The Fort Lauderdale Airport massacre is over.
There are 5 dead and 8 injured. The apparent gunperson, estaban santiago, is in custody.
Why did santiago do it? Why did he load the gun – which he legally owned, legally checked in, and had just retrieved from the airline – and then start randomly shooting people in the head?
Witnesses are telling us there was no outburst, no argument, nothing of that sort; he just calmly loaded and started firing.
Was this an act of terrorism? Was santiago a radicalized jihadist or jihad sympathizer? There is at least some evidence to that effect: it is being reported that he walked into FBI offices months ago and told them the CIA was instructing him to fight for ISIS. Also, there is a picture of him wearing the green military garb generally associated with, among others, Palestinian Arab jihadists.
On the other hand, santiago was a former United States soldier, honorably discharged, who has been described as “pro-American”. And, in the last year, he has behaved more and more irrationally – e.g. he has continually been in and out of trouble with the law, for things having nothing to do with terrorism…which could mean that he went off the deep end, therefore his invocation of ISIS was purely incidental; he might as easily have invoked space invaders from another solar system.
We, of course, do not yet have answers to any of these questions. Maybe we never will.
So let’s be smart about this, and not try to make judgments until we have as complete an understanding of what happened in Fort Lauderdale as we can.
But if we’re asking questions, how about starting with why, if santiago actually did go into an FBI office and say he was being instructed to fight for ISIS, his status as a legal gun owner was not immediately reversed and his gun(s) confiscated. And why he was not put on a no-fly list.
I want to know the answers to those two questions. Don’t you?
Pete Williams of NBC reported that the shooter, whose roots are in Puerto Rico, served in Iraq and returned mentally unstable.
The accused shooter had prior contact with the criminal justice system in Alaska after that; court documents show he was accused of trying to strangle his girlfriend but was given a deferred prosecution agreement.
CNN said there is evidence he was not “performing to standard” in the National Guard toward the end of his service, which took place in Alaska.
“Santiago was discharged in August for unsatisfactory performance,” reported CNN, which added that one of his medals was a combat action badge.
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