Shots Fired in Terminal 2

by William Hazelgrove

  So what happened at Stoneman Douglas High School? Let's start with Nikolas Cruz. He has become the poster child for missed red flags. The nineteen-year-old was a former student at Stoneman Douglas. Nikolas Cruz was adopted. His parents had died. He had been in trouble since middle school. He suffered from depression, autism, and ADHD. He had been transferred six times between schools for behavior issues. He talked incessantly about guns. He posted racist, homophobic, and xenophobic views on Instagram: “I wanna die Fighting killing shit ton of people.”5 He wanted to emulate the Texas Tower shooter. The police received twenty-three calls about Cruz over ten years’ time. He was not allowed to carry a backpack to school. He posted on YouTube, “I'm going to be professional school shooter.” An anonymous tip to the FBI weeks before the shooting detailed Cruz's “desire to kill people, erratic behavior, and disturbing social media posts as well as potential of him conducting a school shooting.”6

  If Nikolas Cruz had stood in front of the police station with a megaphone and said he intended to kill people in schools, he could not have been clearer. But no action was taken by the police or FBI or school officials except to shuffle him off to one school after another. Even though he was severely mentally ill, had posted his intention to kill, and told friends he wanted to shoot up a school, he had no problem buying an AR-15 and ammunition a year before the shooting.

  On February 14, 2018, Cruz took an Uber to the high school, arriving at 2:19 p.m. He then followed some students and entered the east stairwell of Building 12, which held mostly freshman classes, with his AR-15 in a black case.7 He stopped in the stairwell, opened the case, and began shoving the magazine into the weapon. Freshman Chris McKenna saw Cruz loading his weapon. “You better get out of here,” Cruz told him. “Things are gonna start getting messy.” McKenna ran, and Cruz began walking down the first-floor hallway with his assault rifle, hunting people.8

  When Chris McKenna fled, he ran into Aaron Feis, a thirty-seven-year-old assistant football coach and father, and told him about Cruz. “Let me check it out,” Feis said, and then they heard the first shots. Feis ran down the hallway and when he saw the gunman he began pushing students out of the way and shielding them with his body. Cruz shot and killed him, and witnesses later said that Feis was a hero who had saved lives. As Cruz continued down the hallway he fired indiscriminately into classrooms.9

  Ivy Schamis was just finishing a lesson on the Holocaust when Cruz shot through the window of the door, hitting six students. Two of them, Helena Ramsay and Nick Dworet, both seventeen years old, were killed by the high-velocity rounds. Cruz continued down the hallway, firing in all directions. The AR-15 does not have be precisely aimed but simply pointed in a general direction as bursts of gunfire spray the victims. English teacher Dara Hass in room 1216 dropped to the floor as bullets blasted through the door, hitting eight of her students; three of them died on the floor in front of their classmates. Hass texted her husband and hugged the students around her. Cruz was still moving, still firing.

  The smoke from the gunfire set off the smoke alarms, and students on the third floor, not hearing the shots, assumed it was yet another fire drill. On the second floor, math teacher Shanti Viswanathan heard the gunshots and screams. She told her students to get on the floor in the corner and she placed computer paper over the door's window to block the view from the hallway.10 When Cruz climbed to that floor, he passed her classroom without shooting.

  On the third floor, Cruz saw geography teacher Scott Beigel unlocking a door to let students in and shot and killed him with a quick burst of gunfire. Chris Hixon, the school's athletic director, was running toward the sound of shots, trying to pull students out of harm's way, when Cruz killed him.

  The fire alarm was still buzzing. Cruz went into the third-floor teachers’ lounge and tried to fire from the windows at students escaping the building. The hurricane-resistant glass fragmented the bullets, however, and he was unable to hit any targets. Six minutes after he entered the building, he stopped shooting.11 He dropped his rifle and went back into the hall, joining the students who were rushing down the stairs and out of the building to get away from the shooter. Cruz ran outside with them, right past the police still crouching behind their cars.

