‘Water, Adrenalin’ Powered TWA Purser in Hijacking

--The purser of TWA Flight 847, who was hailed as a heroine after the plane’s hijacking last month, said that “water and Adrenalin” kept her going through the ordeal in which one passenger was brutally slain. Uli Derickson said she had just come back from a week’s vacation and had an “incredible supply of energy” on June 14, when the jet was commandeered on a flight from Athens to Rome. “I think water and Adrenalin is a fantastic diet in a situation like that,” said Derickson, 40, on NBC’s “Today” show. “It kept me going.” The last 39 of the 153 persons aboard were freed June 30 after two weeks of captivity in Beirut. Passengers credited Derickson with preventing more killing by the Shia Muslim hijackers, who beat and then shot to death Robert Dean Stethem, 23, a member of a Navy construction team. Another member of the Navy team who was beaten, Clinton Suggs, 29, of Norfolk, Va., said on the program that he did not think he would be alive if Derickson had not intervened. “At the time, things were really getting out of hand after the shot (that killed Stethem),” he said. “They just came right back after me, and she stepped in. . . . I think I would have been next.” Derickson said she “broke down” briefly when one of the hijackers, who had asked her to marry him, demanded that she go to Beirut with him. “I just couldn’t handle that,” she said.

--Betsy Nelson is suing the Irving Sports store in the Washington suburb of Falls Church, Va., for $600,000, charging she was falsely accused of shoplifting a basketball when she actually was nine months pregnant. The day after the incident, she gave birth to a healthy boy. According to her lawsuit, Nelson, 33, was shopping for exercise equipment last February when a cashier told a manager that she had stolen a basketball and put it under her dress. The suit said Nelson was detained for an hour and given the option of opening her dress or going to the police station. “I had to disrobe in front of six male security guards and police officers in the store,” Nelson said in a telephone interview. “I had to take off my jacket, sweater and lift up my blouse.” In the suit, Nelson claims she was falsely accused of shoplifting and subjected to “great mental pain and suffering, insult, indignities, humiliation and serious emotional harm.” A woman who answered the telephone at the store’s offices said no one wished to comment on the suit.