On his 18th birthday, Mohammad Hasan Chaudhary backed his parents’ minivan out of the driveway without permission and disappeared.

He’d nabbed the keys in front of his mother, whom he rarely disobeyed, and revved up on a frigid Wednesday in January — laughing as he did it — while his father futilely gripped the door handle.

Police found him cruising through Pickering five hours later. They took him to hospital. One month later, Hasan was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

“He had a very strange look in his eye that day,” recalled his father Afzal Chaudhary, a retired truck driver.

“His voices would take him anywhere. He would do anything,” said his mother Noreen.

Hasan’s act of apparent teenage rebellion would prove portentous. Two and a half years later, on Aug. 12, he stole a propeller plane, flew it more than 100 kilometres and crash-landed on Peterborough’s main drag.

He was declared dead at the scene.

He had no formal flight training and had never been in a cockpit, his parents said. Hasan’s violent, solitary final seconds belied a life as a “gentle and really sweet” boy who grew up in a tight-knit Markham family of 10.

The second-oldest among Afzal and Noreen’s eight children, Hasan was a precocious student, excelling at math, science and technology, his father said.

His penchant for tinkering bordered on obsession. “Every toy I gave him, after a few days he opened it, looked at the hardware,” Afzal said. “Then he tried to fix it again.”

His first love was remote-controlled cars. “He was into the big ones, the ones that go 10, 20 miles per hour,” said his brother Hussain, 17, who slept across from him on a couch in the living room during the summer months — all eight siblings are under 22 and lived at home this season.

Hasan was never satisfied with the packaged product; he souped them up, crossed the wiring, installed headlights. Later he moved on to BMX bicycles, mixing and matching parts and building one in the garage for his younger brother.

“With BMXing, he wasn’t scared, he would just do it,” Hussain recalled. “He would get cuts and bruises” perfecting tricks at the skate park until his hands blistered.

Hasan graduated to motorized dirt bikes in his mid-teens, fixing old carburetors and clutches late into the night.

“This one time, he’d just fixed a bike and I had some money because I was working at Golden China, so we rode to McDonald’s,” said his sister Sarah, entering Grade 11. “It was 2 a.m. and we just rode down McCowan. It was really nice . . . I was holding onto the back. I thought I was going to die,” she added, laughing.

Hasan’s calm curiosity was broken occasionally by bouts of fear or anger, his family said. He took his medications inconsistently. When he didn’t, he would threaten to “tear down this whole place,” Noreen said.

“When he had his episodes he would be aggressive, because he was scared,” said his sister Zanib, completing a biochemistry degree at Dalhousie University. “He would always apologize for anything he did during those episodes, even though he didn’t have to.”

The exact circumstances surrounding Hasan’s fatal early-morning crash in Don Peck’s Piper Tomahawk on Peterborough’s Lansdowne Ave. on Aug. 12 remain unclear. The RCMP and York and Peterborough police said this week they are continuing to investigate the incident.

Though it has become public, none of those police forces has released Hasan’s name, even now. Neither suicide nor a “national security aspect” is considered a factor at this point, said York police and RCMP spokesperson Sgt. Penny Hermann, respectively.

Markham Airport owner Allan Rubin said this was the first time a plane has been stolen from the facility since it opened more than 50 years ago.

“Nowadays, you can pretty well pick an aircraft and fly it, through the programs that they have on the Internet,” Rubin said, but “landing an aircraft’s the hardest part.”

Fences surrounds only a portion of the airport, and its camera system “doesn’t show very much,” Rubin said. Ropes are the only thing securing most of the aircraft.

He said he fears a copycat scenario, as do Hasan’s parents.

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“What if somebody really wanted to do something? Imagine then. Toronto is right there,” Noreen said. “He was sick. He didn’t know.”

“He was too young,” his father said.

“Twenty years, seven months and four days.”

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