BREAKING: Airman Awarded Purple Heart Medal for Injuries in France Train Attack

U.S. Air Force officials compared Airman 1st Class Spencer Stone to the comic book hero "Captain America" and said he will receive the Airman's Medal and possibly the Purple Heart for helping stop a gunman on a European train.
"What the gunman didn't expect was a confrontation with our very own 'Capt. America' -- and believe it or not, that is what Airman Stone's friends nicknamed him during Air Force technical training," Air Force Secretary Deborah Lee James said during a press conference Monday at the Pentagon.
Stone was traveling on a high-speed train from Amsterdam to Paris on Friday when he, along with two of his friends and British businessman, subdued a gunman and suspected Islamic extremist who was armed with an AK-47, Luger pistol and box cutter.
Stone's unit has recommended him for the Airman's Medal, the service's highest non-combat award, and he may also receive the Purple Heart for being injured in the ordeal, officials said. He was hospitalized with cuts to his head, face and hand after the gunman attacked him with a box cutter.

The 23-year-old Stone "leapt into action" with two of his buddies from a California middle school -- National Guardsman Alek Skarlatos, 22, and Anthony Sadler, 23 -- as well as 62-year-old British businessman Chris Norman in confronting gunman who had strapped the assault rifle across his bare chest.
"Had it not been for this heroic quartet, I'm quite sure that we'd be discussing a bloodbath" rather than their heroism, James said.  "They subdued the gunman and saved lives."
The secretary said that Stone's unit had put him up for the Airman's Medal and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark Welsh said that he also may be eligible for the Purple Heart.
"We are looking at the potential, to see whether we can award the Purple Heart as well," Welsh said, but it will first have to be determined whether the train incident was an act of terrorism. The 2009 attacks at Fort Hood, Texas, by then-Army Maj. Nidal Hasan were eventually ruled to be terrorism, making victims eligible for the Purple Heart.
The gunman has been identified as 26-year-old Moroccan Ayoub El-Khazzani. He was being held and questioned by French counterterrorism police outside Paris.
French and Spanish authorities have alleged that El-Khazzani is an Islamic extremist who may have spent time in Syria. El-Khazzani's lawyer said on Sunday that he was homeless and trying to rob passengers on the train to feed himself.
Earlier Monday, French President Francois Hollande awarded Stone, Sadler, Skarlatos and Norman the French Legion of Honor, the country's highest award.
In the gilded splendor of the Elysee Palace, Hollande said, "One need only know that Ayoub El Khazzani was in possession of 300 rounds of ammunition and firearms to understand what we narrowly avoided, a tragedy, a massacre."
"Your heroism must be an example for many and a source of inspiration," Hollande said. "Faced with the evil of terrorism, there is a good, that of humanity. You are the incarnation of that."
Stone, whose thumb was severely cut by the gunman, still had his left arm in a sling as well as a bruised eye.
"I kind of just woke up from a deep sleep and my friend Alek was sitting next to me," he recalled of the incident during a press conference at the U.S. embassy in Paris, according to a CNN video. "I turned around and saw he had what looked to be an AK-47 and it looked like it was jammed or it wasn't working and he was trying to charge the weapon.
"Alek just hit me on the shoulder and said, 'Let's go.' And [I] ran down, tackled him. We hit the ground. Alek came up and grabbed the gun out of his hand while I put him in a choke hold."

Not only did he tackle the gunman, Stone is also credited with helping save a passenger who was shot in the neck and squirting blood. He said he "just stuck two of my fingers in his hole and found what I thought to be the artery, pushed down and the bleeding stopped," according to an Associated Press article. He kept the position until paramedics arrived, the article stated.

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Internet Activist, a Creator of RSS, Is Dead at 26, Apparently a Suicide

Aaron Swartz, a wizardly programmer who as a teenager helped develop code that delivered ever-changing Web content to users and who later became a steadfast crusader to make that information freely available, was found dead on Friday in his New York apartment.

An uncle, Michael Wolf, said that Mr. Swartz, 26, had apparently hanged himself, and that a friend of Mr. Swartz’s had discovered the body. 

At 14, Mr. Swartz helped create RSS, the nearly ubiquitous tool that allows users to subscribe to online information. He later became an Internet folk hero, pushing to make many Web files free and open to the public. But in July 2011, he was indicted on federal charges of gaining illegal access to JSTOR, a subscription-only service for distributing scientific and literary journals, and downloading 4.8 million articles and documents, nearly the entire library. 

Charges in the case, including wire fraud and computer fraud, were pending at the time of Mr. Swartz’s death, carrying potential penalties of up to 35 years in prison and $1 million in fines.

“Aaron built surprising new things that changed the flow of information around the world,” said Susan Crawford, a professor at the Cardozo School of Law in New York who served in the Obama administration as a technology adviser. She called Mr. Swartz “a complicated prodigy” and said “graybeards approached him with awe.” 

