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Note to the Reader

I did not have access to the victims of the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport shooting. The FBI investigation was ongoing at the time, and the survivors and the wounded were all in various states of recovering. So I have built this book from my personal experience, news reports, history, and the odd bits of information that float around after every shooting. So by the time of publication some of the facts might have changed as the investigation progresses. But the center of the book is unchanged. The experience of going through a shooting is like any rite of passage; you have knowledge you may not want, but it’s there nonetheless.

During the course of writing this book there have been many shootings. The most recent was the Santa Fe High School shooting, where ten were killed. Before that was Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, with seventeen dead. The most horrific, of course, was the Las Vegas Harvest Music Festival with 58 dead and 851 wounded. A congressional Republican base-ball game was attacked by a man with a rifle, and a bomb blew up at an Ariana Grande concert killing twenty-two people. And, of course, there will be more before publication. But I know how the survivors feel. Shootings and bombings have the same footprint of carnage, death, shock, stampeding people, and then a lingering feeling of being changed forever. It is a club you never want to be in, but once you are in it you never view the world in the same way.

I did use secondary sources to buttress this book, but the issues of guns and gun control are changing so constantly that books are out of date soon after they are published. Sadly, I have had to add four recent shootings before this book went to press. And statistics do not tell the tale of the dead, the wounded, and the scarred that shootings leave behind. Only people can tell that tale. Which leaves personal experience, intuition, and a smidge of history.

The best I can say is that I was there, and this is what I saw and felt on January 6, 2017.


Prologue

On January 6, 2017, my family was returning from a cruise in the Bahamas. My book Madame President: The Secret Presidency of Edith Wilson had been out for a few months, and this was a celebratory vacation for my family and me. We had a layover in Fort Lauderdale– Hollywood International Airport and we weren’t due to catch a flight until 7:45 p.m. We settled in for a seven-hour wait and parked ourselves in the main United Terminal. It was noon and hot, and we were tired from too much food, with that lazy languor that is a hangover from any vacation. I was there with my wife, two daughters, and son. We were talking about getting something to eat. I heard sirens, turned toward where they were coming from, and then, in the blink of an eye, our lives changed forever.

The Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport would be shut down for twenty-four hours by what authorities would later say was a lone gunman who took five lives and wounded six more people. Ten thousand people would be trapped in the airport for ten hours, leaving 25,000 pieces of luggage behind. It would take thirty-five buses driving continuous loops to the Everglades International Port all night to evacuate the airport. Planes trapped on the tarmac unable to unload passen-gers would eventually take off again for other airports. Planes in the air were routed away. People running on the tarmac would be out there with these stranded planes, and some people would be taken on board. The airport would be an active situation for over twelve hours, with gunshots heard after the original shooting. It was another random violent senseless act that is peculiarly American.

This is a book about the Fort Lauderdale–Hollywood International Airport shooting, told from my perspective of having been there with my wife and children. But it is also about a prototype of American shootings, showing the interplay of victims, police, media, history, the shooter, and what constitutes this uniquely American form of violence. And it is also about the weaponization of returning war veterans, the failure of police and the FBI to stop this troubled young man who approached them and said point-blank that he was hearing voices telling him to kill others. The incredible fact that his weapon was taken and then given back to him, and that this was the very gun that would kill five people and wound six others and shut down a major airport in the United States, is mindboggling. The same gun that was checked through as a legal firearm and then delivered to the killer in the baggage claim, where he would stroll into a bathroom, load the Walther 9mm, and then return to start his murderous rampage.

And this is a book about questions. Why wasn’t Terminal 1 locked down when the shooting began? Why did my family and I and hundreds of others run from gunshots after the initial shooting? Why the rush to declare only a single killer was involved? Many witnesses, including myself, say there were two gunmen, with multiple shots fired. But the real question is, where does this violence come from? Why is America the home of mass killers who have come to haunt us? Why do we have 5 percent of the world’s population and 30 percent of the mass shootings? Why, since 1949, have over one thousand people died in mass shootings in our country?

These are the questions that are generated after every American mass shooting, and the answers are never enough. But, even saying that, we still have to try.