Life's A Beach

A onetime Des Moines Register reporter has made national news for having played in a band with Joseph Stack, the man who crashed a plane into a building in Austin, Texas.

Patrick Beach, with the Austin American-Statesman, described him as a mild-mannered guy who was a stereotypical software guy.

"I talked to a lot of people who knew him better than I did, and no one saw anything like this coming".

The toughest part about this, Beach said, was how this guy, who loved his wife and step-child, could be the same person who wanted to "commit mass murder."

Beach, who also knew Stack's wife Cheryl, said-- "It seems extremely out of character. He was the quintessential, stereotypical, straight-out-of-central-casting, mild-mannered, bespectacled engineer type."