  In the parking lot, school resource officer Scot Peterson and other officers from the Broward County Police Department were behind cars. They had heard the shots and yet they violated the protocol that had been in place ever since Columbine, which was to immediately confront the shooter.12 The AR-15 shots clattered through the school, they heard the multiple bursts, and they were not going to confront a killer armed with a military weapon while they were armed with handguns. Peterson's attorney later argued that Peterson thought the shots were coming from the outside of the building.13

  Our society expects police officers to sacrifice their lives for others. But when the moment of a mass shooting comes and an officer hears the rapid booms of a semiautomatic weapon, the cold fear of death becomes very real. The shooter is not a man armed with a pistol. This is a killer armed with a killing machine that sprays out high-velocity bullets, leaving wounds like those seen on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan.14

  By the time the officers entered the school, Cruz had already walked to a nearby Walmart, where he got a soda at Subway and then went on to McDonald's. He eventually left the restaurant and was arrested at 3:40 p.m. A surveillance camera in the school confirmed his identity as the school shooter. Cruz was charged with seventeen counts of murder. The prosecutors have stated they will seek the death penalty but, as of May 2018, no firm decisions had been made.15

  Fourteen students and three teachers died in Parkland.16 In the days after the shooting, the president declared his desire to arm teachers and spoke of turning schools into fortresses.17 High school students around the country protested with walkouts and a march on Washington. A CNN town hall meeting was held the week after the shooting, with discussions between the students, Senator Marco Rubio, and a representative of the NRA. Once again lawmakers debated gun legislation, arguing about bump stocks, background checks, and more mental health restrictions. Students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School have been vocal at rallies and on national television, declaring that they will no longer tolerate the status quo on guns. Many began to view this shooting as a tipping point for gun control.

  On March 7, 2018, Florida passed a 400 million dollar gun-control bill, with the NRA in opposition. The legislation “would raise the minimum age to purchase any firearm to 21 from 18; impose a three-day waiting period on gun purchases; fund school police officers and mental health counselors; and allow local school districts and sheriffs to arm certain school personnel. It would also ban so-called bump stocks, which make guns fire faster, and give law enforcement more power to commit people deemed a threat.”18

  Student activists wanted a more sweeping bill, but this is the first significant gun-control legislation to emerge in the last ten years. Governor Rick Scott signed the bill into law March 9, 2018.19

  If an alien came down from another planet and examined the shootings that have occurred in the United States beginning with Howard Unruh in 1949 and ending with Dimitrios Pagourtizs, who killed ten people at Santa Fe High School on May 18, 2018, he or she or it would make several observations. The shooters were all suburban males. They were all young men, with the oldest being Stephen Paddock at sixty-four (an unusual rarity). They were all white, with the exception of Seung-Hui Cho. They had little or no ideological motivation. They were all mentally ill, with the Santa Fe High School shooter still a question mark as of this writing. And they all were failing.

  The alien then might study the Second Amendment of the United States and find that it is intertwined into the foundation of our society. The right to bear arms is as much a right as free speech. The right to bear arms ensures that no government will run amuck and trample the other rights. The alien would understand how taking away guns in any form will not work. People fail and there is nothing to be done a
bout that. A ban on young white males having guns will not work. The assault weapons ban has already been tried and appealed. So the alien might throw up his hands and walk back to his ship in disgust. He might then turn and shout, “At least keep guns out of the hands of the mentally ill.” Then he would fly away and leave earthlings to their strange problem of people shooting people.

