Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  We have now become the subjects of the news, the people who will tell their story. My son will tell his story about how he ran from the shots and tried to get in people's cars, offering them money to let him in until the police detained him and frisked him. He is tall and lanky and wears his hair short, and like most twenty year olds he has been stopped by the police a few times. Callie and Careen will describe how they hid under the bins, afraid they could be shot any minute. My wife, Kitty, is so scared she is lying face down on the sidewalk. I do not share her fear, but I don't know if that is because of stupidity on my part, a lack of being in touch with my feelings, or the adrenaline ride I am on.

  “Don't get up,” Kitty pleads with me.

  “Okay,” I say, listening to her for now.

  She has always been the pragmatic one. Kitty worked in the rough-and-tumble world of advertising on Michigan Avenue in Chicago for years. She was an account executive and developed a very hard shell and a real ability to drill down to what was really the essence of a problem. If a creative director had a problem or a commercial shoot ran into an issue, Kitty had to intercede and solve the problem when no one else could. She is not subject to flights of fancy the way her writer husband is, who sees villains lurking over the next hill. She is fact driven and solves problems logically. So to her the situation is very simple: survival means staying flat on the sidewalk with her children. If her idiot husband wants to walk around and get shot, there is not much she can do about it. And if the police want to claim there was only one shooter, there is nothing she can do about that either. “I know what I heard and so did everyone else who ran out of that terminal,” she would say later. “There was a second shooter.”

  There is a photo I saw later of people hiding under cement stairs next to officers with their pistols drawn, crouched in a shooting position. The people were under those stairs, behind cement poles, and hiding behind anything they could find for one reason—the second gunmen. The reason people were turned out onto the tarmac of the airport, literally running around planes that were taxiing and some being picked up by those planes, is because of a second gunmen. The SWAT teams were searching the garages, the cars, people, and luggage because of this unknown assailant. The reason the FAA ordered a ground stop and closed the airport and trapped ten thousand people was because the situation was active and that meant somewhere there was a potential shooter.

  Kitty later put it this way: “I ran for my life when those shots went off. My son ran and pleaded with people to let him in their cars. We pleaded with people to let us in cars after we got up from hiding under the luggage bins and then we lay on the ground in fear, in the dirt, on sidewalks. There were shots. I have been on this earth for a long time and have never run like that before. My daughters heard the shots. An airline pilot heard the shots. The people around me heard the shots. And we all ran the same way away from the shots. We ran toward Terminal 2 because we heard shots in Terminal 1. So why didn't the police hear the shots…? I have no idea.”

  Kitty's father is a German engineer who made his money from designing candy factories from the first bolt to the last processing machine that would wrap the candy bars. She is grounded, whereas I am prone to imaginative leaps. She is methodical while I am intuitive. She will do the heavy lifting while I will find the shortcut. She follows procedure while I look for the easy way that will assure me that I am smarter than everyone else. Kitty is smarter than everyone else but doesn't care. So her reaction was different than mine. This is how she put it: “When I heard the four shots my thought was to hide. I am a fleer so I hid behind that large pole in the terminal. The shots came from the south end of the terminal and everyone was running from that end to the north. So Callie, Careen, and I hid behind this pole. We might have still been there when you came back looking for us.”

  I asked her what she heard after the shots.

  “Nothing. We heard nothing. But there was a Japanese woman by us on her phone, and a man began swearing at her, saying we all were going to be shot if she didn't shut up. He began to threaten her, but she kept talking in Japanese. Finally, we realized we were the only ones in the terminal and decided to leave. I think Callie said we should leave. We assumed the shooter was in the other end where the shots came from. I mean that is how you know there was a shooter. No one said anything. Everyone just started running the same way.”

