Shots Fired in Terminal 2 Read online

  At 12:11 p.m. Delta Flight 2182 lands, and thirty minutes later Esteban Ruiz Santiago, in a blue shirt and black pants, is walking toward the baggage claim area in Terminal 2. Terminals 1 and 2 are mirrors of each other. The baggage claim is on the lower level in both buildings. Santiago takes the escalator at the western end of the terminal down to the lower level and walks nonchalantly to the revolving carousel. He waits, and then sees the single hardened case that has the 9mm and the two ammunition clips. Santiago picks up the case and then heads toward the men's room and goes into a stall. He locks the door, opens the case, and shoves one of the clips into the gun. He puts the gun in the waistband of his pants and pulls his shirt down. He walks out of the men's room and emerges in the baggage claim area, where people from Delta Flight 1465 from Atlanta are picking up their bags. Many are headed for a cruise.2

  Fort Lauderdale is the jumping-off point for many of the largest cruise lines. People fly into Lauderdale and then take a cab or a bus to the International Port, where they embark on a generally seven- or ten-day cruise. Our preconceptions of cruisers involve senior citizens toddling around with trays of food in front of a sunset mirroring the latter part of their lives. This was countered by the television show The Love Boat in the seventies and eighties, which managed to insert disco and bad fashion and young people into equally cheesy plots with the cruise ship as the setting. Both images are only partially true, and modern cruising bears little resemblance to Captain Stubing's ship. If anything, the modern cruise ship is designed to be a playground where passengers can enjoy the ultimate payoff for years of work.

  Ocean liners gave up the ghost in the sixties and handed off the transatlantic trade to airliners. And ocean liners are not cruise ships. Liners have heavy plating for rough seas, as well as high fuel consumption, enclosed decks, and the idea of getting as many people aboard as possible—not unlike airliners, where passengers find themselves uncomfortably close to the person next to them. The cruise ship is all about comfort, on the other hand, with cabins built on top of the hull in the superstructure. No more portholes, modern cruise ships are more like floating condominiums with balconies looking out over the sea.

  One-class cruising became the standard in the eighties, where everyone received the same quality of service. A floating Disney World type of environment, most cruise ships offer a casino, shops, spa, fitness center, library, theater, cinema, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, hot tub, lounges, gym, basketball courts, and tennis courts. The glass elevators rushing up and down the interior of these ships give the feeling of being in an overblown mall at times, but the atmosphere is elegant and passengers have their needs taken care of by a staff that works seventy-seven-hour weeks ten months a year, with two months off. Cruise ships are a twenty-four seven, 365-days-a-year operation. Even a week out for maintenance can result in the loss of millions of dollars. The 30 billion-dollar-a-year industry is highly competitive and becomes even more so as the baby boomers enter retirement, looking for the vaunted golden years of rest and relaxation. A cruise is the answer for many.

  The five people flying into Fort Lauderdale who would die in Terminal 1 on January 6, 2017, were all headed for cruises. They were passing through the airport on their way to a week of halcyon days and luxurious evenings filled with five-course meals and walks along the promenade. This was the world we had just left. A cruise is not inexpensive. For a family of five, the trip can cost probably ten thousand dollars by the time airfare, drinks, hotels before embarkation, and miscellaneous charges are all totaled up. The cruise industry does cater to an affluent and successful segment of society. Generally speaking, many cruisers have lived orderly lives, and the cruise is a celebration of an event like a birthday or a retirement.