  What the alien doesn't know is that there is such a rule on the books. There is a federal law that keeps the mentally ill from buying guns, but states are not required to report people to the FBI's NICS system. So people like Esteban Santiago, who was clearly mentally ill and told the FBI he heard voices telling him to kill, was still able to buy a gun.1 The alien would be amazed to know that Congress repealed a law that kept guns from mentally ill people on Social Security.2

  When you begin a book you do not know where you will end up. Fiction, nonfiction, it is all a journey and you are after the discoveries. In a book like this the journey is even more important. I did not want to begin this with preconceived notions or have an axe to grind for or against guns. I did not want to hit people over the head with statistics. I have purposely stayed away from writing a “gun book.” A lot of the books I consulted were brimming with stats that became meaningless because there was always another statistic that countered it. So I wanted to blend my journey with shootings in the United States that were not ideologically motivated.

  I wanted to know about the shootings where there was no reason. There was no overwhelming motive. And as I went through the shootings beginning with Howard Unruh in 1949 and ending with Nikolas Cruz in 2018, there were discoveries. American shooters are mostly young men. All the shooters were in some stage of mental illness and all the shooters were males who had failed in life. And all the victims of the shootings had their lives changed forever.

  The people who died in shootings were not even given the honors of someone dying in a war. At least those killed in war get a twenty-one gun salute and a flag and a letter from the president. No, people who are killed in shootings just die and the media moves on and they are forgotten. They are put in the category of freak accidents, tornados, lightning strikes, rare incurable diseases. They are just gone and the survivors who are wounded physically or psychically are left to pick up the pieces of their lives and do the best they can.

  There is no Veterans Administration for victims. There is nothing beyond the lawyers who can try and sue for compensation. You could say there is a war between vested interests in the gun debate in America but that would not get you very far. Basically, victims have had the bad luck to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. In this life, in America, we live with the ever-present danger of being shot. Statistically, the odds are increasing that we or someone we know will be involved in a firearm-related incident, if not a mass shooting. There are mothers who have had children in two separate school shootings.3 The odds of that happening are incalculable and this is the very reason that in the end the numbers are meaningless.

  Veterans suffering from PTSD, young men who are failing, young men who are schizophrenic, paranoid, delusional, psychotic, insane, bipolar, psychopathic, depressed, and are armed with automatic weapons are a hazard to our health. There is no doubt. If the alien stopped at a different world they might have a psychological test for all gun owners to complete, with a waiting period, and only the sane could own a gun. And there would be no automatic weapons. On earth, this will never happen.

  This is no great epiphany. Everyone knows that crazy people should not own guns and civilians should not have military weapons. So what? I grew up playing with guns my whole life and drawing pictures of men with guns and playing war games and fantasizing about being a western gunslinger. Guns are in our DNA in America. They are intertwined with who we are. So how can we survive in this gun-rich environment?

  What we really have is a national health crisis, much like cancer or heart disease. The difference between this disease and the others is that we have chosen not to study this one. Where is the Presidential Commission on Mass Shootings in America? Where are the congressional committees mandating studies? With any other health crisis, from AIDS to Ebola, we throw millions and millions at the problem. We are strangely silent on guns. There are a few strangled gasps after each shooting, and then we go back to sleep. If we did have a national study we would probably find that the crisis stems from a confluence of trends in America. A plethora of guns in an increasingly urbanized society. A culture that promotes violence. A media that inadvertently promotes the shootings they cover with their glorification of the shooters. A lack of recognition that the old model of open schools should be replaced with metal detectors and single entrances, closer to a TSA approach. The problem is that we don't know because we have chosen to not even study this spreading cancer, which is multiplying every month and every year.

  Personally, I won't ever do a layover in an airport again. I won't hang around public areas unless I must. I will always look for a nearby exit or a door to escape through. After that, it is the luck of the draw. Most people in shootings never see it coming. They are here one moment and gone the next. Some see their executioner and have that last thought that is terror, amazement, finality. So this is how it ends. A fucking shooting. This is how I am leaving. Many who survive have survivor's guilt and wonder—why not me?

  I don't own a gun. I won't buy a gun to protect myself. That is not in my personality. But others think having a weapon might change the outcome and guns give them a sense of safety in their home. I get it. That is their right. I used to have a friend in Baltimore and whenever I would do something really stupid he would say, “Duuuuuumb.” He would almost sing it and later in life when I do something stupid I will often murmur to myself, duuuuuuuuumb.