  Kitty ran out of the terminal with the girls and picked up the luggage bins to put over them. “A man looked at Careen and said that will not stop a bullet,” she explained later. “I don't know if she heard him but my thought was, ‘My God, we are talking about my daughter getting shot.’ So we put the bins over us and hid with everyone else. Everyone was hiding because everyone heard the four shots. The police were running, too. They were running into the terminal and the SWAT teams were running into the garage across the street. So, we lay there and that's when I texted you and then you picked up Careen and took her down to the media trucks. Callie and I lay there and then we decided to go down to where you were.”

  Kitty and Callie crossed into the street but realized they were exposed to the garage. She later told me, “I realized then we could be shot by anyone in that garage and so we asked a man if we could get into his car. He stared at us and said he had stuff in his back seat. We just wanted to get out of the line of fire that we felt could come from anywhere. So we went to the next car and the man didn't say anything. That was when we crossed over to the media trucks and saw you. I lay down on the ground with the kids and that's where we stayed. I felt we could be shot at any moment because it was obvious the police did not have control.”

  This is where the photographer from the Washington Post took the picture that shows a family on the sidewalk in utter fear. What most people don't understand is that the fear came from a second series of shots that had nothing to do with Esteban Santiago. Kitty summed it up this way days later, “I mean why didn't they lock down Terminal 1 when those people were killed in Terminal 2? Everything was perfectly normal until shots went off in Terminal 1,” she pointed out, pausing. “Then they did a lockdown. They did that lockdown because of the second shooter they said didn't exist. The police should have locked down the entire airport when those first shots were fired…and they know it. Whoever fired those second shots is responsible for the airport closing and they got clean away.”

  I am staring at three cameras. Andy Warhol said we would all get fifteen minutes of fame. He was referring to the evolving media universe, with its roving eye searching for anything deemed newsworthy. Warhol said this before the internet, which really now should translate the idea to fifteen nanoseconds of fame. Such is our attention span these days that most of us will not be able to get our full fifteen minutes and will have to settle for a few nanoseconds. I am about to get mine, and it comes on the back of a national catastrophe.

  The sweat stings my eyes. The air has grown even hotter. Stress makes us perspire. We have been under stress now for several hours, ready for fight or flight. The camera lunges over another man's shoulder. I am facing three cameras and three microphones. Word has gotten out that I was in the shooting. I am news fodder for the live breaking news. The microphones edge closer. No book I have ever written has garnered this much immediate attention. Celebredom is coming in a sound bite and the quicksilver fame of bad luck. The lights flip on, and I am blind as a woman fills the space below my mouth with a large spongy microphone.

  “You were there in the shooting? Tell us about it. Jim, you want to get this?”

  The camera lights are still blinding and I am speaking to a woman with absurdly blue eyes. “We were on our way back from a cruise and waiting for our flight when we heard the shots—”

  “You mean in Terminal 2?” she interrupts.

  I shake my head.

  “No, in Terminal 1.”

  She bobs the microphone.

  “There were shots in Terminal 1?”

  “Yes,” I nod. “Everyone ran. Three or four shots. That is
how we ended up out here. This is why they closed the airport.”

  Now there are three more cameras on me and microphones reaching over shoulders. So you heard the shots? Yes. How many? Three or four. You are sure you heard shots? Absolutely. The police are saying there was only a lone gunman. I don't know about that. All I can tell you is that we were in Terminal 1 when the shots were fired and everyone ran and Terminal 1 emptied out. The cameras suddenly pull away, and I can hear people talking. “I don't know if he knows what he is talking about,” I hear someone say. I turn, and a man with blond hair looks at me.

  “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?”

  He looks vaguely familiar, and I am sure I have seen him on the news. He is in front of a Fox News truck. I stare at the truck and its dark interior with multiple computer screens. The warm humming electronics smell soothing. It looks safe in there. I turn to him.

  “Can my family sit in your truck?”

  The man stares at me and shakes his head quickly.

  “No. We are going live on a nationwide feed.” He brushes back his hair, stares into the camera, and holds the microphone just below his mouth. “Are you ready?”

