We reach the diesel-puffing media trucks and slump down behind a thick cement pole. Portable generators hum, along with the engines that surround us with heat and exhaust. Fear has been transmuted into a permanent adrenaline high. The fear belonged to the moment the shots rang out, and now there is just the heat and I am soaked from perspiration. My daughter stares at me with large blue eyes. Diesel exhaust from the television trucks and the incessant wailing of the sirens are all around us. Incredibly, there are beautiful female reporters just a few feet from us, holding microphones in bright lights. This makes me feel better. If they are not worried about getting shot then maybe we are safe. They suddenly duck down, and I look back toward Terminal 1, where people are running again. It is that avalanche of humans flowing toward us like a wave. We are still on the firing line, and I remember as if in a dream that just that morning we were on a cruise. The world before the shooting is gone, and there is only this moment of survival. No one seems to know what anyone is running from. We are all running to escape an unseen terror. You have to wonder, when did mass shootings begin in our country?
It had never happened before, and they didn't know what to do with him. In 1949, people didn't just kill other people for no reason. It was so rare that there was no police protocol to deal with it. It was so rare that they immediately decided the killer had to be insane and didn't even bother with a trial. They simply put him in an insane asylum and forgot about him. Prisons were for sane men, and a man who would kill multiple people was clearly insane and could not have been in control of his own mind.
His name was Howard Unruh. He was gay and a World War II vet. This was a time when it was a crime to be gay. He lived in Camden, New Jersey, in an apartment above a store. Unruh would be the first “lone wolf” killer, harboring resentment against those around him until it boiled over into a murderous rage.1 The idea of the individual plotting revenge on those around him would become the boilerplate story for many workplace and school shooters that followed. The eerie coincidences between Esteban Santiago and Howard Unruh are striking. Both men were veterans. Unruh saw action in the Battle of the Bulge as a tank gunner, where he kept meticulous notes on the Germans he killed and how they died. He received commendations and was said to follow orders well. PTSD was a long way off as a diagnosis, but Howard's younger brother would later say that Howard was not the same man when he came back from World War II. In his Camden apartment Unruh kept German shells for ashtrays, along with pistols and machetes he had brought back from the war. He practiced shooting in the basement with a Nazi luger he had brought back with him.
Before the war Howard had been a normal kid in prewar America. His parents had divorced, and Unruh lived with his mother, who worked in a soap factory. A later psychiatric report on Unruh after the shooting would note that he had prolonged toilet training and didn't walk or speak until sixteen months, but after this Freudian stab there was nothing to say Howard Unruh exhibited anything other than normal boyhood traits.
He liked to collect stamps and build model trains. As a young adult, he didn't drink or smoke and he attended St. Paul's Evangelical Lutheran Church. His Woodrow Wilson High yearbook noted that he wanted to work for the government. After graduating, Howard worked for a printer for a while, and then worked operating a metal stamping press. And then he was drafted.
Like many returning vets, Howard Unruh had a hard time adjusting, and he ended up back with his mother in Camden. Later, a psychiatrist would write, “After WWII…he returned home, he did not work nor did he have any life goals or directions, had difficulty adjusting or solving problems and was ‘angry at the world.’”2 Esteban Santiago choking his girlfriend after his return from Iraq, with the resulting restraining order comes to mind.3 A weaponized human being, still loaded to kill.
Unruh began keeping a list of those who had wronged him. The drugstore owner, Mr. Cohen, kept shortchanging him.4 The people who lived in the apartment below his threw garbage in the backyard. A barber flooded his basement by throwing dirt into a vacant lot and blocking up the drainage. Then there was the shoemaker, who buried rubbish right next to Unruh's property line. Mr. Cohen had also called Unruh queer, and the tailor's son spread a story about him meeting a man in an alley. Howard Unruh was becoming increasingly paranoid that people knew he was gay, and this increased his sense that people were out to get him and would reveal him to the authorities.
