MIAMI (Reuters) - U.S. agents filed criminal charges on Wednesday against a pilot who parachuted out of his airplane before it crashed in an apparent attempt to escape his legal woes by faking his death.
Pilot Marcus Schrenker, who is recovering in a north Florida hospital after slashing his wrists, was charged with making a false distress call and willfully crashing his plane.
The charges were filed in U.S. District Court in Pensacola, Florida, and carry a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison, a $5,000 fine, plus restitution for the $36,000 rescue effort.
Schrenker, a 38-year-old money manager from Indiana, was already wanted there on financial fraud charges alleging he misled consumers who invested in his wealth management companies and misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars of their money.
He flew alone aboard a small plane that took off for Florida on Sunday from Anderson, Indiana. Investigators said that as the plane flew over Alabama, he made a fake distress call, put the plane on autopilot and parachuted out.
The empty plane crashed in a swampy area near a housing development in the northwest Florida city of Milton. No one was injured and no structures were damaged, investigators said.
Schrenker parachuted safely to the ground near the Alabama city of Harpersville on Sunday night, got a police officer to give him a ride to a hotel and then fled, investigators said.
He had previously stashed a motorcycle in a storage unit near that hotel and got away before local police learned of the plane crash.
U.S. marshals caught up with him on Tuesday night at a north Florida campground, incoherent and bleeding severely from an apparent attempt to kill himself by cutting his wrists.
He was in fair condition and under guard at a Tallahassee hospital.
An affidavit attached to the charges said that the red motorcycle Schrenker drove to Florida carried saddlebags stocked with maps, survival paraphernalia, military ready-to-eat meals and what appeared to be a bullet-point script for his distress call.
He had told aviation dispatchers that his windshield had imploded and he was bleeding profusely. When the crashed plane was recovered, the windshield was still intact, the affidavit said.
Schenker will be tried first in Florida on the federal charges, then sent to Indiana for trial on the financial charges, Florida officials said
Reporting by Jane Sutton, editing by Anthony Boadle
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