Pilot Suffered Gunshot Before Crash Into Ocean

The case of the lawyer who stunned rescuers by surviving a crash landing into the Atlantic Ocean grew ever more unusual Friday as investigators revealed that Thomas Root had suffered a gunshot wound before his crash.

Officials in Hollywood, Fla., where Root is recuperating in a hospital, said they had not yet determined how the wound--roughly two inches above Root’s navel--was inflicted. But powder burns on his skin indicate the gun was close to his body on the right-hand side, Hollywood Police Chief Richard Witt told reporters.

“The gun was held right to his body within a close proximity and fired,” Witt said. Attempted suicide was the “first hypothesis” investigators drew from the available evidence, he added. Officials said there is no indication that anyone else was aboard the single-engine Cessna 210 with the pilot or that he was wounded before boarding the plane Thursday in Washington.

Root was “resting” in his room, hospital officials said. And federal investigators, describing him as heavily sedated, said they would not attempt to interview him until this morning.

Family members, however, who talked with Root on Friday, insisted that the gun in the plane must have gone off by accident. “The only thing that we can figure out is that somehow that (the shooting) happened on impact when the plane crashed,” Root’s brother-in-law, Brett Geer, told reporters after visiting Root at Hollywood Memorial Hospital along with his sister, Root’s wife Kathy.

Associates described Root as an avid gun collector. Virginia police, accompanied by federal officials, earlier this spring raided Root’s locker at the suburban Virginia airport where he kept his plane, the Associated Press reported. The officials found nearly three dozen weapons, including a machine gun. All were legal under federal and state law, although the machine gun was not registered with Virginia officials, a misdemeanor in that state.

Fellow attorneys here and former clients painted a picture of Root as a man at the center of a complex web of controversial dealings that may have been closing in on him in recent weeks.

The business ventures have involved some $15 million raised from several thousand people around the country by a Georgia firm, Sonrise Management Services, for projects to open radio stations. Until recently, Root represented all of the Sonrise investors in applications to the Federal Communications Commission for FM radio licenses.

Money Spent

To date, none of the investors has received a license and the money raised from them has been almost wholly spent on management and legal fees, according to sworn testimony by Sonrise officials. The company’s business dealings are currently the subject of investigations by state and federal agencies, officials said Friday. Root’s representation of Sonrise license applicants also has been questioned by federal authorities.

Among the Sonrise applicants are 16 partnerships bidding for FM radio stations in central and northern California.

Richard Hamming, a Monterey investor in one partnership seeking an FM radio license in the Central Valley town of Madera, said he already had “kissed the money good-bye.”

An investor in Oxnard, Reuben Miranda, said he remained anxious. “I got $10,000 in this thing,” said Miranda, who received a Sonrise letter soliciting investments at the Baptist church outside Oxnard where he is pastor.

“They had a really nice sales pitch,” said another investor, who sank some $50,000 into shares in 15 separate license applications and who has so far received no return on his money. “It was slick.”

The heart of the sales pitch was a promotional videotape prepared by the company, in which Sonrise Chairman Ralph M. Savage described the firm as a “Christian-based organization”--a professed orientation reflected in the firm’s name--whose goal was to “maintain the highest ethic in offering the potential investor the best return for his investment.”

Although many firms nationally work as consultants to assist investors in obtaining broadcast licenses, Sonrise differed markedly from most of the rest, according to lawyers familiar with its business practices. In typical cases, a group of people who wish to apply for a broadcast license will seek out a lawyer or consultant for assistance. In Sonrise’s case, the company employed a sales force that at one point numbered as many as 120, which sought out potential investors and tried to convince them of the benefits of seeking a radio license, Savage said in a deposition filed with the FCC.

Church Connections

The company appears to have concentrated on seeking investors who had connections with evangelical and fundamentalist churches in the Southeast, lawyers who have interviewed Sonrise clients said. Some of the partnerships apparently hoped to start stations with religious programming.

Last month, as some individual investors began to contact lawyers in Washington to discuss filing suits against Sonrise, the firm sent a letter to clients raising questions about Root’s representation of their applications and seeking to oust him as counsel for the partnerships. In confidential memoranda sent to the investors and made available to The Times, Root has defended his performance and raised questions, in turn, about Sonrise.

Most investors contacted Friday said they had no indication of problems until they heard of Root’s dramatic plane flight Thursday. Root took off from Washington early Thursday, heading for a court hearing in Rocky Mount, N.C., about two hours away. But shortly before reaching that destination, the plane veered off course, heading off into the Atlantic.

Military pilots who tracked the plane for nearly four hours reported Root was slumped backward in his seat. When the plane ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean near the Bahamas, rescuers were stunned when Root, hurt but alive, swam away from the wreckage.

While Root’s activities may have been a mystery to many of his clients, both Root and Sonrise have come repeatedly to the attention of federal and state officials in recent months.

At the FCC, documents show hearing examiners recently have used words such as “sham” in written orders directing the company to answer questions about the FM applications it has filed. They have on several occasions chastised Root for failure to appear at hearings or to present witnesses in cases.

North Carolina Probe

In North Carolina, Secretary of State Rufus Edmisten said Friday that his office has been investigating Sonrise since earlier this year, examining allegations that its sales practices violated securities laws.

And in Georgia, where Sonrise has its headquarters, state officials in June referred a complaint about Sonrise business practices to the federal Securities and Exchange Commission, according to documents released by the state office of consumer affairs. An SEC spokesman, citing agency policy, would neither confirm nor deny that the agency had opened an investigation of Sonrise.

Sources close to the FCC also said Root has been under investigation for allegedly preparing false documents to show that he had won permission from the Federal Aviation Administration to build tall radio towers in potential airplane flight paths. The sources said the investigation was referred to the FAA. An agency spokesman, John Leyden, said agency policy bars any comment on such matters.

Root, himself, was described by acquaintances as creative and hard working, but, said one lawyer, “he’s always spending most of his energy digging himself out of holes he had gotten himself into.”

Staff writers Russell Chandler in Los Angeles; Josh Getlin, Lori Silver and Michael Ybarra in Washington, and researcher Edith Stanley in Atlanta contributed to this story.