  Terry Andres fits this profile. He is sixty-two and is going on a sixteen-day cruise with his wife, Ann, to celebrate his birthday. In the ship's dining room, you often hear the waiters singing “happy birthday” to someone during dinner. The waiters keep track of who is having a birthday, which year they are celebrating, and at what table they are sitting; Terry is slated to be serenaded. He is a big man with a cherubic face, who in his pictures looks like he will enjoy having a margarita by the pool. He had worked twenty years at the Norfolk Shipyard as a radiological control technician and is now retired. His wife is a travel agent. Terry is also an avid golfer and tennis player, and he loves having a few beers with the guys. His daughter, Ryan Kim, twenty-eight, will have the burden of telling the world about her father, a man who never had a bad word to say about anybody.1

  Olga Woltering is eighty-four, and she, too, is headed for a cruise. She is going to celebrate her husband's ninetieth birthday. They have just marked their sixty-fourth year of marriage, and a cruise offers amenities and a low-impact way to see the Caribbean.2 The cruise ships stop at the various islands, where people disembark for the day and return with duty-free booze, cigars, sunburns, and a new appreciation for the ship, which then sails away to another third-world island. But many like Olga and her husband will probably not leave the ship. They will see Honduras or St. Kitts or Cozumel from their balcony, and that will be as close as they get. That is fine. The constant service and unbelievable amounts of food served day and night are a senior citizen's dream. The Wolterings are from Marietta, Georgia, and are such regulars at the Transfiguration Catholic Church that everyone knows which pew is theirs. An ice storm is headed for Georgia on the day before they are to leave for Florida, and the couple makes the fateful decision to beat the storm. They move up their flight. They will arrive at the Fort Lauderdale airport on the morning of January 6.3

  Next to birthdays, the second biggest celebrations on cruise ships are probably weddings and anniversaries. Shirley Timmons is celebrating an anniversary. One would notice Shirley; she is seventy but still carries the spark that caught Steve Timmons's eye in eighth grade. They started dating that year, and they had an All-American romance. Shirley cheered Steve all through high school as he played football for the Barnesville Shamrocks. She was Homecoming Queen, and in the 1960s she and Steven had been a part of the popular group in Senecaville, Ohio. Pictures of Shirley and Steven show a handsome couple, well-tanned and vibrant. Their house on the lake, three daughters, three sons-in-law, and eight grandchildren all speak of a life where no opportunity was squandered. The phrase “a well-lived life” comes to mind. They had run a clothing store, with Shirley doing the buying and Steve doing the books. They seemed to be a couple riding the crest of a wave. As friends said, “You never saw Steve without Shirley…. They were fun-loving people with a good sense of humor.”4 The cruise is a family vacation with their daughters and sons-in-law, and in three weeks Steve and Shirley will celebrate their fifty-first wedding anniversary.5

  And some people do not go on a cruise to celebrate anything; some people are just cruisers. I met one couple who were doing back-to-back cruises and sometimes would do as many as three in a row. Michael John Oehme is fifty-seven and looking forward to his cruise with his wife, Kari. They have flown in from Omaha, Nebraska, and this is an annual event. He has left behind the cares of running his surveying company, Boundaryline Surveys Oehme-Nielsen and Associates. His daughter has long since moved out, and now it is just Michael, Kari, and their Labrador. The picture of Michael in newspapers after the shooting will show a professorial man with white hair, leaning over to his dog for a kiss.6

  Some people see cruising as a safe way to see parts of the world they consider too rough, inclement, or inaccessible to see otherwise. They no longer have the enthusiasm of youth to go charging into a rainforest or brave the wilds of Alaska, but still their curiosity about the world remains. Mary Louise Amzibel is sixty-nine and wants to see South America and take a trip through the Panama Canal. This wonder of the modern world, built during Teddy Roosevelt's time, is not well known to most Americans and occupies only a small space in high school history books. But Mary wants to see the canal and the rainforest. A cruise ship is a wonderful way to go down into the remote c
orners of the world and see what you could not otherwise. The Panama Canal is a long way from Dover, Delaware, where Mary and her husband have lived since moving from Ashtabula, Ohio. She has two adult children, and she has always had an interest in traveling and seeing exotic places. The Panama Canal is on her bucket list.7

  By 12:55 p.m., these five people will all be in Terminal 1 in the lower baggage area to claim their suitcases. The baggage claim is by the escalators and dimly lit. The main thing they have in common is that they are all going on a cruise and that they will all be in the path of Esteban Santiago, who is not there to go on a cruise. Like all people who are victims in a shooting, they have the unlucky fate of common proximity.

