One of the three American heroes who stopped a 2015 terror attack on a Paris train wants to do more for his community so he is running for office.
Alek Skarlatos announced Tuesday that he will be running for commissioner in Douglas County, Oregon, the News-Review reported.
The former Oregon National Guardsman played himself in a Clint Eastwood film about the 2015 event called “The 15:17 to Paris.” Skarlatos was traveling in Europe with his friends, Anthony Sadler and Spencer Stone, in August 2015 when they subdued an armed terrorist on the train, saving lives and becoming instant heroes.
“I’ve traveled all over the world, and there’s no place I’d rather live than Douglas County, honestly,” the hometown hero and former Oregon National Guardsman said Tuesday at Douglas County Republican Party headquarters in downtown Roseburg.
Since the Paris event that changed his life, Skarlatos has made the finals on “Dancing With the Stars,” starred in the Eastwood film, been recognized by Presidents Obama and Trump as well as receiving the French Legion of Honor Award from President François Hollande.
Skarlatos thinks millennials get a bad rap, but “somebody is going to have to step up and represent the next generation in Douglas County. I think the political climate has led a lot of younger people to become interested in politics, myself included. I just hope to move Douglas County in a better direction.”
He believes his community has been “ horribly mismanaged” by the federal government and wants to focus on jobs and fixing the budget, among other things.
“Really I think that jobs bring in taxes, and if we can get people jobs that would make the whole community better off,” Skarlatos told Fox News.
He also noted that the government “wants to give us welfare and we don’t want it.”
“We want to go back to work,” he said.
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida where she has been writing for the BizPacReview team since 2015.
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