FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — An arriving airline passenger with a gun in his checked luggage opened fire in the baggage claim area at the Fort Lauderdale airport Friday, killing five people and wounding eight before throwing his weapon down and lying spread-eagle on the ground, authorities and witnesses said.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — An arriving airline passenger with a gun in his checked luggage opened fire in the baggage claim area at the Fort Lauderdale airport Friday, killing five people and wounding eight before throwing his weapon down and lying spread-eagle on the ground, authorities and witnesses said.
The gunman — identified by authorities as 26-year-old Esteban Santiago, an Army National Guard veteran who served in Iraq but was demoted and discharged last year for unsatisfactory performance — was immediately taken into custody.
His brother said he had been receiving psychological treatment recently.
One witness said the attacker gunned down his victims without a word and kept shooting until he ran out of ammunition, sending panicked travelers running out of the terminal and spilling onto the tarmac, baggage in hand.
Others crouched behind cars or anything else they could find to shield themselves as police and paramedics rushed in to help the wounded and establish whether there were any other gunmen. The airport was shut down.
“People started kind of screaming and trying to get out of any door they could or hide under the chairs,” a witness, Mark Lea, told MSNBC. “He just kind of continued coming in, just randomly shooting at people, no rhyme or reason to it.”
Authorities said the motive was under investigation.
“This could well be someone who is mentally deranged, or in fact it could be someone who had a much more sinister motive that we have to worry about every day, and that is terrorism,” said Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida. “We can’t conclude that.”
President Barack Obama was briefed by his Homeland Security adviser, the White House said.
It is legal for airline passengers to travel with guns and ammunition as long as the firearms are put in a checked bag — not a carry-on — and are unloaded and locked in a hard-sided container. Guns must be declared to the airline at check-in.
Santiago arrived in Fort Lauderdale after taking off from his hometown of Anchorage, Alaska, aboard a Delta flight Thursday night, checking only one piece of luggage — his gun, said Jesse Davis, police chief at the Anchorage airport.
At Fort Lauderdale, “after he claimed his bag, he went into the bathroom and loaded the gun and started shooting. We don’t know why,” said Chip LaMarca, a Broward County commissioner who was briefed by investigators.
The attack exposed another weak point in airport security: While travelers have to take off their shoes, put their carry-on luggage through X-ray machines and pass through scanners to reach the gates, many sections of airports are more lightly secured and more vulnerable to attack.