Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  Hinckley was quickly tackled by Secret Service agents, who protected him from the bystanders who had grabbed him and wanted to tear him apart. One agent wielded an Uzi submachine gun to deter mob violence, and Hinckley was hustled off. Authorities discovered that his gun had been purchased at a Dallas pawn shop and loaded with six Devastator bullets, which had explosive charges inside the lead. The only one that exploded, however, was the bullet that hit James Brady. Doctors wore bulletproof vests while removing the others from victims. As he was being arrested, Hinckley asked the officers if the Academy Awards would be postponed because of the shooting.6

  Ronald Reagan survived, as did the other men who were injured in the attack, but press secretary Brady was permanently disabled and used a wheelchair for the rest of his life. He remained press secretary in name only for the remainder of the Reagan administration. Brady and his wife became advocates for gun control after the shooting.7 John Lennon's death at the hands of Mark David Chapman in 1980 had sparked a debate on gun control that picked up steam after the assassination attempt on Reagan.8 The Brady Bill, the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act, was passed into law on November 30, 1993.9 For the first time, background checks would be required when a gun was purchased from a federally licensed dealer or manufacturer unless there was an exception—a “private sale,” which constitutes an online sale or someone selling their gun to another individual. If a gun was given to someone else then it must be checked with the National Instant Background Check System (NICS).10

  A series of restrictions in the act further tightened up gun ownership. People could no longer buy a gun if they had been convicted of a crime or were a fugitive from justice or had been “adjudicated as a mental defective”11 (a legal term meaning a person has been determined to be “a danger to himself or to others” or else “lacks the mental capacity to…manage his own affairs”12) or committed to a mental institution. Also excluded from gun ownership are those who have been discharged from the armed forces with a dishonorable discharge, those who have renounced their United States citizenship, have a restraining order on them, or have been convicted of any type of domestic violence.

  The Brady Bill was the most comprehensive gun legislation of the twentieth century. The NRA dug in to defeat the bill, taking it all the way to the Supreme Court, where concessions were given so as not to force state and local authorities to run the NICS background check (although most still do), as well as to abandon the five-day waiting period in exchange for an instant background check. By 2016 the number of background checks that had been completed under the Brady Bill reached 202 million, with 1.2 million firearm purchases blocked.13 The most common blocked purchases were felons who had attempted to buy guns and failed the check.

  When John Hinckley went to trial for his attempt to assassinate President Ronald Reagan, he was found not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyer claimed he suffered from narcissistic personality disorder. He was released in 2016 from an institution for the criminally insane. His lawyer had petitioned for his release claiming that his mental illness is in remission.14

  The Brady Bill is the only piece of major gun legislation that the National Rifle Association failed to defeat. It is one of the few times a shooting in the United States has translated into gun-control legislation. Such is the power of the president.

  I watch lots of films. Kitty goes to bed and I stay up for the quiet time and get sucked into Double Indemnity, A Bridge Too Far, Reservoir Dogs, any Coen brothers film, and old films from the seventies, eighties, or nineties. The Warriors is a film I have seen many times and rewatch whenever it pops up on cable. The premise is simple: a gang gets caught on the wrong side of town in hostile gang territory and they have to cross New York in one night to escape. By dawn they have been through hell but they make it to their side and the final shot is of them by the harbor with the Statue of Liberty in the distance.

  We are the warriors now. We have been threatened with gunfire like the warriors. We have been chased like the warriors by unseen assailants. We are hungry and thirsty and sweat grimed, with our hair mussed and arms slicked. The warriors are making their way through an urban jungle and so are we, with our suitcases, along the side of the road, with cars and buses roaring past leaving us breathing diesel exhaust. The warriors were in constant danger right up to the end and so are we. Terminal 2 and Terminal 1 loom in the distance as we again pass the burned out hulk of modern aviation, reminding us that leaving the ground is no easy feat. The warriors passed the burned out cars and the burned out people of their world, too, and looked for the light on the other side of New York. We look for the light somewhere out there beyond the confines of the razor-topped fences of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport. We have been dragging our suitcases for over an hour now, along with thousands of other people. We are all warriors now.