  “I guess so,” I reply, feeling strange about becoming part of the media show.

  He is getting a count from a producer. A mass shooting is an event that networks and cable news shows cut away from the regular programing to cover. This is how we become part of the narrative of the Fort Lauderdale shooting, and this is how our friends and family will find out we are there. Media comes like a wave, washing away all prior notions of who we are. I wait, listening to the count, and feel strange now about these interviews. I feel like I am pushing a book again. The media juggernaut has me right now, and I know from experience that the wave will pass quickly, but right now I am caught up in that wave. The lights come up.

  “I am standing here with William Hazelgrove who was in Terminal 1 when shots were fired…. Tell us what happened.”

  The microphone is below my mouth. I want to wipe my face but I don't dare. “Well, I was there to catch a plane with my family in Terminal 1, in the United Terminal, when at about one o'clock we heard four shots and everyone started running.”

  He frowns. “So you are saying this is not in Terminal 2 but in Terminal 1?”

  “That's right.”

  “So you are saying there is a second gunman?”

  “All I can tell you is that I have heard gunfire before and everyone in that terminal started running for their lives.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Then we ended up here where we thought it was safer.”

  “Everyone in your family is safe?”

  “Yes.”

  The lights flick out and I turn away. I feel used up and a little shoddy for talking to the media. Should one talk about almost getting shot and sell it like a pair of shoes? Media demands that you be complicit in selling the product, and the product is sensational news. The man is already walking toward a press briefing by the sheriff. I didn't know it then, but I had just gone out live on Fox News to the world and declared that there was a second shooter at the Fort Lauderdale Airport.

  Another woman asks me for a quick interview. I repeat what I had said. I turn away and my son is there. Clay and I are then both interviewed about what happened in Terminal 1. The journalists point out that the police have said there is only one shooter. I shrug and look at my son. We both heard it and we both ran. The cameras go away again. Then a man from CNN asks if I will go on camera.

  I have a funny feeling about this one as he prefaces my interview for the audience. “We don't have confirmation of a second shooter but we have a man from Chicago who says he heard the shots.” And then I am in front of the camera. “Tell us what you heard.”

  “I was in Terminal 1, the United Terminal, and a little after one I heard four shots. My wife and my two daughters and my son heard the shots.”

  “And what did you do?”

  I look at him. “We ran for our lives out of the terminal and became separated.”

  The journalist, who has close-cropped hair and dark eyes, stares at me. “You are aware there is no other shooter. That the police have said there is only one shooter.”

  I shrug again. “This is what I heard. I heard four shots and so did everyone else who ran out of Terminal 1.”

  “Well, I think you are wrong,” he says flatly, and I realize then I have been set up. “There was only one shooter, sir. You were mistaken. The police have informed us there was only one shooter. So there you have it. A father who is mistaken on what he heard.”

  And then I am off camera. The objective of this interview was to tell the world there was one shooter. I had been brought in to be confronted on live television and positioned as either a liar or someone hearing something go bump in the night. This narrative of one shooter has already taken hold, and the media is there to confirm the narrative.

  I wander away from the lights feeling foolish. It is my own fault. I should not have taken any of the interviews. But I have spent many years chasing media for coverage for my books, and I was not used to the pursuer becoming the quarry. One never really wins with a medium that holds all the power. I notice a large news conference gathering not ten feet away. I walk over and stand at the back as the lights come on. There are ten cameras, with many more microphones. The sheriff begins to speak, surrounded by police and officials from the airport and the city. My fifteen minutes are over and television has won again; but, then, the medium has far more experience than I do with shootings. The first televised shooting had been in Texas and after it nothing would be the same again.

