville, for anyone in this country, and even outside of the United States, has seen that as a real example that this country is still struggling with deep racial divides. We went to a town in Pennsylvania that is struggling with the question, what to do about a neighbor who is outspoken and a neo-Nazi and fires off his guns that night. In the calm of this rural northern Pennsylvania town, a sign that hate lives here. Are you a neo-Nazi?
[Daniel Burnside, Pennsylvania Director Of Far-right National Socialist Movement:] Do I embrace it? I don't try to push it away.
[Sidner:] Well, you're wearing a swastika on your shirt
[Burnside:] Exactly.
[Sidner:] and you've got swastika flags. Why the flags? Why the shirt? Why these hateful symbols in this town?
[Burnside:] I don't think they're hateful. I think it's an ideology that has been completely misinterpreted since the Third Reich.
[Sidner:] OK. Now, I have got to stop you. Misinterpreted, misinterpreted six million Jews were killed?
[Burnside:] No, no. You'll never sell me on that.
[Sidner:] I'm not trying to sell you.
[Burnside:] Yes.
[Sidner:] It's reality. It's history that cannot be denied. [voice-over]: Daniel Burnside is lightning rod of discord in Ulysses, Pennsylvania, population 690. With the help of the Internet, his message has spread far and wide, giving his town attention it doesn't want.
[Burnside:] Rural America spoke up when he they elected Trump. Rural America.
[Sidner:] And by rural America, he means white America.
[Burnside:] We are staring down the barrel of a gun here in white America. There's still 193 million white Americans. Yes, the vast majority of them are in their 60s and 70s, will be in the ground in the next 20 years and, therefore, we have the possibility of becoming a minority in our own country. A possibility
[Sidner:] It sounds to me
[Burnside:] of becoming a minority.
[Sidner:] like you're afraid of being me. And being me
[Burnside:] It's my country.
[Sidner:] is great. This is also my country.
[Burnside:] You guys didn't win the culture war.
[Sidner:] He invited us on his property to talk, but when he doesn't like our conversation, he explodes.
[Burnside:] Get the
[Sidner:] We do. Just down the street, we're met by a dozen residents who say Burnside does not speak for this town. [on camera]: There are families in this county that blame politics for people like him sort of being able to come out and be very loud. Is that fair?
[Ivan Lehman, Ulysses Resident:] Our president we've got right now hasn't helped the situation a whole lot. You know, he has done a lot of the same believes. You know, he won't speak against them, OK? This guy feeds off that stuff.
[Sidner:] Among the crowd, many with grandfathers or fathers who fought the Nazis in World War
[Ii. Carm Barker, Ulysses Resident:] They're good people and he is stepping on all of us. He is stepping on all of us. We are all one we're all one tribe. Who does he think he is?
[Sidner:] Teacher, Debbie Hamilton says she just returned from touring concentration camps in Poland.
[Debbie Hamilton, Teacher:] One of the things that we spent a lot of time talking about was passive resistance versus active resistance.
[Sidner:] So far, they have chosen passive resistance with Burnside. On the other side of Potter County, Joe and Lashina Leschner are convinced passive resistance is the wrong choice.
[Joe Leschner, Ulysses Resident:] I'm not saying you should go to their houses with pitch forks and guns. I'm saying hold a peaceful protest against them.
[Burnside:] Traditionalists, American Knights of the Ku Klux Klan neighborhood watch.
[Sidner:] After seeing KKK flyers appearing in their neighborhood and Burnside's decorations in the county, Joe did protest only to receive a threat by one of the supremacists he stood against.
[Leschner:] They would look at me and gave me the finger and even make little gestures, you know, that they were going to shoot me.
[Sidner:] Joe says the racial hatred intensified with when his Jamaican bride arrived. LASHINA
[Leschner, Wife Of Joe Leschner:] In Walmart, you know, I get a lot of that. It's
[Sidner:] In their minds, if more people stood up against hate, the racist would be forced to leave and let love stand. Now we are here in Lafayette Park. And a lot of people who are standing against the Unite the Right rally that is scheduled here on the very day that Heather Heyer was killed in Charlottesville during the counter protest to the Unite to Right protest. People see it as spitting in the eye of the victims of that protest to have yet another one here in Washington, D.C., right across the street by the way from the White House. But there counter protests that are also scheduled and there expected to be more people at those protests than at this one. The Unite the Right organizers got a permit for about 400 people whether or not that number materializes we won't know until this evening. They are expected to start and end up here at about 5:30 in the evening. They will also be faced with those counter protesters who are here. They are calling it D.C. shut it down Shut It Down D.C. They are supposed to end up in this park right outside the White House, just giving you another example of the racial divide in this country.
[Blackwell:] Certainly. And let's hope everything remains peaceful there. Sara Sidner, thank you so much.
[Paul:] Sara, thank you. And Sara just mentioned Heather Heyer. This is a woman who people are remembering today. They left messages for her on the walls of downtown Charlottesville. One reads, teach love, not hate. And this is such as you can imagine a really tough weekend for her mother. But her mom says even though this was not her goal in life necessarily, she was a teacher, she was with her family. She says it is now her job to stop fighting for the social injustice that her daughter was fighting for. What do you think Heather would say to you one year later, if she could? And what would you say to her?
[Susan Bro, Heather Heyer's Mother:] I would say, I need you. I hope she would say I'm proud of what you're doing. I'm helping from up here, mom.
[Paul:] Do you feel her helping you?
[Bro:] I do. She makes things come together.
[Paul:] What is your wish for Charlottesville this year?
[Bro:] Don't be in such a rush to heal, that you don't fix the underlying problems. I know Mayor Walker is working hard to get some of those things done. I know some other people are working hard. If you rush to heal it over, if you rush to just spackle on top of the black mold on the wall, then it's only going to fester and grow and we are going to have this problem again in a short time. And I really don't want to see another mother, black, white, Asian, Latino, in my spot.
[Paul:] And by the way, Susan Bro there says that she is going to go to Heather's the place where Heather died on Fourth Street. She's going to lay some flowers there today.
[Blackwell:] Well, on this one-year anniversary, we are learning more about the Russian interference after Charlottesville. A GOP lawmaker says Russian trolls fueled that hate and anger, meddling online in the aftermath of the Charlottesville rally last year. We'll learn more about how he says
[Paul:] Also a security guard opens fire in a store in Las Vegas. We have new video to show you here of some frightening moments there as shoppers were hiding from that shooter.
[Blackwell:] Also, a multimillion dollar settlement for the man who says a popular weed killer caused his cancer. Coming up, what this landmark verdict could mean for the hundreds of patients suing the makers of Roundup.