LAX shooter planned to murder ‘multiple agents’
Print Edition
The gunman who allegedly killed a security officer at Los Angeles airport carried a note saying he planned to murder “multiple” agents, prosecutors said as they announced charges against him.
A prosecutor on Saturday told how Paul Ciancia allegedly opened fire at “point-blank range” on Gerardo Hernandez, the first Transportation Security Agency agent killed since the office was created after the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.
Ciancia, who used a Smith and Wesson assault rifle and a large stock of ammunition in the attack, faces a possible death penalty on charges of murdering a federal officer and committing violence at an international airport.
The gun rampage on Friday triggered chaos at LA international (LAX) airport, disrupting more than 1,500 flights. The airport only fully reopened more than 24 hours later.
Describing how the shooting started, a prosecutor said Ciancia pulled a “.223-caliber M and P-15 assault rifle out of his bag and fired multiple rounds at point-blank range” at Hernandez, 39, shortly after 9:00am in LAX’s Terminal 3.
The shots wounded the unarmed TSA officer but did not kill him.
The 23-year-old gunman, dressed in black and wearing a bullet-proof vest, then went up a nearby escalator but came back down to “shoot the wounded officer again,” said US Attorney Andre Birotte.
Wounded in gunfire
Ciancia then proceeded further into the terminal, shooting four more people including two other TSA officers, before being wounded in a gunfight with airport police and arrested.
The alleged gunman, who remains in hospital and has not yet answered questions from investigators, carried a note in his bag indicating “he targeted especially TSA officers,” for whom he felt “anger and malice.”
The handwritten note, found in a bag taken into the airport, showed that he “made a conscious decision to kill multiple TSA employees,” said David Bowdich, the head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office.
“In the note that was handwritten by the defendant, that was signed by the defendant, we found a statement where he made a conscious decision to kill multiple TSA employees,” said Bowdich.
“He addressed them at one point in the letter, and stated that he wanted to ‘instill fear into their traitorous (sic) minds.’”
The handwritten letter resembled a suicide note, an unnamed law enforcement official told the Los Angeles Times. The note also said Ciancia did not want to hurt anyone “innocent,” just TSA agents, the paper said.
The agent killed was a father of two who immigrated to Los Angeles from El Salvador when he was 15, his widow Ana Hernandez told reporters.
She described her late husband as “a joyful person, always smiling” and someone who “took pride in his duty to the American public.”
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