  The buses, police cars, armored SWAT vehicles, and ambulances whoosh by. I have lost all track of time and I feel I cannot remember ever not being soaked with perspiration. I think it is around ten o'clock at night. Kitty and Clay and the kids are behind me and no one is talking; we are just trying to get wherever we are going. It turns out that the SWAT guy had it all wrong. We are supposed to now just find a bus, any bus to get on. The buses have finally stopped and are parked in a long diesel-fuming line of blue smoke and hissing airbrakes.

  “Let's cross,” I shout, and we go across the access road to the buses now lined up for departure.

  “What are we doing?” Kitty shouts.

  “Trying to find a bus,” I shout back.

  But so is everyone else and the thought that there are more people than buses is evident in the people running from bus to bus. The worst thought now is not that you can't get out but that you might be left behind. There is still the possibility that any moment the shooter will emerge and start cutting people down. We are well-schooled in terrorism and we have seen the coordinated attacks on cities in France and England and the thought that this was a coordinated terrorist attack is still out there. So it is time to escape, time for the warriors to break into the light in view of the Statue of Liberty.

  We cut between two buses and go to the first one. The driver shakes his head. “Can't get on this bus. It's full,” he says, hooking a thumb behind him. “Go on back and see if you can find one with some room.” Now we are walking back toward Terminal 2 and every bus is filled to capacity. People are in the aisles, standing in the door. People are trying to squeeze on while other people tell them the bus is too full and to go find another. This is like the evacuation of Vietnam or any movie where everyone is trying to escape but transportation is limited and they know some people will not get out. We keep walking and walking. Some buses are empty but the doors are closed and when I bang on the door the drivers shake their heads and point behind them.

  “Are all the buses full?” Kitty asks behind me.

  “Hope not,” I shout back.

  I can smell myself, the rank odor of someone who has been perspiring way too long. Everyone is going from bus to bus and banging on doors. The drivers just shrug and motion behind them.

  “Dad, are we going to be able to get on a bus?”

  I look back at Careen, who is struggling with one of our carry-ons.

  “Absolutely,” I say, with more confidence than I am feeling.

  “Yeah, Dad. I mean, what the fuck? Are all the buses taken?” Clay grumbles, saying exactly what I want to say.

  “No. We will find one,” I say, feeling like we are on another family outing where I am promising a gas station is coming where everyone can use the bathroom and get something to drink or eat. It is surreal the way family life just continues under any situation. I am sure families in war feel this same way.

  “We are never going to get out,” Careen proclaims, in twelve-year-old bravado, voicing our secret fear.

  “Shut up, Careen. Of course we will,” Clay says, shooting her a dark look.

  “I just don't want to get shot at again,”
she says, shocking all of us with her honesty.

  “No one is going to get shot at again,” I say crossly, hearing myself as if someone else is speaking.

  We come to another bus. It has Reserved written on its overhead sign and the interior is semi-dark. The driver is sitting down and I am about to bang on the doors when they fold open. The young black driver stares at me as my family comes to a stop in front of him. We are tired, dirty, sweaty, exhausted, hungry, and thirsty, our clothes are soot streaked, and we are breathing heavily from our journey around the airport. The driver takes all this in as I croak out, “Can we…. can we get on your bus?”

  He opens his hand and gestures to the cool nirvana of air conditioned comfort. “Well, come on if you are going to get aboard.”

  I feel the first ray of hope that there is an end to this day and that it won't end in disaster. But I am not sure I am hearing correctly.

  “We can board?”

  He frowns. “Hell yes…ain't nobody on the bus right now.”

  I look at the kids and nod.

  “Let's go!”

