A gunman opened fire inside the baggage claim area at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Friday afternoon, killing five people and wounding at least eight others, authorities said.
The shooter, who has been taken into custody, was identified as Esteban Santiago, 26, of New Jersey, Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) told MSNBC. Santiago was carrying a military ID and a handgun during the airport rampage.
About 90 minutes after the first attack, there were unconfirmed reports of another shooter inside a parking garage at the airport.
The TSA told passengers on Twitter to “shelter in place.” Witnesses said police rushed into the parking garage as Terminal 1 was being evacuated.
An unnamed witness told MSNBC the gunman was wearing a Star Wars T-shirt and appeared to be a man in his 20s.
The shooter randomly fired at people, going through three magazines of bullets without uttering a word, according to observers. He finally stopped shooting when he ran out of ammunition, then spreadeagled on the floor and waited for cops to show up, witness Mark Lea said.
“At first we thought it was firecrackers,” Lea, 53, told MSNBC. “Everyone started screaming and running. The shooter made his way down through baggage claim. He had what looked like a 9mm and emptied his entire clip. People were trying to run.”
Another witness, John Schlicher, said the slender gunman was spraying bullets just feet away from him.
“I put my head down and prayed,” the man told MSNBC.
Schlicher’s wife held a sweater up to one wounded man who was bleeding from the head.
“She was doing her best to apply pressure to his wounds,” he explained. “The person right next to him was already gone.”
The airport tweeted about 1:15 p.m. that there was “an ongoing incident in Terminal 2, Baggage Claim.”
A gruesome video posted on Twitter showed a wounded person lying next to a baggage carousel with blood streaming from his head.
Twitter users reported being returned to planes amid the chaos.
“Shots have been fired. Everyone is running,” ex-White House press secretary Ari Fleischer tweeted.
Another user tweeted out a grisly image that appeared to show a man bleeding on the sidewalk outside the terminal.
Gene Messina said he was waiting for friends at the airport around 12:50 p.m. when the gunman opened fire.
“All of a sudden I heard screaming and running, people coming from security, yelling, ‘He as a gun, he has a gun!,’” Messina told the Sun Sentinel.