Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Airport shooter ‘wasn’t really thinking about it’
Esteban Santiago struggled to explain Wednesday what caused him to kill five people and injure six others in the January 2017 mass shooting at Fort Lauderdale’s main airport.
“Umm, I don’t know. I wasn’t really thinking about it at the moment. A lot of things were going on in my mind. Messages,” Santiago said.
The mentally ill former Army reservist didn’t elaborate but seemed to be referring to psychotic symptoms of his schizophrenia diagnosis.
Santiago was found legally competent to plead guilty after he was examined by a mental health expert.
The Iraq war veteran spoke haltingly as he tried to answer the key question from U.S. District Judge Beth Bloom, posed after he pleaded guilty to 11 charges.
“Why did you do what you did?” the judge asked Santiago during the hearing in federal court in Miami.
Santiago, 28, knows what he did and has expressed remorse, according to his defense team and psychologist Heather Holmes, who found him legally competent.
Since a change in medication stabilized his condition, Santiago has been spending his time in the Federal Detention Center in Miami reading the Harry Potter series of books and sometimes listening to NPR, Holmes testified.
Santiago is allowed to phone his mother about every two weeks to
hear family news, including updates on his toddler son who lives with the child’s mother in Alaska, Holmes told the judge.
Santiago, who had his hair pulled back in a ponytail and wore dark-rimmed glasses in court, answered most of the judge’s questions with a “yes” or “no,” occasionally stopping to get clarifcations from his assistant federal public defenders, Eric Cohen and Hector Dopico.
Santiago wore beige and brown jail scrubs and was handcuffed with a metal chain around his waist. As he was led out of the courtroom, he called out “I love you” in Spanish to his sister and her family who flew from Puerto Rico to attend the hearing. Santiago is a U.S. citizen who was born in New Jersey and grew up in Puerto Rico.
Federal prosecutors have agreed not to seek the death penalty under the terms of the plea agreement Santiago signed. Instead, he is expected to be sentenced to five life terms plus 120 years on Aug. 17, if the judge signs off on all of the conditions of the agreement between the prosecution and defense.
In the unlikely event that the judge does not accept the plea agreement, Santiago would be allowed to withdraw his guilty pleas and could go to trial. Prosecutors have not ruled out seeking the death penalty if that were to happen.
The judge said she would wait to hear from family members of the victims, and survivors of the attack, before making a final decision on whether to accept his guilty pleas and impose his punishment. Prosecutors Ricardo Del Toro and Lawrence LaVecchio told the judge they consulted with the victims’ relatives and the survivors, who all agreed with the decision to let Santiago plead guilty and spend the rest of his life in federal prison without any chance of ever being released.
Officials from the U.S. Attorney’s Office, the FBI and Broward Sheriff’s Office condemned Santiago’s crimes and welcomed the fact that he was being held liable.
“Today the man responsible for the horrific, devastating, and tragic attack on numerous innocent people at the Fort Lauderdale Airport was held accountable for his crimes,” U.S. Attorney Benjamin Greenberg said. “Although this conviction cannot restore the lives lost or forever changed by his egregious acts of violence, it shows our unwavering and united commitment to seeking justice for the victims.”
Santiago has admitted he fired 15 bullets, aiming at victims’ heads and bodies in the crowded baggage carousel area at lunchtime on Jan. 6, 2017, in Terminal 2 at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport. A total of 11 people were killed or injured.
Santiago took a one-way flight from Anchorage, Alaska, where he lived at the time, to Fort Lauderdale. The only item he checked was a hard-sided firearm case that contained a 9mm handgun and two loaded ammunition clips.
After picking up the weapon from a Delta Airlines employee, he loaded the gun in a restroom and began firing at the first people he encountered as he walked out at 12:52 p.m.
“Santiago pulled out the firearm from his waistband, took aim, and fired several rounds of ammunition at the passengers who were standing in the terminal, aiming at their heads and bodies,” according to the plea agreement. “At one point, Santiago ran out of ammunition and reloaded a second magazine into the firearm. He then fired all the rounds in the second magazine at his victims.”
After the two-minute attack, Santiago ran out of bullets. He lay down on the floor and surrendered to a Broward sheriff’s deputy. Killed in the rampage were: Mary Louise Amzibel, 69; Michael Oehme, 56; Olga Weltering, 84; Shirley Timmons, 70; and Terry Andres, 62.
Four men and two women, identified only by their initials and gender in court records, were seriously injured. Some of them were the spouses of the murder victims. Several of the survivors sustained gunshot wounds to the arm, neck and shoulder.
Timmons’ husband, Steve, “suffered a gunshot wound to the head resulting in the loss of his left eye and the excision [removal] of part of his skull in order to remove damaged brain tissue,” court records show. And Amzibel’s husband, Edward “was shot in the face and required multiple surgeries in order to reconstruct his sinuses, palate and jaw with metal parts.”
Santiago confessed and initially said he was acting under some form of government mind control.
Santiago was briefly hospitalized for psychiatric care in Alaska in November 2016, two months before the shooting.
He had driven to the FBI office in Anchorage, asked for help and told agents he was hearing voices and thought the government was controlling his mind.
In new information revealed Monday, prosecutors said Santiago researched the layout of the Los Angeles International Airport three days before the mass shooting. Authorities did not explain why he used his cellphone to look up a map of the layout of LAX or why he bought a ticket to South Florida that same day.
The defense declined to comment.