Eight hours of chaos enveloped a Durango family that was waiting at the Fort Lauderdale airport Friday for a flight home.
Dr. Rich Lawton, his wife, Sue, and their three children, Julia, 22, Sarah, 19, and Joe, 17, were in Terminal Two to catch a flight home from a Caribbean cruise when gunshots were fired near the baggage claim just below where they were sitting.
Esteban Santiago of Anchorage, Alaska, had opened fire, killing five people and wounding eight others in less than two minutes before he ran out of ammunition and was arrested.
“When the gun shots started happening, everybody started running and screaming,” Sue Lawton said.
The family hid behind seats at their gate until Delta Air Lines staff members opened Gate 9 and people shouted at them to run onto the tarmac, she said.
Sue and her three kids ran out the gate, but Rich Lawton hunkered down near their luggage.
“I looked around and my family was gone,” he said.
Rich was in touch with his family by cellphone in a few minutes, but hours of chaos came after the shooting, which occurred just before 1 p.m. It was about 9 p.m. before they were reunited at Port Everglades, where stranded travelers were taken.
Once on the tarmac, Sue and her children heard several false alarms of more shooters and ran several times across the tarmac. Although Santiago was apprehended immediately, it was unclear for some time whether there was more than one shooter.
“It was a mess. It was chaos. It is just a perfect example of how panic and herd mentality just feed into each other,” Joe said. One person would start running and it would snowball, he said.
Different people within the same agencies told the crowd different things, and the four Lawtons outside didn’t feel safe for hours.
“We didn’t know what was real and what was fake,” Sarah said.
They didn’t know who was in charge, and they didn’t know where to go, she said.
The four ended up waiting at a private hangar, where things were calmer, until buses came to take them to Port Everglades.
Rich Lawton, who stayed in Terminal Two, headed toward the baggage claim after the shooting stopped to see if he could help anyone who was injured, he said.
An officer had him wait on standby until it was clear his medical services weren’t needed, and then he went back to the gate.
There was some anxiety in the terminal in the aftermath, but there were lots of armed officers in that area.
“We felt pretty safe there,” he said.
He also was eventually bused to Port Everglades.
The family returned home Saturday on a flight from Orlando International Airport. All but Julia came home to Durango; she returned to her home in Colorado Springs.
Rich’s parents and some other family members also were in the Fort Lauderdale airport after returning from the cruise, but they were not in Terminal Two. They eventually also got home safely.
After the harrowing experience, Sarah said shootings in unsecured areas such as baggage claims may not be preventable, but airports should be better prepared to handle them.
“I think there needs to be a more stable and more concrete protocol that they should follow because it was just utter chaos,” she said.
mshinn@durangoherald.com
