OAN Staff Jenna Lee
2:27 PM – Tuesday, May 12, 2026
Officials have identified the man who was fatally struck by a Frontier Airlines plane at Denver International Airport (DEN) as 41-year-old Michael Mott.
Denver officials provided an update on their findings regarding the weekend incident on Tuesday, noting that fingerprints were used to confirm Mott’s identity.
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The Denver Medical Examiner’s office ruled the death a suicide and named “multiple blunt and sharp force injuries” as the cause of death. Chief Medical Examiner Sterling McLaren said during the news conference that Mott was sucked into a jet engine.
A suicide note had not been recovered in association with the incident, according to Denver Police Department Chief Ron Thomas.
According to investigators, Mott breached the airport’s perimeter fence and stepped onto the runway as the aircraft was accelerating for takeoff at 139 mph bound for Los Angeles, California.
The impact resulted in an engine fire at about 11:19 p.m., prompting an emergency evacuation of all 224 passengers and seven crew members.
Mott had gotten into trouble with the law multiple times before the incident, beginning when he was only 17 years old. His record included over 20 arrests for crimes such as felony trespassing, second-degree homicide using a gun in 2005, felony menacing and assault in 2010, second-degree burglary in 2016, and felony assault on a peace officer in 2020. Most recently, he was reportedly involved in an assault in February 2025, though the victim did not press charges.
A spokesperson for the Denver Police Department told the New York Post, “We currently are looking for any notes, computers, anything like that, trying to identify places where he most recently was.”
Security expert Jeff Price noted that trespassers breaching airport perimeters is a longstanding problem that happens regularly, perhaps dozens annually nationwide, but the majority of airport trespassers are intoxicated and simply “messing around just to see if they could do it.” In rare cases, trespassers jump the fence in an effort to prove the long-running conspiracy theory that the airport secretly houses a “UFO base,” he explained.
“It’s really not that difficult to jump an airport perimeter fence. They meet the standards for TSA (Transportation Security Administration), but the standards are not that robust,” said Price.
Denver International Airport CEO Phil Washington said that safety is the airport’s first priority. He added that the investigation into Mott’s death is ongoing, and “we will do our best to make sure that the improvements that we need to make are made very, very quickly.”
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