Killing of Rigoberto Alpizar
criminal takedown
Rigoberto Alpizar (April 17, 1961 – December 7, 2005) was a Costa Rican-born United States citizen who was fatally shot at Miami International Airport by two United States Federal Air Marshals.
Alpizar lived in the central Florida town of Maitland and worked in the Paint Department of a Home Depot. He was supposed to fly with his wife, Anne Buechner, to Orlando, Florida, returning from a missionary trip to Quito, Ecuador.
The shooting took place on a jetway. Alpizar ran away from the aircraft and, Homeland Security officials maintain, claimed to have a bomb in his bag and then made a sudden movement toward it.
Shooting
On December 7, 2005, upon landing at Miami International Airport, from Medellín, Colombia, the airplane on which Alpizar was traveling taxied to the gate and passengers began disembarking to be processed by customs agents. At about 14:00 (2:00 PM) EST, passengers continuing on to Orlando were re-boarding the plane.
As the plane finished boarding and all 114 passengers were seated, Alpizar was heard having an argument with his wife, Anne Buechner. He stood up from his seat saying, "I have to get off the plane", and ran for the door, which was still open. Buechner chased after him, yelling, "He's sick".
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7333843. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1961 and 2005.
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This entry incorporates text from “Killing of Rigoberto Alpizar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.