Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Heroes jumped in to save lives as bullets flew
As bullets whizzed through Terminal 2 Friday, Annika Dean dropped to the floor.
She lay there wondering if her two sons would grow up without a mother when a man she didn’t know put his body between her and the shooter. Her protector was Tony Bartosiewicz, a retired electrician from Rochester, N.Y. Neither was hit.
“He shielded me. He basically climbed on top of me and whispered, ‘I will protect you,’” said the Broward County art teacher. “I knew he might be a victim, but I also knew I would survive.”
As the shooting unfolded at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport, there were acts of courage and resourcefulness through which travelers helped each other and saved their own lives.
Arrested at the scene was Esteban Santiago, 26, who will face federal charges and a possible death penalty in the shooting that left five dead and six wounded.
Bartosiewicz’s daughter, Jenny Miller of Denver, said her father, who saved her from drowning in a pool when she was a little girl, has
always been selfless.
“That’s the kind of person he is,” she said. “He would do something like this without thinking.”
Mark Lea, of Elk River, Minn., escaped the terminal with his wife during the shooting, which took place just before 1 p.m. Then he made a decision few would make: He went back in.
“I thought there were people inside who needed assistance. I just did what was right,” said Lea, vice president of the Minnesota Patriot Guard, a volunteer group that provides escorts for police officers’ and veterans’ funerals.
Lea and his wife were in town for a cruise of the Caribbean to celebrate their first anniversary. The couple had just arrived at the luggage carousel when Lea said he heard “bang, bang, bang.”
He thought it was firecrackers. Turning, he saw Santiago.
“He wasn’t targeting anyone, wasn’t yelling or screaming,” said Lea, 53, a financial planner. Within seconds, travelers began ducking behind furniture or running, Lea said. He rushed his wife, Kari, outside — then went back into the terminal without her.
Lea said he moved toward the carousel as Santiago dropped his gun and lay down spread-eagle on the floor. People were screaming and crying, he said. Some were bleeding profusely. He saw a man shot in the wrist with two young boys huddled next to him.
The area was filled with smoke and smelled like gunpowder, Lea said. He moved from person to person, making sure someone was with the wounded.
In a few seconds, he came across Kari Oehme, of Council Bluffs, Iowa, collapsed on the carpet next to a row of chairs and bleeding heavily. Lea said he saw a white-haired man in a blue shirt nearby, lying still on his stomach but clearly shot in the face.
Lea said he realized the motionless man was Oehmn’s husband, Michael. “She kept asking, ‘Where is my husband, where is my husband?,’” he said.
The entire drama unfolded in less than a minute, Lea said.
Amid the chaos of the evacuation of the airport, David Laquerre, 46, of Ottawa, was going up an escalator behind a man carrying three bags and a baby. The baby slipped out of a shirt and started tumbling down.
Laquerre and law enforcement officers were running up the escalator when Laquerre grabbed the baby and got the child back to the man, he said.
“The good news is I got a little high five from a guy who was fully locked and loaded,” he said. “Nothing happened to the baby, which was nice.”
In some cases, survival depended on split second decisions.
After Ruthie Bellman picked up a piece of luggage near the baggage claim area, she looked up and saw the gunman pointing his weapon in her direction.
“I was right up against the wall,” she said. “I couldn’t run anywhere. I was just praying to Jesus to protect me, my daughter and all of us there. Basically I just dropped to the floor and covered my head with a backpack.”
The woman standing right next to her was shot in the head and most likely died, Bellman said. That’s the spot Bellman’s daughter would have been had she not gone to Starbuck’s, Bellman said.
The mother and daughter boarded the cruise Saturday afternoon and hope to have a good time despite Friday’s horror.
Bellman, an assistant to the director of a regional library system in Virginia, said she received training to prepare for a possible gunman and used it Friday.
“If you can run, you run. If you can’t, you get down. The other thing is to stay calm,” she said. “I would suggest everyone take active shooter training. It definitely helped.”
After hearing two shots, Chenet Nerette, 52, a radio broadcaster from Atlanta, looked to his left and saw the gunman firing off rounds, a calm look on his face. Nerette hit the floor. Then he got up and ran out a door. As he ran, he began to feel in his torso.
After reaching his hotel, a pain in his chest wouldn’t go away. After a phone call with his wife, who insisted he get it checked out, he went to the hospital where he learned he had broken several ribs.
Dwayne Dickerson, a Fort Lauderdale lawyer, was upstairs at the Delta airlines ticket counter when he heard gunshots. But because he couldn’t see Santiago, who was downstairs in baggage claim, Dickerson didn’t know if he should hide or run — and if he ran, in what direction.
He jumped over the ticket counter, grabbed the ticket agent’s hand and asked her what was the fastest way out.
“But she was just frozen,” he said. Looking to the right, he saw two doors being opened by other passengers and ran over, thinking it was an exit. It was a supply closet about the size of a average bathroom.
“We all had to make a decision. Was it safer to go into a place where there was one way in and one way out? Or to run back into the terminal?,” said Dickerson, 38.
About 30 or 40 people, including Dickerson, piled in and shut the door. Dickerson said he immediately texted his mother and brother: Shooting at airport. I am hiding. I love you guys.
“If for some reason I didn’t made it out, I wanted them to know I loved them,” he said.