A lone gunman who had just gotten off of a flight pulled a gun from
his checked baggage and opened fire Friday at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla.,
international airport, killing five people and injuring eight others
in a brief, bloody shooting rampage that terrorized.
The attack
at a quiet baggage claim area sent people scrambling through the
terminals and across the airfield at one of the country’s busiest
airports, shutting down all flights while paramedics and federal and
local law enforcement officers flooded the scene.
The suspected
shooter is in federal custody, officials said Friday night. It appears
he acted alone, said Broward County Sheriff Scott Israel. In addition to
the people slain, eight others were brought to area hospitals, all with
apparent gunshot wounds, while dozens of others were injured in the
chaos that followed the shooting.
Police did not immediately
identify a motive for the shooting at the Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood
International Airport, which they said occurred just before 1 p.m., but
said they had not eliminated the possibility of terrorism.
“We are
looking at all avenues,” George L. Piro, the FBI special agent in
charge of the bureau’s Miami division, said at a briefing Friday night.
“We have not ruled out terrorism and we will be pursuing every angle to
try to determine the motive behind this attack.”
Piro also said
that the shooter, identified as 26-year-old Esteban Santiago, had
voluntarily walked inside an FBI office in Anchorage late last year, and
“his erratic behavior” caused concerns, so the agents who interviewed
him had Santiago taken by local police to get a mental health
evaluation.
The gunman was taken into custody without any
incident “almost immediately after the shootings,” Israel said during a
news briefing Friday afternoon.
“He’s unharmed,” Israel said. “No law enforcement fired any shots.”
The
man in custody was identified earlier Friday by several officials
including Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), who was told the name by the head
of the Transportation Security Administration, according to Ryan Brown, a
spokesman for the senator.
Santiago was carrying an Army ID, according to three federal law enforcement officials.
He
was a passenger on a flight traveling with a checked gun in his
baggage, said federal law enforcement officials, who asked to speak on
the condition of anonymity to discuss the ongoing investigation. The
officials said that Santiago had picked up his bag and took the gun into
the bathroom to load it before returning to the baggage claim area to
begin firing at people.
John Schlicher, a pastor from Ohio who
was in baggage claim when the shooting happened, said in a brief
telephone interview that the gunman, who appeared to be wearing a blue
“Star Wars” T-shirt, said nothing as he fired at people’s heads.
“He
was just shooting randomly into the crowd,” Schlicher said during an
interview Friday afternoon broadcast on MSNBC. “There were two people to
my left and two people to my right who were shot.”
The gunman
reloaded and continued firing at people, Schlicher said. When police
arrived, Schlicher said his wife tried to administer first aid to a man
who had been shot in the head while his mother-in-law tried using her
sweater to help another man before realizing he was already dead.
In
a brief news conference Friday evening, trauma surgeons at Broward
Health Medical Center, located just north of the airport, said they
received five shooting victims and two needed surgery. All of the
patients were in stable condition, they said. Hospital officials
declined to comment on their specific injuries or release their ages and
gender, citing privacy rules and the ongoing investigation.
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