Shots Fired in Terminal 2
Page 1
Published 2018 by Prometheus Books
Shots Fired in Terminal 2: A Witness to the Fort Lauderdale Airport Shooting Reflects on America's Mass Shooting Epidemic. Copyright © 2018 by William Hazelgrove. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, or conveyed via the internet or a website without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Hazelgrove, William Elliott, 1959- author.
Title: Shots fired in terminal 2 : a witness to the Fort Lauderdale shooting reflects on America's mass shooting epidemic / by William Hazelgrove.
Description: Amherst, New York : Prometheus Books, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2018011847 (print) | LCCN 2018013391 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883840 (ebook) | ISBN 9781633883833 (pbk.)
Subjects: LCSH: Santiago Ruiz, Esteban. | Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport (Fla.) | Mass shootings—Florida—Fort Lauderdale—Case studies. | Veterans—Mental health—Florida—Fort Lauderdale—Case studies. | Victims of violent crimes—Florida—Fort Lauderdale—Case studies. | Gun control—United States—Case studies. | Violence—United States—Case studies.
Classification: LCC HV6534.F6187 (ebook) | LCC HV6534.F6187 H39 2018 (print) | DDC 364.152/340975935—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018011847
Printed in the United States of America
We each devise our means of escape from the intolerable.
—William Styron
Note to the Reader
Prologue
Chapter 1. Reentry (January 6, 2017, 5:00 a.m.)
Chapter 2. The American Payoff
Chapter 3. Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport
Chapter 4. Weaponized Humans
Chapter 5. Baggage Claim Terminal 2 (12:50 p.m.)
Chapter 6. Terminal 1 (1:06 p.m.)
Chapter 7. The Right to Bear Arms: A Liberal Idea
Chapter 8. Grace Under Pressure (1:20 p.m.)
Chapter 9. One in Three Hundred and Fifteen (1:45 p.m.)
Chapter 10. The First Mass Murder (1949)
Chapter 11. The Feeding Frenzy (2:00 p.m.)
Chapter 12. Fifteen Minutes of Fame (2:30 p.m.)
Chapter 13. The Texas Tower Sniper (1966)
Chapter 14. Outside Terminal 2 (3:00 p.m.)
Chapter 15. Chicken Nuggets: The McDonald's Shooting (1984)
Chapter 16. Shell Shock (3:30 p.m.)
Chapter 17. A Short History of the Gun
Chapter 18. Return to Terminal 1 (4:00 p.m.)
Chapter 19. Cowboys and Indians
Chapter 20. No Escape (5:00 p.m.)
Chapter 21. A Short History of the NRA
Chapter 22. Casablanca (7:00 p.m.)
Chapter 23. Columbine (1999)
Chapter 24. Escape from FLL (9:00 p.m.)
Chapter 25. Taxi Driver (1981)
Chapter 26. The Warriors (10:00 p.m.)
Chapter 27. The Worst: Sandy Hook (2012)
Chapter 28. Port Everglades (11:00 p.m.)
Chapter 29. Quality Inn (11:30 p.m.)
Chapter 30. Virginia Tech (2007)
Chapter 31. Swimming Up from the Deep (Midnight)
Chapter 32. The Dark Knight (2012)
Chapter 33. Victims (January 7, 2017, 9:00 a.m.)
Chapter 34. The Survivor (2011)
Chapter 35. The Horror (January 8, 2017, 2:00 p.m.)
Chapter 36. The Bump Stock Killer: Las Vegas (2017)
Chapter 37. Home (January 9, 2017)
Chapter 38. A Professional School Shooter: Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School (2018)
Chapter 39. Males Who Fail
Chapter 40. Twelve Hours of Chaos
Acknowledgments
Notes
I did not have access to the victims of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport shooting. The FBI investigation was ongoing at the time, and the survivors and the wounded were all in various states of recovering. So I have built this book from my personal experience, news reports, history, and the odd bits of information that float around after every shooting. So by the time of publication some of the facts might have changed as the investigation progresses. But the center of the book is unchanged. The experience of going through a shooting is like any rite of passage; you have knowledge you may not want, but it's there nonetheless.
During the course of writing this book there have been many shootings. The most recent was the Santa Fe High School shooting, where ten were killed. Before that was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with seventeen dead. The most horrific, of course, was the Las Vegas Harvest Music Festival with 58 dead and 851 wounded. A congressional Republican baseball game was attacked by a man with a rifle, and a bomb blew up at an Ariana Grande concert killing twenty-two people. And, of course, there will be more before publication. But I know how the survivors feel. Shootings and bombings have the same footprint of carnage, death, shock, stampeding people, and then a lingering feeling of being changed forever. It is a club you never want to be in, but once you are in it you never view the world in the same way.
I did use secondary sources to buttress this book, but the issues of guns and gun control are changing so constantly that books are out of date soon after they are published. Sadly, I have had to add four recent shootings before this book went to press. And statistics do not tell the tale of the dead, the wounded, and the scarred that shootings leave behind. Only people can tell that tale. Which leaves personal experience, intuition, and a smidge of history.
