The man who was struck and killed by a Frontier Airlines plane on a runway at Denver International Airport has been identified.

Denver’s chief medical examiner said on Tuesday that they identified the man as 41-year-old Michael Mott.

“Mott had climbed the perimeter fence just minutes before walking on the runway. He was identified by fingerprints at the scene. According to Denver’s chief medical examiner, Sterling McLaren, Mott’s death was ruled a su*cide. He was sucked into one of the plane’s engines,” Collin Rugg wrote.

“Denver Police Chief Ron Thomas says no vehicle or bike was found at the location where Mott jumped the fence. While Mott reportedly scaled the 8-foot-tall fence, the airport’s motion sensors detected a herd of deer near where he was. Mott reportedly had previous contact with law enforcement in the metro area, but no more details were released,” he continued.

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The pilots immediately aborted the takeoff after reporting the engine fire and telling air traffic controllers that there was smoke inside. The plane was evacuated, and passengers exited the jet on the runway using emergency slides.

Phillip Washington, the chief executive of Denver International Airport, praised the actions of the pilots and crew members. “This could have been far worse,” he said.

The Frontier Airbus A321 jet, with 224 passengers and seven crew members, was leaving on Flight 4345 to Los Angeles International Airport when the accident took place, according to Frontier and the Federal Aviation Administration. Frontier is based in Denver.

The plane stopped on the runway soon after it started accelerating for takeoff, according to the aviation tracking website Flightradar24.

Denver Airport said in a statement that the episode happened at about 11:15 p.m. and that firefighters put out an engine fire on the plane. The airport said that 12 people sustained minor injuries, with five taken to nearby hospitals. The injuries were sustained during the evacuation.

According to the New York Post, Mott had been arrested in Colorado over 20 times since 2002.

The outlet shared prior mugshots of Mott.

The New York Post shared further:

His most recent arrest was for felony trespassing just one month before he jumped the fence at Denver International in an attempt suicide mission.

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Mott got sucked into one of the engines of the Airbus A-321neo and his cause of death was determined to be multiple blunt and sharp force injuries, officials said Tuesday.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the Pueblo-native was walking free after he was nabbed on April 10 for first-degree trespassing and damaging property at a Colorado Springs dwelling, then resisting arrest when cops arrived.

Starting when he was just 17, Mott was repeatedly arrested for minor infractions like shoplifting and underage alcohol consumption – but within just a couple of years, he had devolved into a hardened, violent criminal, his public rap sheet shows.

By February 2005, he was arrested by officers from the Cortez Police Department for attempted murder using a gun.

He pleaded down to second-degree assault causing serious bodily injury with a deadly weapon in that case, and was slapped with six years behind bars.

While in prison, he was charged with felony assault using a weapon once again.

 

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