Small amounts of cocaine and alcohol were found in the body of a despondent truck driver who crashed his small plane on the White House grounds, the Secret Service said, reporting preliminary autopsy results.
And in a troubling miscue, Frank Corder's plane appeared on radar at the nearby National Airport, but operators did not notice it until after the crash. "It was . . . missed," Secret Service spokesman Dave Adams said Tuesday.The developments should help investigators determine how a novice pilot in a tiny Cessna 150 managed to come so close to hurting the first family, but the news did little to explain why Corder took to the air in the first place. Was it suicide, a bungled prank or - less likely - an assassination attempt?
Adams said an autopsy showed that Corder's blood-alcohol content was 0.045 percent, slightly above the 0.04 percent legal limit for pilots. The legal limit for driving a car in most states is 0.10 percent.
Relying on an initial test tainted by blood-clotting, the Secret Service first reported the blood-alcohol content at 0.32 percent. The agency later supplied the 0.045 results of a second test but said even that exam is preliminary.
Adams said the autopsy found "trace amounts of cocaine in his system," but complete results will not be available until tissue samples are examined in the next few days.
In what could become an embarrassing lapse, Adams said radar at National Airport picked up the plane shortly before the crash, but the operators failed to spot it.
The Federal Aviation Administration keeps recorded images of everything operators see on the radar. A review of the tapes showed the plane was visible, Adams said.
"They did not see the aircraft on the radar screen. After reviewing the tapes . . . they did see it on the image," he said.