Mr. Wolf said he would remember his nephew, who had written in the past about battling depression and suicidal thoughts, as a young man who “looked at the world, and had a certain logic in his brain, and the world didn’t necessarily fit in with that logic, and that was sometimes difficult.”

The Tech, a newspaper of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, reported Mr. Swartz’s death early Saturday. 

Mr. Swartz led an often itinerant life that included dropping out of Stanford, forming companies and organizations, and becoming a fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

He formed a company that merged with Reddit, the popular news and information site. He also co-founded Demand Progress, a group that promotes online campaigns on social justice issues — including a successful effort, with other groups, to oppose a Hollywood-backed Internet piracy bill. 

But he also found trouble when he took part in efforts to release information to the public that he felt should be freely available. In 2008, he took on PACER, or Public Access to Court Electronic Records, the repository for federal judicial documents. 

The database charges 10 cents a page for documents; activists like Carl Malamud, the founder of public.resource.org, have long argued that such documents should be free because they are produced at public expense. Joining Mr. Malamud’s efforts to make the documents public by posting legally obtained files to the Internet for free access, Mr. Swartz wrote an elegant little program to download 20 million pages of documents from free library accounts, or roughly 20 percent of the enormous database. 

The government shut down the free library program, and Mr. Malamud feared that legal trouble might follow even though he felt they had violated no laws. As he recalled in a newspaper account, “I immediately saw the potential for overreaction by the courts.” He recalled telling Mr. Swartz: “You need to talk to a lawyer. I need to talk to a lawyer.” 

Mr. Swartz recalled in a 2009 interview, “I had this vision of the feds crashing down the door, taking everything away.” He said he locked the deadbolt on his door, lay down on the bed for a while and then called his mother. 

The federal government investigated but did not prosecute.In 2011, however, Mr. Swartz went beyond that, according to a federal indictment. In an effort to provide free public access to JSTOR, he broke into computer networks at M.I.T. by means that included gaining entry to a utility closet on campus and leaving a laptop that signed into the university network under a false account, federal officials said. 

Mr. Swartz turned over his hard drives with 4.8 million documents, and JSTOR declined to pursue the case. But Carmen M. Ortiz, a United States attorney, pressed on, saying that “stealing is stealing, whether you use a computer command or a crowbar, and whether you take documents, data or dollars.” 

Founded in 1995, JSTOR, or Journal Storage, is nonprofit, but institutions can pay tens of thousands of dollars for a subscription that bundles scholarly publications online. JSTOR says it needs the money to collect and to distribute the material and, in some cases, subsidize institutions that cannot afford it. On Wednesday, JSTOR announced that it would open its archives for 1,200 journals to free reading by the public on a limited basis. 

Mr. Malamud said that while he did not approve of Mr. Swartz’s actions at M.I.T., “access to knowledge and access to justice have become all about access to money, and Aaron tried to change that. That should never have been considered a criminal activity.” 

Mr. Swartz did not talk much about his impending trial, Quinn Norton, a close friend, said on Saturday, but when he did, it was clear that “it pushed him to exhaustion. It pushed him beyond.”

Recent years had been hard for Mr. Swartz, Ms. Norton said, and she characterized him “in turns tough and delicate.” He had “struggled with chronic, painful illness as well as depression,” she said, without specifying the illness, but he was still hopeful “at least about the world.” 

Cory Doctorow, a science fiction author and online activist, posted a tribute to Mr. Swartz on BoingBoing.net, a blog he co-edits. In an e-mail, he called Mr. Swartz “uncompromising, principled, smart, flawed, loving, caring, and brilliant.” 

“The world was a better place with him in it,” he said. Mr. Swartz, he noted, had a habit of turning on those closest to him: “Aaron held the world, his friends, and his mentors to an impossibly high standard — the same standard he set for himself.” Mr. Doctorow added, however, “It’s a testament to his friendship that no one ever seemed to hold it against him (except, maybe, himself).” 

In a talk in 2007, Mr. Swartz described having had suicidal thoughts during a low period in his career. He also wrote about his struggle with depression, distinguishing it from sadness. 

“Go outside and get some fresh air or cuddle with a loved one and you don’t feel any better, only more upset at being unable to feel the joy that everyone else seems to feel. Everything gets colored by the sadness.”

When the condition gets worse, he wrote, “you feel as if streaks of pain are running through your head, you thrash your body, you search for some escape but find none. And this is one of the more moderate forms.”

Ravi Somaiya contributed reporting.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: January 12, 2013

An earlier version of this article incorrectly identified the police who arrested Mr. Swartz, and when they did so. The police were from Cambridge, Mass., not the Massachusetts Institute of Technology campus force, and the arrest occurred two years before Mr. Swartz’s suicide, but not two years to the day.Read More >>

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