  We carry our clumsy suitcases into the air conditioning, which feels like cool water after the close humid air. The bus driver and I take the suitcases from the girls and put them to the side and then we go all the way to the back and commandeer the rear seats and put our remaining suitcases in front of us. People stream in, and in minutes the bus is full to capacity with people standing in the aisle. I look at Kitty and see she is thinking the same thing. We are close to getting out of the Fort Lauderdale airport and we will not become a statistic. We will not end up as another tragedy that people will talk about for years. We were in the wrong place at the wrong time but the gods or whoever did not take their pound of flesh, and, like the warriors, we are almost there.

  My phone rings and I pick it up. It is almost out of power.

  “Is this William Hazelgrove?”

  I recognize the voice from a television station that had called me earlier.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I ask you a few questions?”

  I hesitate, feeling the strange sensation of being cold in the air conditioning.

  “Sure.”

  “Where are you?”

  “I am in a bus. We are getting ready to leave.”

  “How do you feel?”

  I pause and look out the window and see Terminal 2 with the police still guarding the doors. I stare at the media trucks waiting for the next catastrophe, and I see the grounded airplanes out on the tarmac and the platoons of camouflaged men still searching for the elusive shooter. I look at my children—dirty, sweaty, exhausted. I wipe my eyes.

  “Alive,” I say.

  The rich or the upper middle class usually escapes. They have enough money to buy the nice homes with the big yards in the nice areas where crime and lone nuts do not reside. Mass shootings fall traditionally on those in the lower end of the middle class. There is an economic component to mass shootings. Even the first shooting in 1949 was an assault against a thrifty middle class of shopkeepers, tailors, and barbers. The McDonald's shooting and those at Columbine, concerts, and theaters all hit middle-class people where they and their kids go. But those with a bit more money seemed to be able to duck most of the carnage. That is until Sandy Hook, when upper-middle-class professionals were assaulted by a brutal attack on their children in the last sanctuary of society: an elementary school.

  There are shootings that have left more people dead. There are shootings where horrific moments are replayed and replayed on the internet or through witnesses recalling what happened. Sandy Hook is not the worst American shooting in terms of numbers or grotesque moments. Sandy Hook is the worst because of the depravity of murdering twenty first-grade children between the ages of six and seven.1 The shooting was the low point for American society because, no matter how you slice it, what happened was the outgrowth of the cancer that infects our culture. This tragedy is almost indefinable.

  I remember hearing of Sandy Hook. I could not get it out of my head. Nobody could. It was December 14, 2012, and Christmas was coming. I was up in my office writing when news of the shooting reached the internet. I began reading and even as I was reading I hoped Adam Lanza had restricted his shooting to adults. It is terrible to think we rate human beings this way, but Careen was seven and in first grade at the time, and this one hit close to home.

  Parents all over America viscerally felt pain when they learned that Adam Lanza had gone to Sandy Hook Elementary School and targeted children. It was impossible to believe. I wrote about it on my blog extensively and then I stopped because nothing I could write would make any difference. What had happened had no parallel. We had no measure for this one and we were all left with one central question: who or what would do such a thing? Because a creature that would kill like this raised the question: Is such a creature even a human being?

  Adam Lanza washed his hands continually. He couldn't stop washing his hands. He changed his socks twenty times a day. His mother was constantly doing laundry. He blacked out the windows of his basement and wouldn't talk to anyone, and he communicated through email with his mother who was still in the house. His food had to be arranged strategically on his plate or he wouldn't eat it. He was taken out of school at sixteen and homeschooled. He would not touch a door knob and went through boxes of tissues every day.2

  Lanza was diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome and placed on antidepressants, but his mother took him off them because of adverse reactions.3 He was diagnosed with sensory integration disorder and then obsessive-compulsive disorder. His father suspected he had schizophrenia. He was obsessed with mass shootings. He watched videos of the Columbine shooting over and over. He kept a large chart on a four-by-seven piece of cardboard where he ranked American shootings. He was antisocial and anorexic, and at six feet he weighed one hundred and twelve pounds. He played video games nonstop and loved Super Mario Brothers. His mother, Nancy, was a gun enthusiast who had over a dozen firearms in the house. She was divorced, lived comfortably off of alimony, and took her son to the local shooting range where she put high-powered automatic weapons in his hands. Adam Lanza destroyed the targets at the range with a Bushmaster XM15-E2S rifle designed to kill massive numbers of humans.4