  On August 1, 1966, Charles Whitman took a footlocker filled with ammo, guns, water, and food up into the clock tower at the University of Texas at Austin, to the twenty-eighth-floor observation deck. It was a sweltering 98 degree day. Whitman was another weaponized human being. He had earned a sharpshooter badge and a Marines Corps Expeditionary medal. He could hit 215 out of 250 shots on marksman tests, excelling at shooting rapidly over long distances and hitting moving targets.1

  Born in 1941, Whitman had an above average intelligence, with an IQ of 139. His father grew up in an orphanage and was able to become a successful businessman. Violence emanated from the man, however, and he demanded perfection from his wife and children. When Charles came home drunk one night, his father beat him and threw him in the family swimming pool. Charles Whitman's father was also a hunter and a collector of guns, who took his son hunting and taught him to shoot. He was proud of his son's natural marksmanship, commenting, “Charlie could plug a squirrel in the eye by the time he was sixteen.”2

  From a young age, Charles Whitman was deadly with a rifle. He joined the Marines after high school without telling his father. There, he excelled in a Marines Corps scholarship program and was allowed to transfer to the University of Texas at Austin. He studied mechanical engineering and received mediocre grades. Another student, Francis Schuck Jr., remembers Whitman staring at the clock tower and saying, “A person could stand off an army from atop of it before they got to him.”3

  On August 17, 1962, Whitman married Kathleen Frances Leissner in Needville, Texas. She was two years younger and an education major. Things seemed to be going well at first, but Whitman's grades fell and his scholarship was revoked. He finished out his tour with the Marines at Camp Lejeune, where he was court martialed for gambling and threatening another Marine. He spent ninety days doing hard labor before being discharged from the military in 1964. He then returned to the University of Texas at Austin to study architectural engineering. His parents divorced and he went to help his mother move out, requesting that a policeman be present in case his father showed up.

  His mother took an apartment near Whitman, who was beginning to experience bad headaches and had started taking amphetamines to get his work done. He went through a series of jobs, as a bill collector, then a bank teller, then a traffic surveyor for the Texas Highway Department. His wife taugh
t at Lanier High School.

  On July 31, 1966, Whitman bought a knife and a pair of binoculars and typed a suicide note. In it, he complained of unusual and irrational thoughts and requested an autopsy after he was dead. He said he wanted to save his wife and mother the embarrassment of his actions.4

  Whitman then went to his mother's apartment and stabbed her in the heart, leaving another note. He wrote that he hoped his mother was in heaven and that he loved her with all his heart. Then he drove over to his apartment and killed his wife in the same way while she slept. He left another note with instructions on his life insurance policy and requesting that his dog be given to his in laws. He phoned the workplaces of both his wife and his mother and said they would not be in.

  After this, Whitman loaded up his footlocker with a plastic container of gasoline and a high-powered rifle with a telescopic scope, along with pistols, ammo, and canned food. He drove to the University of Texas at Austin campus, and carried the footlocker into the thirty-story university clock tower. There, he took the elevator to the twenty-seventh floor, which was as far as it went, and then dragged the footlocker up two flights of stairs to the observation deck. He killed Edna Townsley, the receptionist in the observation area, and dragged her body out of sight. When a group of tourists arrived, he shot at them, killing two and injuring two more.5 The uninjured tourists were looking for help when the elevator arrived on the twenty-seventh floor again, carrying Vera Palmer, who was coming to relieve Edna Townsley. One of the men looked at her and said, “Lady, don't you dare get off this elevator.”6

  At 11:48 a.m., Whitman began firing from the clock tower, aiming at people walking across the campus below him.7 University police received a call that something had happened in the clock tower, and two unarmed security officers arrived to check it out. As they started up the stairs to the observatory, they saw bodies and then heard the shots.8 They went back down and called the police. Whitman had begun firing from all sides of the tower with his three rifles and two pistols. People were shot and killed and lay in the 98 degree heat. Armored vehicles were later used to pick up the wounded and the dead, since many of the people who first tried to help were also struck with bullets. With the high-powered rifles, Whitman was able to kill people up to two blocks away.