posted on September 30, 2001 07:08:07 AM
Mohamed Atta did not want to pay the $3.10 toll. It was Monday, Sept. 10, and Atta, 33, an Egyptian who in the past few years had lived a wanderer's life between several cities in Florida, was stopped at a toll booth at Exit 13 of the Massachusetts Turnpike. He boiled over in anger when the operator demanded that he pay the toll.
When Atta refused and sped away, the operator wrote down the license plate number of his rented white Mitsubishi.
"Three bucks,” an operator said later. "But he wouldn't pay.”
At 5:53 a.m. the following day, a calmer Atta and a man identified by the FBI as Abdulaziz Alomari passed through the metal detector at the Portland, Maine, airport and boarded a plane for Boston's Logan International Airport. A surveillance camera snapped their pictures, freezing the time and place forever.