  And if that alien returned in his spaceship years later and ran through our news cycles and saw the same kinds of shootings with the same talking heads, the same SWAT teams, the same memorials and funerals and the same quadriplegics, the same school massacres, people in wheelchairs and families destroyed, people scarred for life with PTSD, the same fights in Congress going nowhere, and the same arguments trotted out, the same accessible automatic weapons, and the same mentally ill young men shooting people down, you can see that alien putting his spacecraft into gear and taking off, shaking his head, and singing out just like my old friend…

  “Duuuuuuuuuuuumb.”

  I am buying a ticket for the train to go to Chicago. The lady behind the ticket window stares at me. “I saw someone on television in that shooting in Florida. Was that you?”

  I nod.

  “Oh my gosh. I thought that was you. That is amazing!”

  I smile and take my ticket and have some time to kill. I have been holed up working on the proposal for this book for a few weeks and this is my first time out in public since I got back. I walk next door to get a cup of coffee. The same guy I see every time I take the train and who wears shorts all winter takes my order then looks at me.

  “Were you on television?”

  I nod.

  “I thought that was you.”

  And that's it. He doesn't want to know any more beyond the confirmation that I have been on television. I take my coffee and go outside to wait for the train. Friends and family wanted to hear the story and Kitty and I have told them obligingly. It has become an adventure story, something we lived through and now we could relate our perilous journey.

  Some people don't want to hear it. One couple at dinner after telling us all about their vacation in Europe only nod when I mention that we were in the shooting in the Fort Lauderdale airport.

  “That's weird,” the woman says, looking at her menu. It is already in the realm of the fantastic and weird and as more time passes it will become more so. Normal people are not in shootings in airports and we are normal people. And so we just quit talking about it. It requires too much energy from the listener and we become fatigued with trying to relate the story in a way that makes people understand.

  A week
after we came back the house phone rang. It rarely ever rang and I rarely answered it but that time I did.

  “You don't know me but I am the photographer who let your kids stay in my car.”

  “Oh. Yes. Thank you for doing that. We really appreciate it.”

  “Yes…well. I don't know how to say this but one of your kids urinated in my backseat and I cannot get the smell out.”

  And then it all came back: the long day and the girls sitting in the car. There was nowhere to go to the bathroom except to be escorted into Terminal 2 by a policeman. Kitty and the girls eventually went but they were in that car a long time before that. Probably six hours.

  “I am really sorry about that. We can pay for any damage.”

  “Yeah, I've been trying to scrub it out but I can't get rid of the smell.”

  “I am so sorry. We can pay you for the damages.”

  “Well, that's cool…Your girls alright?”

  “Yes. They seem to be.”

  “And your son. I never did use that picture of him being searched by the police.”

  “Yes…he seems fine also.”

  There was a pause on the line.

  “Well, the only thing I want to know is did they use my car to go to the bathroom…you know, figure they could do it there.”

  I hesitated and shook my head. It was a logical question, I suppose. Some people might use a car to urinate in if they weren't so terrified that urinating was the last thing they were worried about.

  “No. No. Absolutely not. This is the first I heard of it. We appreciate what you did and, like I said, we can send you something for the damage…ah, why don't you give me your address.”

  I wrote down her address and hung up the phone. It was as if a hand had reached out and pulled me all the way back to that hot sticky day of terror. It was another world and this woman had done a humane thing and she wanted to make sure we had not played her for her kindness. I understood. It is a cynical world and you do something nice and you end up with urine in your backseat. What it said beyond this I didn't want to think about. Two girls too scared to get out of a car to go the bathroom so they urinate quietly in the back seat. There are things we cannot control and one of the most frustrating is losing control of what affects our children. Esteban Santiago and whoever shot off the rounds in Terminal 1 was still in our lives and might be for a long time.