Family, Friends Stunned by Man’s Bizarre Acts

He cleaned the floors of nursing homes and lived with his mother in a peaceful neighborhood filled with children and retirees.

He liked country music, cooking and camping--and was always ready to lend a hand, from painting the house trim to hauling ceramic tile into a neighbor’s home.

He was, say friends and relatives, sweet, laid-back, kind and generous. An all-around nice guy.

In his mother’s words, “He was the whole light of my life.”

The Jonathan Burton they describe is a far cry from the man law officers say flew into a rage on a Southwest Airlines flight and tried to break into the cockpit. Burton, 19, died of asphyxiation after being restrained by passengers. Federal prosecutors have declined to press charges.

Neither his mother, Janet Burton, nor friends, co-workers and neighbors can find anything in Burton’s past behavior to explain what happened.

He wasn’t into drugs, insisted Janet Burton, a registered nurse who works at a dialysis center. Though toxicology reports on her son showed small traces of drugs, the amounts were not enough to have affected his actions, an autopsy concluded.

He wasn’t afraid of flying, his mother said, noting he had flown numerous times by himself.

Martha Ford, who lived across the street from the Burtons, recalled Burton and his two brothers inviting her young sons to play whenever they were out in the yard kicking a ball.

“I thought it’s very telling about a person and their character that they would slow up their game for a little kid,” she said. “Teenagers are not something I necessarily wanted across the street. If you had to have teenagers, you would want these boys.”

Burton was born in West Virginia but moved with his mother and brothers to Las Vegas in 1984 after his father died of a heart attack. Burton was 4 and just beginning to emerge from the shadow of the older boys, Craig and Brad.

“He didn’t start talking until he was 3, and he didn’t stop from that time on,” Janet Burton said. “ . . . Being the youngest of three boys, he always had to be a little bit louder to be heard.”

“He was a sweetheart,” said Isabel Orvis, who supervised Burton at Life Care Center of Las Vegas, a nursing home where he worked for about two years in high school. “You don’t see teenagers wanting to work with old people, but he was so good with the residents.”

He also worked several weeks this past summer at Silver Ridge Healthcare Center.

“He loved it,” his mother said. “He would come home every night with stories these elderly people would tell him. He’d say, ‘Someday I’m going to be old, and hopefully somebody will do something for me.’ ”

While Burton knew he didn’t want to clean floors the rest of his days, he wasn’t sure what he did want to do. He finished high school in 1999, and his mother told him to take a year to think things through.

A two-week trip to Salt Lake to visit his aunt and uncle, something he did almost annually, was supposed to be one last hurrah before Burton started community college.

“Something obviously happened, and I can’t explain it,” Janet Burton said. “Nothing that I’m hearing was the Jonathan that I knew.”