  The airport of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, is located twenty-one miles north of Miami and three miles to the southwest of downtown Fort Lauderdale, positioned strategically near the cruise line terminals. It is in the top fifty busiest airports in the country, falling in at number twenty-one, and it's the fourteenth busiest in international flights.1 The airport is classified by the federal government as a “major hub,” and in 2016 more than 29,205,000 people passed through the gates on their way to other countries, sunny climes, or while returning to their homes in other parts of the United States.2

  The airport was originally called Merle Fogg Field, and before it was an airport it was a nine-hole golf course. On May 1, 1929, the new airfield opened, and in World War II it was taken over by the Navy and renamed Fort Lauderdale Naval Air Station.3 Airplanes were refitted for service overseas, and the station became a training base for young pilots getting used to flying torpedo bombers, specifically the TBM Avenger. The site would take its place in conspiracy history when five TBM Avengers took off in December 1945 and never returned, after straying into the Bermuda Triangle.4

  After World War II, the airport closed for several years as the country adjusted back to a peacetime economy, and the Navy transferred control of the site to the county. Broward County International Airport began commercial flights to Nassau in 1953, and five years later Eastern and National airlines began domestic service.5 Seven years after that forty airlines operated out of BCIA, and low-cost traffic boosted flights in the 1990s with Southwest, Spirit, and JetBlue opening hubs. The airport was closed in 2005 for forty-eight hours during Hurricane Katrina6 and then for five days during Hurricane Wilma when eighty-mile-an-hour winds damaged jets, broke windows, and destroyed canopies.7

  There have been more than a few accidents at the airport over the years. An Eastern Airlines McDonnell Douglas DC-9-31, on May 18, 1972, had a landing gear fold down on landing and the tail section tear away, igniting a fire. There were no injuries, and the crew and passengers evacuated safely.8 Then, on July 7, 1983, a passenger handed a note to a flight attendant aboard an Air Florida flight, claiming to have a bomb and directing the pilot to fly to Havana, Cuba. The bag the passenger was carrying proved to contain no bomb, and the passenger was taken into custody in Cuba, where he spent five years in prison.9

  On November 19, 2013, a medical transport Learjet 35 crashed into the ocean after takeoff, on the way to Cozumel, Mexico, after a distressed Mayday. The four people on board died, and the investigation concluded the crash was due to engine failure and human error.10 There were also two fires on board aircraft at FLL, with one on October 29, 2015, which occurred when a Boeing 767's left engine caught fire from a fuel leak. Seventeen passengers went to the hospital, and operations at the airport were stopped for three hours.11 The other fire occurred on October 28, 2016, when FedEx flight 910, a McDonnell Douglass MD-10-10F cargo plane from Memphis, landed at Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood. As the plane touched down, the left gear collapsed and fire broke out in the left wing and engine.12 The crew was evacuated without injuries, and it was this plane that I saw on my way in to the airport. The burned hulk was resting beside a hangar like a junked car. I am surprised the airline didn't hide the plane away from passengers as it confirmed every person's worst fear—that these planes are still, at the basic level, mechanical contraptions with which things can go horribly wrong.

  If you read Wikipedia, airport security is defined this way: “Airport security attempts to prevent any threats or potentially dangerous situations from arising or entering the country…. As such, airport security serves several purposes: To protect the airport and country from any threatening events, to reassure the traveling public that they are safe and to protect the country and their people.”13

  It is to this end that we have to take off our shoes, belts, and watches, and remove our phones, keys, and change, and even then we might still be “wanded” or pulled off for separate screening. After 9/11 we became obsessed with stopping anyone with a weapon from entering a plane, and rightly so after men with box cutters commandeered commercial planes and destroyed the World Trade Center in New York City. Fort Lauderdale and other airports use metal detectors, explosives-detection machines, X-ray machines, and explosive trace detection portal machines. Innovations include backscatter X-rays that can detect a hidden weapon or an explosive on someone. A single backscatter scan hits an individual with between 0.05 and 0.1 microsieverts of radiation. A chest X-ray will give you a hundred times that amount.

