“While attending flight school at Huffman Aviation in Venice, Mohamed Atta, 33, and Marwan Alshehhi, 23, lived with four other Middle Eastern students near Venice Airport at Sandpiper Apartments.
The six Middle Eastern men shared a two-bedroom, two-bathroom apartment in unit 26, said Charles Grapentine, manager of the apartments.
Huffman Aviation rented the unit at $550 a month,…The flight school then subletted the unit to its students, …Huffman Aviation charged each of the six Middle Eastern flight students $225 a month to live in the apartment, Grapentine said …Students were charged an additional $50 fee for cleaning costs, Grapentine said.
It is unknown how long the six men resided at Sandpiper Apartments before leaving in early January of this year. The complex's owner, Vicky Kyser, told the Sun she is turning the leases over to the FBI”
Grapentine wasn’t quoted as to when they stayed but the paper, seemingly citing the owner, said they left in “early January". He did however indicate that Atta had lived in apartment 26 with five other Middle Eastern men all of whom were students at Huffman Aviation. Interestingly according to Hopsicker, Keller (and Atta) also lived in apartment 26.
“However, Atta may have been in Venice as recently as April. Charles Grapentine, he manager of Sandpiper Apartments on Airport Avenue in Venice, said he remembers seeing Atta at the complex for about three weeks in April. He said Atta was living in the apartment of Amanda Keller.”
His wife and boss seems to have supported his original account they were interviewed for a different September 14 Sun Herald article.
"Paula Grapentine immediately recognized the face of a suspected terrorist who may have trained for the World Trade Center attacks at Huffman Aviation in Venice. He was her next-door neighbor.
Postal Carrier Neil Patton also recollects the names and faces of Mohamed Atta, 33, Marwan Alshehhi, 23, and four other Middle Eastern flight school students.
The lived at the Sandpiper Apartments, unit 26, in Venice until earlier this year.
[…]
But the Grapentines, who manage Sandpiper and Lemon Bay Apartments, didn't like the six men -- especially Atta.
[…]
The students reportedly smoked a strange tobacco which smelled like marijuana, [the apartment complex's owner, Vicky] Kyser said. "
Though Hopsicker cites the mailman, as a supporting witness he also indicated that the man he thought was Atta lived in apartment 26 till early January with several other Middle Eastern men, not that he lived with Keller in March and April.
The Sun obtained a handwritten list of names the FBI is reportedly pursuing Thursday: Gamil, Rami, Mukadam, Ibrahim and Mogadem. Stapled to the list FBI agents gave Patton was a special agent's business card. The FBI would not confirm or deny the pursuit of these five individuals.
Patton said he remembered all the above-mentioned names as those being used by some of the six Middle Eastern students allegedly attending Huffman Aviation.
Atta also may have gone by the name Youseff, Patton said.
He delivered no unusual mail at the Venice address, Patton said.
Only once was a 8-by-3-inch box mailed to the apartment, he said. Patton stopped delivering mail to the men at Sandpiper Apartments on Jan. 18, 2001 -- which means they probably moved out seven to 10 days before, he said.
But even Patton seems a bit unsure he seems to have told the paper he recognized both the real names and pseudonyms of the hijackers.
Hopsicker does have two other witnesses who said Atta lived with Keller, one is anonymous and supposedly a former manager at Huffman. This presents two problems one is there is no way to determine his credibility; the other is that there is no way to verify that he said what Hopsicker claims he did. As I will demonstrate in a future post Hopsicker can’t even be trusted to accurately and honestly report what local newspapers reported thus his claims as to what unnamed sources supposedly told him must be taken with a bag of salt. He claims the then flight school employee “vividly remembers her then-hot pink hair,” Which seems quite unlikely, are we to believe that Atta a known quantity at the school was seen there moths after he supposedly left with such a conspicuous companion and no one else seems to remember seeming them?
The other witness however seems credible enough, Keller’s next door neighbor, a housewife named Stephanie Frederickson. But like Neil Patton (the mail man) Vicky Kyser (the building owner), Paula Grapentine and even Charles Grapentine in his original account, she contradicts part of Keller’s story. Hopsicker cited her in a 2004 newsletter.
"Amanda moved in next door first, saying she had come from Orange Park (near Jacksonville," Frederickson says. "Then one day in the middle of March (of 2000) she brought home Atta. ‘I’d like you to meet my friend Mohamed Atta,’ she said to me. ‘He’s from France.’"
However according to Keller, that’s not the name she knew “Atta” by. In chapter 3 of his book Hopsicker quotes Keller as telling him “The name on the [rent] check was Mohamed Arajaki, the name he said was his.” Two chapters later he tells his readers “She knew him as Mohamed Arajaki, which was also the name on the [bail] check. " He said this on his site as well “The alias Atta used, we have learned, was “Mohamed Arajaki,” the same one he used with Amanda Keller while living in the Sandpiper Apartments in Venice.”
If Frederickson actually told Hopsicker that Atta and Keller moved together in March 2000, that would also be a serious discrepancy because his current theory is that they were a couple February – April or May 2001. At the time though Hopsicker’s theory was that they were together in 2000 thus he presumably put words in her mouth. Either Frederickson or Hopsicker looses credibility over this one take your pick.
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