  On the morning of December 14, 2012, after destroying the hard drive on his computer, Lanza loaded a Savage Mark II bolt-action .22-caliber rifle and went to his mother's bedroom, where he shot her four times in the head while she slept. He then took her car and drove toward Sandy Hook Elementary School, located in Fairfield County, Connecticut. There were 456 children in the school. Protocol was to lock the doors after 9:30 a.m. Adam Lanza arrived at 9:35 a.m., parked in the lot, and, wearing a black shirt and pants, sunglasses and yellow ear plugs from the range, along with an army-green vest stuffed with extra magazines for the Bushman XM15-E2S rifle, he blasted his way through the locked glass door. The shots could be heard over the intercom during the morning announcements.5

  Principal Dawn Hochsprung and teachers Mary Sherlach and Natalie Hammond went into the hall when they heard the first shots. The principal screamed out, “Shooter, Stay put!” She then lunged toward the shooter, and it would later be determined the shots ripping across her chest showed she lunged to put her body in front of her students and died trying to save her children. Lanza fired a burst from his XM15, killing the principal and Mary Sherlach and wounding Natalie Hammond. Hammond was able to crawl into a conference room and hide after Lanza left the hallway. Lanza went into the main office and, seeing no one, left. Sally Cox, hiding under the desk, was close enough to see Lanza's boots.6 A substitute teacher in the first grade looked up as Adam Lanza entered with his automatic weapon.

  Lauren Rousseau had herded her students into the back of the room toward the bathroom. Behavioral therapist Rachel D'Avino was in the room when Lanza walked in and began firing. Fifteen children were murdered there, along with their teacher and the therapist. Many of the victims were shot multiple times.

&nbs
p; Bullets from assault weapons travel twice as fast as regular bullets. They essentially destroy everything in their path and inside the human body they ricochet around, pulverizing bones and shredding organs. Later, a doctor in the documentary Newtown would attest that the bullets had exploded inside the small bodies; he would not describe the carnage further. Many of the dead students and teachers were found in the bathroom where they were hiding. A single six-year-old survived by playing dead in a cupboard and later told her mother that all her friends had died.7

  After shooting everyone, Lanza left and headed to another first-grade classroom, reloading as he went. He entered Victoria Leigh Soto's classroom as she was moving to lock the door. First-grader Jesse Lewis yelled for his classmates to run, and Lanza shot and killed him. At that point, Lanza's gun momentarily jammed and several of the students were able to run to safety. Victoria Soto tried to shield her students with her body, but Lanza shot her dead and then continued firing at the children. Anne Marie Murphy, a teacher's aide, was killed as she covered a little boy's body with her own; the boy was also shot and killed.

  The children would be left in place until late in the night during the subsequent investigation. All crime scene photos would be sealed. An officer on camera a year later would speak like a zombie when asked what it looked like when he entered the classroom.8

  When he left Victoria Soto's classroom, Lanza went into the hallway and passed a classroom with black construction paper over the window on the door; inside, Kaitlin Roig was hiding with her students. School librarians hid children in a storage space and barricaded it with a filing cabinet. A music teacher hid her students in a small storage closet, staying silent when Lanza pounded on the door and demanded entrance. He moved on and his final shot rang out at 9:40 a.m. This was when Lanza shot himself in the head with his Glock.9

  By the time the police entered it was all over. Eight boys and twelve girls were dead, all between the ages of six and seven. Six women lay dead as well. Lanza fired over one hundred rounds, not even emptying his clips before reloading. His car held more ammunition. An NRA certificate was found at his home, along with samurai swords, 1,400 rounds of ammunition, a .45 Henry rifle, .30 Enfield rifle, and a .22 Marlin rifle.10