  The whole airport security setup is positioned around a gated or “secure” or “sterile” area. On one side there is potential danger, and on the other are people who have been deemed to not possess a weapon or anything that could bring down a modern jetliner. The entire system is based on the idea that danger is coming from outside the airport and that inside the airport all is secure. People who get off planes are deemed safe or sterile because they went through the security process before getting on the plane at a different airport. The system has no defense against a weapon coming from inside the safe area. That would go against the basic assumption that danger is coming from the outside and not from a plane.

  Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport (FLL) is divided into four terminals. Terminal 1, which is referred to as the “new terminal,” was built and opened between 2001 and 2003. The other three terminals were built fifteen years before, with Terminal 4 known as the International Terminal and Terminal 3 as the Main Terminal. Terminal 2 is simply the “Delta Terminal” and is used exclusively by Delta.

  Everyone flying in on a Delta flight goes to Terminal 2 and makes their way downstairs to pick up their baggage. The other terminals have a similar layout, with the baggage claim on the lower level. United Airlines uses Terminal 1, and one could walk out of that building and look down the sidewalk to see Terminal 2. A brisk walk of five minutes is all that separates the two baggage claim areas.

  If someone were to fire a gun in Terminal 2, the people in Terminal 1 would not hear it. They would still be drinking coffee in Starbucks or getting a breakfast sandwich or whiling away the time, waiting for the hours of their ridiculously long layover to pass, the way we were. In fact, complete carnage could occur in one of the terminals, with those in the other terminals having no clue what had happened; bustling passengers and cheery faces behind ticket counters would continue conducting the business of a modern airport without concern. The only sign that anything was amiss would be the rushing lights and sirens of police and EMTs going by outside, and if you had already gone through security you might not even see that.

  We are in Terminal 1 and unware of Terminal 2's close proximity. The kids are getting hungry, and like most people we are fixated on our own situation and oblivious to what could be occurring elsewhere in the airport. But in reality hell is about to break loose in Terminal 2, and we are a five-minute walk away.

  Since 1989, the United States has been involved in ten wars, with one ongoing. This has created a need for constant troops and activated the National Guard units across the country. Many “weekend warriors” have found themselves in the incinerating heat of the Middle East on a twelve-month tour. Politically, the return of the draft has been a hot potato that both parties have avoided, even though our constant involvement in wars has stretched human
resources to the limit. Many soldiers have done multiple tours of service in Iraq and Afghanistan. These veterans have emerged as trained killers who are then expected to assimilate back into the civilian population.

  Many do adjust to life back home, but PTSD takes its toll, and veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder can find their lives spiraling quickly into lost jobs, alcoholism, violence, and drugs, with many ending up in prison or entangled in a legal system that has no capacity to deal with men and women who have experienced the horrors of combat. So they drift.

  Esteban Santiago Ruiz was born March 16, 1990, in New Jersey. His family moved to Puerto Rico two years later, where he lived most of his life in the town of Peñuelas. After his high school graduation, he joined the Puerto Rico National Guard. It is hard to know what his thinking was at the time. The National Guard was usually regarded as a safe haven against seeing action in combat. Three years later, he was headed for Iraq as a combat engineer.1

  Santiago served in Iraq from April 23, 2010, to February 19, 2011. He received a medal for serving in a combat area. And it was here that Santiago's life veered away from him. He was building a road when a mine went off near two friends of his. The men were killed instantly, and Santiago saw them die.2 It is hard to know what exactly he saw. Men are blown to pieces by roadside bombs. Some have arms or legs or heads blown off. Men are burned horribly or incinerated on the spot. His aunt would later say that when Esteban came back from Iraq his mind was gone. Post-traumatic stress disorder is a term that would come now to define Esteban Santiago. He would still have his military ID when he was arrested.