The best I can say is that I was there, and this is what I saw and felt on January 6, 2017.
On January 6, 2017, my family was returning from a cruise in the Bahamas. My book Madame President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson had been out for a few months, and this was a celebratory vacation for my family and me. We had a layover in Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport and we weren't due to catch a flight until 7:45 p.m. We settled in for a seven-hour wait and parked ourselves in the main United Terminal. It was noon and hot, and we were tired from too much food, with that lazy languor that is a hangover from any vacation. I was there with my wife, two daughters, and son. We were talking about getting something to eat. I heard sirens, turned toward where they were coming from, and then, in the blink of an eye, our lives changed forever.
The Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport would be shut down for twenty-four hours by what authorities would later say was a lone gunman who took five lives and wounded six more people. Ten thousand people would be trapped in the airport for ten hours, leaving 25,000 pieces of luggage behind.
It would take thirty-five buses driving continuous loops to the Everglades International Port all night to evacuate the airport. Planes trapped on the tarmac unable to unload passengers would eventually take off again for other airports. Planes in the air were routed away. People running on the tarmac would be out there with these stranded planes, and some people would be taken on board. The airport would be an active situation for over twelve hours, with gunshots heard after the original shooting. It was another random violent senseless act that is peculiarly American.
This is a book about the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport shooting, told from my perspective of having been there with my wife and children. But it is also about a prototype of American shootings, showing the interplay of victims, police, media, history, the shooter, and what constitutes this uniquely American form of violence. And it is also about the weaponization of returning war veterans, the failure of police and the FBI to stop this troubled young man who approached them and said point-blank that he was hearing voices telling him to kill others. The incredible fact that his weapon was taken and then given back to him, and that this was the very gun that would kill five people and wound six others and shut down a major airport in the United States, is mindboggling. The same gun that was checked through as a legal firearm and then delivered to the killer in the baggage claim, where he would stroll into a bathroom, load the Walther 9mm, and then return to start his murderous rampage.
And this is a book about questions. Why wasn't Terminal 1 locked down when the shooting began? Why did my family and I and hundreds of others run from gunshots after the initial shooting? Why the rush to declare only a single killer was involved? Many witnesses, including myself, say there were two gunmen, with multiple shots fired. But the real question is, where does this violence come from? Why is America the home of mass killers who have come to haunt us? Why do we have 5 percent of the world's population and 30 percent of the mass shootings?1 Why, since 1949, have over one thousand people died in mass shootings in our country?2
These are the questions that are generated after every American mass shooting, and the answers are never enough. But, even saying that, we still have to try.
The foghorn of the ship wakes me. I blink in that strange way that being on a vacation brings. Cruises are even more disorientating. You go from being out at sea with a fathomless black landscape pearled by a crescent moon to seeing Honduras or Cozumel appear in front of your balcony. And when it ends the shock is visceral. The orange-lit landscape of dock warehouses and ships and forklifts is at great variance from a week of five-course meals and days spent on the deck in tropical sun so foreign to our Chicago skin.
But we are back, and Fort Lauderdale streams by in the ugliness that is any transportation hub in America. We will soon be caught up in the ritual of disembarkation leading to a seven-hour layover in the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood Airport. This couldn't be helped, with the exigencies of discounts, timing, and trying to make an expensive vacation less so at the very end. It will be a long day. The air is getting warm and very humid, and I miss the sea breeze already.
The foghorn continues its brooding lament. It is 5:00 a.m. and the Caribbean Princess is warning all ahead that a great presence is moving in and not to move out of the way means death.
At this time, Esteban Santiago Ruiz is already airborne, with his Walther PPS 9mm semiautomatic pistol and two clips in a protective case somewhere below in the belly of the plane. The gun is declared, and Santiago is headed for his connecting flight, Delta 1465, in Minneapolis–St. Paul, where he will begin the final leg of the seven-hour flight from Anchorage, Alaska. Santiago shuts his eyes and tries to wall out the voices telling him to kill. They are always there now. His destination is Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport. He has a one-way ticket.1
My son, Clay, is staring at the custom official's gun at the disembarkation point. It is probably a 9mm, but I really don't know. We are in that 66 percent of Americans who don't own a gun and don't know anyone who owns a gun. We are urbanites from Chicago who had children and moved to a near suburb and then had more kids and ended up in a far suburb. We are now a suburban family of five, with two girls—Callie, sixteen, and Careen, twelve—and our son, Clay, twenty.
Clay is naturally intelligent, had aced the ACT admissions test without studying, and had been accepted at several colleges. But like his father, who received the “gentlemen's C” in high school, he had trouble applying himself and my wife, Kitty, hacked it out with him all the way through high school to graduation. My mother did the same for me. I have often said there should be a medal in heaven for all the mothers who sit up late with their sons and daughters at kitchen tables. Clay is now a funny, serious twenty-year-old, who works a forty-hour week at a shipping company. My assumption that everyone goes to college was put to the test when Clay let us know the day before he was to leave that he didn't believe college was for him. Already my friends had adult children back at home living in their basements with $100,000 student loans, so maybe my son was onto something.