On September 6, 1949, Howard threatened his mother with a wrench after breakfast, and she fled from the house. He then picked up his Luger and ammunition, put on a brown suit and bow tie, laced up his army boots, and left through the backyard. He encountered a bread deliveryman in his truck and shot at him, but the bullet missed. He then went to the shoemaker's store, where he shot John Pilarchik in the chest and then the head.
Next to Pilarchik's store a six-year-old boy, Orris Smith, was getting his hair cut in a barbershop when Unruh burst in and waved his gun. Clark Hoover, the barber, tried to shield the boy as Unruh shot him and the boy. Orris's mother grabbed her son and ran out into the street, screaming, until a neighbor picked them up and drove for the hospital.
Like a Wild West movie, Unruh then walked down Main Street firing indiscriminately into stores until he reached the drugstore run by the Cohens. A customer, James Hutton, fell in the doorway with a single shot, then Howard stepped over him and saw the Cohens running from the gunfire up the stairs. Unruh followed them and shot Rose Cohen in a closet but missed her twelve-year-old son hiding in an adjacent closet. Cohens mother was dialing the police when Unruh shot and killed her, finishing off Rose's husband Maurice as he tried to escape onto a porch roof.
Back outside the drugstore, Unruh shot and killed four people in cars that happened to be driving down the street. He stepped into the tailor's shop, where he shot and killed Helga Zegrino, the tailor's wife, while she begged for her life. He had been looking for Tom Zegrino, the tailor. On the street again, Unruh saw movement in an upstairs window and fired, striking and killing two-year-old Thomas Hamilton. Finally, Unruh broke into a house behind his apartment, where he shot a woman and her sixteen-year-old son, wounding but not killing them. At that point, Unruh ran out of ammo, so he fled back to his apartment as the police arrived.
There were no SWAT teams in 1949. There was no protocol or procedure for dealing with a “shooter.” The police were not heavily armed and they had to bring in extra weaponry. They proceeded as if at war; fifty cops surrounded the apartment and let loose with Thompson machine guns, shotguns, and pistols, endangering the crowd of a thousand people who had gathered nearby. As Unruh hid in his apartment, the phone rang. Surprisingly, Unruh answered, and spoke briefly to the editor from the Camden Evening Courier who had called. When the editor asked how many people he had killed, Unruh replied that he didn't know but that “it looks like a pretty good score.”5
After the police threw tear gas canisters into the apartment, Unruh gave up and surrendered peacefully. At the police station, he described the killings in detail.
Twenty-four hours after the first mass shooting in American history, Howard Unruh was turned over to the Trenton Psychiatric Hospital. There he was committed to the Vroom building for the criminally insane. He never stood trial for the thirteen people he had killed. He showed no emotion when describing the murders, but he later said he was sorry for killing the kids.
The order of commitment states that Howard Unruh suffered from “dementia praecox, mixed type, with pronounced catatonic and paranoid coloring.”6 This meant that he was considered a paranoid schizophrenic. Experts today are not convinced the diagnosis was accurate and believe that were the incident to have happened more recently he would have stood trial. But law enforcement did not know how to view Unruh at the time, as he was so clearly outside the boundaries of even criminal behavior, and there was simply no procedure to assess the criminality of his act. He would die in the psychiatric hospital in 1988.7
Esteban Santiago and Howard Unruh were veterans who came home sufferin
g from PTSD in one form or another. Both killed with no emotion, and it is telling that Howard Unruh donned his combat boots for his final tour of death. Both men had difficulty adjusting to society after serving in combat, and for a time they lived quiet lives of rage, filled with grievances against those around them. Santiago heard voices telling him to kill, while Unruh made lists of those who would die. The men are separated by almost seventy years, but the carnage created by these weaponized humans is the same. The FBI defines a mass killing as one having four or more victims.8 Howard Unruh would go down in history as America's first modern mass killer.
