First-Year’s Roommate Bears Suspiciously Striking Resemblance to D.B. Cooper
WOODLAWN – First-year Ralphie O’Higgins moved into his new dorm room on Friday only to find that his roommate bore an uncanny resemblance to the notorious plane hijacker D.B. Cooper.
O’Higgins made the connection half an hour after meeting his roommate, who introduced himself as Brad Normal. “We were making small talk, just getting to know each other, when I thought, ‘Gee, he sure looks an awful lot like D.B. Cooper, the unidentified man who hijacked Northwest Orient Airlines Flight 305 on November 24, 1971, and obtained two hundred thousand dollars in cash before parachuting thirty minutes out from Seattle, never to be found or identified.’
Naturally, O’Higgins said, Normal doesn’t look exactly the same as the man who appears in the composite sketch produced by the FBI in 1972. “For one thing, he’s a fully-dimensional person rather than a shaded drawing. And then he’s also older, obviously. But if you were to turn that drawing into a man, and then age the drawing-man up forty years, you’d basically just get Brad.” When it was put to him that Cooper’s disappearance was fact fifty-three years ago, not forty, O’Higgins said it’s possible Normal “exfoliates or something.”
O’Higgins’ suspicions were further raised during a conversation about the current NFL season. “I told him I thought the Seahawks were looking pretty good this year, and he just chuckled and said, ‘No bird of the sky has anything on me, boy.’”
Then there was the moment when a gentle knock on the door prompted Normal to dive under his bed and scream “They’ll never take me alive!” while brandishing a hunting knife.
“Most guys I know wouldn’t react like that,” said O’Higgins. “Also, he coughs a lot, but not like how you would cough, or me. More like a really old guy, like how a really old guy would cough.”
When asked for comment, Normal simply smiled and said, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? You’d like that an awful lot I bet. Admit it, you’d like that. Wouldn’t you like that? Well. I bet you would. I sure bet you’d like that. You son of a bitch.”
Griffin is a copy editor and staff writer for this paper, and was born early in the morning.