Callie, my oldest daughter, is on the cusp of sixteen, beautiful, talented, and smart. What father doesn't say these things about his daughter? She goes for extended periods without saying a word, until I lure her out with inane father antics. “You're kooky,” she remarks, and then lets me twist in the wind. My youngest, Careen, is twelve, and my last life raft to fatherhood. She has yet to give up on our daughter-daddy dances at the park district, though I suspect this might be our last year. When Kitty took a nine-to-five we became even closer, having our cereal and coffee together before I ran her to school. The highpoint of my day has always been dropping the kids off at school. I know this is not the Rich Dad, Poor Dad motif, where I am off beating down the world for the almighty buck, but I do work at home and, besides, I like hanging with my kids.
My wife of twenty-five years and I come from different backgrounds. Kitty grew up in a small Midwestern town, where her father did hunt and kept unloaded shotguns under his bed for security. The shuck of the slide on the shotgun would supposedly send a burglar packing. Kitty remembers her father going off to hunt, and the lore is that he was hunting when she was born. But this gun culture did not transfer to any of the kids, and my wife has never personally touched a gun. I grew up on the East Coast, with liberal parents who never mentioned guns, never owned one. The only time my father ever had a gun, and I think it was borrowed, was after we moved to the Midwest and there had been a rash of murders outside of Chicago. We were living in a semi-secluded area, and one night we heard some noises outside and my father and I went to investigate. I heard the noise again and motioned to my dad, and it was then that I saw him struggling with something in his pants pocket. He finally pulled out the small pistol and looked faintly ridiculous peering into the dark woods, a suburban man in pajamas, wholly unequipped for the role of armed protector.
The only time I have ever shot a gun was up in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area of Ely, Minnesota. I had gone with some Chicago cops to a quarry. They brought along a small arsenal and allowed me to try out each gun and obliterate bottles, cans, and stones. I fired a .38, a .44 Colt Peacemaker, a Winchester, a 9mm, a shotgun, and even an Uzi. “Now this one has five in the grave so be careful,” one of the cops told me, handing me the 9mm. I stared at the gun that had terminated five human beings in the line of duty. It's hard to believe, but that is my experience with firearms. I never had a desire to personally own a gun beyond my days with a Daisy BB gun.
I know very little about the Second Amendment except that it gives us the right to bear arms. Like most Americans, I am horrified by shootings and wonder why we can't stop them. My wife and I have never once signed a petition or contributed money or done anything to put our support behind gun-control legislation. And, like most Americans, we forget about guns when the news cycle runs out on the latest shooting. Guns simply haven't mattered in our day-to-day existence of running kids to school, concerts, sports, and trying to make a buck.
The life of a writer is a precarious roller coaster at best, and we have managed to hit a few highs in the last year after some severe lows. So this vacation has been sort of a capping off of beating the odds that a professional writer can make a living in the year 2017. We had been on the cruise ship for New Years, and Kitty and I toasted that this would be our year. This would be even better than the last year. We could see nothing that would knock us off as fireworks exploded over the soft Caribbean Sea.
We pass through customs and emerge outside the terminal disorientated, slightly exhausted, and with a mountain of luggage. The Uber driver strains under the load and chatters the whole way to the Fort Lauderdale airport. We veer onto the exit leading to the airport and are passing the outlying runways when I see a very strange sight. A large white 757 FedEx jet is parked off to the side with half the wing eaten by fire and most of the left engine destroyed. The black scorch marks reach back along the white fuselage. I don't mention this, as none of us are regular flyers and we all harbor our own secret doubts about tons of machinery and people being lofted into the air dependent on nothing more than air pushing up on the Wright brothers’ vaunted wing. I turn around and stare again at the wounded beast in the rear window. A harbinger I don't want, but there it is.
“United?”
“Yes, United,” I answer, turning back around and watching all the vacationers arriving, sunburnt, still in shorts, many heading back to the frigid temperatures of the Midwest.
“What time is your flight?”
“Seven forty-five.”
“Oh, plenty of time.”
We arrive and I get out of the car and inhale the slight diesel scent of jet fuel and car exhaust. It is warm and humid, and the air is not moving in Fort Lauderdale. We can't use the skycaps, as we are too early to check our luggage, so we move it into the terminal next to a man sleeping wedged behind the seats. I will always wonder what happened to that man. He never moves the whole time we are there, but he will eventually vanish along with everyone else. I carry in the last bag, and the kids collapse onto the benches. My son is soon fast asleep in twenty-year-old slumber. He has passed on college, but he has the college student's knack for sleeping anywhere and anytime and he can easily sleep for a solid sixteen hours. Callie and Careen have both slumped down and I am feeling the pull of the week of sunshine and too much food and the inevitable thud of returning reality. I look around the terminal. It is only just noon and our flight isn't for seven hours. A flight we will not catch.