We are addicted to the news. CNN made us this way. Before CNN began broadcasting, in 1980, veteran CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite would sum up events for us once every evening. CNN, however, said there was enough news for a twenty-four-hour cycle, and if there wasn't they would find some. Shootings are tailor-made for networks like CNN. They are real-time crises that unfold like high-stakes dramas in front of us. The news becomes a spectacle as journalists descend on the dead, the wounded, the families, and the shooter. The line between show business and news becomes blurred.
Now that we are trapped in an airport in an “active situation” we are literally living inside the news story. The surreal is normal. Something takes over and allows us to function in extreme stress. We see this with people who have just lost loved ones; they speak as if they are talking about someone else. It is a coping mechanism. The thought that my twelve-year-old and I were running from a potential shooter does not compute. Careen and I are usually riding scooters or shooting baskets or going to Dairy Queen. We have never experienced being in a combat zone. But that is what an “active shooter situation” is: a combat zone where anyone can be shot at any time.
And here we are, sitting on a sidewalk in the hot sticky Fort Lauderdale air. Careen's white shorts are dirty and smudged with road grime. I am streaked with sweat, and my black T-shirt sticks to my body as if painted on. We are survivors.
I am standing up and thinking about going back for Kitty and Callie and wondering where Clay is. But of course I can't leave Careen among the fortress of television trucks and the juiced-up talking heads with their microphones. Sirens are screaming, ambulances are parked everywhere, and we are in media central. The images being pumped out to the world are coming from right here.
“I want to get out of here, Dad,” Careen says, looking at me, her eyes wide.
I nod, staring at the police cars, small tanks, fire trucks, ambulances, SWAT teams, soldiers, men in dark suits, helicopters flying overhead, and buses marked Evidence. We are in a war zone, and nobody is going anywhere until the war is won. So I lie.
“We will. We just have to get everyone together,” I say, standing up and looking toward Terminal 1.
Careen shakes her head. “They should have come with us.”
“I agree,” I murmur, looking around.
The television trucks have their antennas extended, sending out the story. The truth is, I had experienced the shooting in Terminal 2 through CNN, which had broadcasted images of people running onto the tarmac, above the bold headline “Five Dead, Eight Wounded in Shooting in Ft Lauderdale Airport.” Music and graphics and cutaways resemble a movie, morphing American shootings into entertainment. One thing the networks know is that violence sells, and even better is the developing story of a real-time shooting. The Fort Lauderdale airport shooting is the hottest thing on television right now, and we are at ground zero of the media universe.
Television ushered in our current consumer-based mass culture and its adoption was only delayed by World War II, but by 1955 two-thirds of all homes in the United States had a television set.1 The television is on for seven hours and forty minutes a day in the average American household, with an average of three televisions per home. Children consume forty hours of television per week and much of this television is violent. A study in 1998 defined media violence as “any overt depiction of a credible threat of physical force or the actual use of such force intended to physically harm an animate being or group of beings.”2 Certainly, television coverage of any shooting falls into this category, especially now with graphic cellphone video footage being picked up by the networks.
Just after Esteban Santiago stopped shooting at the Fort Lauderdale airport, a cellphone video begins circulating online, showing the carnage in Terminal 2. The video sweeps around, and the viewer sees the dead and dying on the ground, people huddled around them. We get the horror firsthand through the grainy frenetic image. It is not polished, and this makes it more macabre. The video is already being run on television with a “graphic images” warning, which makes more people watch it.
In the sea of media parked outside Terminal 2 where Careen and I sit, the idling engines and the lawnmower sound of the generators give the area the feel of a bus depot. The danger rolls in and out like a wave as the entire airport lies under the threat of an active shooter. When the danger seems to ebb the newspeople come out of their air-conditioned trucks with microphones, ready to broadcast. They are in a feeding frenzy to get their scoop, to share this violence with the American people. And we are putty in the hands of marketing executives, who use “edits, cuts, zooms, pans and sudden noises to continually trigger our orienting response.”3 Our response comes from a primal world where we needed to be aware of any sudden or novel stimulus, allowing us to survive and to either run or fight. A mass shooting is exactly the kind of event that stimulates our orienting response—the threat of death, with the potential for real gore and real tragedy.
School shootings have been the most shocking of mass shootings, covered in the media with helicopter shots of kids and teachers running and police and SWAT teams entering the school. The line between fiction and nonfiction becomes blurred as graphics and music and interviews amplify the already-great tragedy of children and teachers being murdered. Ratings skyrocket for the stations covering these shootings, and the first network on the scene dominates the airwaves until the other networks can catch up. News coverage is often blamed for copycat shootings, in which someone imitates the crime of the initial shooter to gain similar fame. There has been talk of limiting media coverage of shootings, but this would mean surrender in the brutal ratings wars waged by television networks. No one is going to turn off their camera.
As the violent images from a tragic event are played over and over, we become desensitized; television continues the violence by replaying the shocking footage again and again. Mass shootings have left people with the impression that American society is awash in blood: “From 1960 to 1991 the US population increased by 40 percent, but the violent crime rate increased by 500 percent.”4 In the era of mass shootings, death by gunfire suddenly seemed to be as ubiquitous as dying from cancer or heart disease. But I would find out the hard way that the media has a narrative, and they expect everyone to stick to the script. To deviate is to invite ridicule.
My interaction with the media begins as I see Kitty and Callie running up from Terminal 1 and then I see Clay coming from the direction of Terminal 1 where we had all split up. We found out later that he had been frisked by the police and then released. A photographer would later tell us she had a picture of him that she decided not to use because he looked so terrified. My family has crossed over the access road and then weaved their way through the television trucks. We are now all together and surrounded by television trucks, lights, cameras, and reporters; it is the electronic medium that has become as real as life itself for many people.
Kitty and Callie have run up and taken refuge behind a cement pole but now Kitty is lying on the ground with my children. She believes the shooter is sizing up anyone standing. Here is the insanity of our situation—some people are hiding while others are talking and laughing. The real hell is that we have no information at all. We have no idea if there are two, three, or four shooters. We are simply ducking the unseen danger that sent us running in the first place. All we know is that we heard four shots in Terminal 1 and we ran
along with everyone else. This is our story.
“Get down…get down,” Kitty screams at me.
I get down and then we all cluster around the cement pillar again for safety. I move away to get a better look at the police now moving back toward Terminal 2. A Washington Post photographer snaps a picture of my family huddled next to the cement pillar, and this will be syndicated and end up in many national newspapers. The photo sums up the utter capriciousness of any shooting—regular people caught up in hell. This single moment of a family in distress will be shown over and over, and this is just the beginning. I watch the television journalists standing with lights surrounding them. They are absurdly good-looking men and women and extremely young. They exist beyond the carnage of what is occurring around them. They are in the ether of a high-powered industry that allows them to float above mortals. Their images are beamed out daily, and that gives them a peculiar larger-than-life existence. Whenever I do radio or television interviews, the afterglow is one of knowing that people unknown to me have just listened to or watched me. I had floated over half the country or the state and had for a while left my terrestrial body. Or so they think. Journalists often feel a detachment because they are covering the tragedy, the shooting, the murder and not participating in the actual moment. It might be best described as a strange third-person narrative feeling of safety.
I get down on the ground with my family and lie on the sidewalk. We are a strange sight, lying on the sidewalk while others walk around us. But Kitty believes that to stand is to invite catastrophe, so we keep lying on the dirty sidewalk as the television journalists talk to their colleagues. The women are blue eyed with blond hair and dressed to the hilt. The men are in smart sport coats or bright ties. The juxtaposition of beautiful people to the people trapped in the airport, hiding, sitting, lying on the ground, sweating, worrying, caught up in a vortex they cannot escape, is startling.
Shots Fired in Terminal 2 Page 6