The gunman who killed five people at Fort Lauderdale airport on Friday had extended contact with police near his Alaska home, officials said on Saturday afternoon, adding that the Iraq war veteran was taken to a mental health facility after he made claims about mind control.
Esteban Santiago, 26, was held at the Broward County jail and was charged with an act of violence at an international airport resulting in death. The charges could carry a death sentence or up to life in prison. Prosecutors also charged Santiago with two firearms offenses.
In a separate briefing in Anchorage, Alaska, police chief Christopher Tolley said officers had been called about several disturbances involving Santiago dating back to February 2016.
In August, officers were called to his home but had no cause for arrest, Tolley said. In October they were called about allegations of strangulation and domestic violence, but again “no probable cause was established for arrest”.
On 7 November, Tolley said, Santiago arrived at the Anchorage police station to tell officers he was “having terroristic thoughts and believed he was being influenced by Isis”.
He also spoke about manipulation by an “intelligence agency”, Tolley said, and had a loaded magazine on his person. He left a firearm in his car, along with his newborn child.
Tolley said police called the FBI, which found no links to terrorism, and that Santiago was admitted into a mental health facility. On 8 December, by which point Santiago was outside the facility, his weapon was released back to him.
Tolley said police do not know if the gun was the one used in Friday’s attack, and that prosecutors have subpoenaed the facility for Santiago’s mental health records.
Santiago’s aunt, Maria Ruiz Rivera, was one of a number of family members who told reporters her nephew had “changed” after returning from Iraq, where he served as a national guardsman in 2011 and after which, FBI agent George Piro said, he received extensive psychological treatment.
“He had visions all the time,” Ruiz Rivera said from her home in Union City, New Jersey. “His mind was not right. He seemed normal at times but other times he seemed lost.”
Santiago’s brother, Bryan Santiago, told the Associated Press on Saturday: “The FBI failed there ... we’re not talking about someone who emerged from anonymity to do something like this.
“The federal government already knew about this for months, they had been evaluating him for a while, but they didn’t do anything.”
At the Alaska briefing Karen Loeffler, US attorney for the state, defended law enforcement decisions not to arrest Santiago, withhold his weapon or bar him from boarding a plane.
“This is not somebody would’ve been prohibited based on information that they had,” she said. “We’re a country of laws and we operate within them.”
At an earlier briefing in south Florida, Piro refused to rule out terrorism as a possible motive. He said Santiago “was cooperative” during an hours-long interview and maintained that it was too early to establish the motive.
“The indications are he came here to carry out this horrific attack,” Piro said. “We have not identified any triggers that would have caused this attack but it’s very early in the investigation.
“We continue to look at all angles and motives and at this point we are continuing to look at the terrorism angle. We have not ruled anything out.”
Santiago’s mental issues would continue to be a focal point of the investigation, which was being carried out jointly by the FBI and detectives from the Broward sheriff’s office (BSO), Piro said.
Santiago, who has a girlfriend and four-month old baby in Alaska, flew to Fort Lauderdale from Anchorage via Minneapolis, and appeared to have acted alone. Piro said the suspect used a legally held 9mm semiautomatic handgun, which had been checked on to the flight in accordance with security requirements.
Piro said investigators had spoken to all of Santiago’s family members identified so far and had reviewed airport security footage and conducted about 175 witness interviews “in numerous locations not only in South Florida”.
“We’re looking not only at all the places he has resided but also the places he has travelled,” he said.
Scott Israel, the Broward County sheriff, downgraded the number of wounded from eight to six. Of the gunshot victims, he said, three were in “good” condition and three remained in intensive care.
Meanwhile, several witnesses spoke of escaping the attack, including one man who said his life was saved by a laptop in his backpack.
Steve Frappier, from Atlanta, Georgia, said he was trying to shelter on the floor of the baggage hall “like a tortoise with the backpack on me” when he felt something hit him. “The bullet entered my backpack [and] hit my laptop,” he told CNN.
“It hit through the open backpack, exited, ran through the laptop and the casing and landed in an interior pocket.” He showed photographs of his shattered laptop and said the FBI had found the bullet in a pocket when they examined it.
A woman from Weston, Florida, who asked not to be named, said the shooter walked around the baggage carousel while he was firing. “He was just walking with his arms straight out, stone-faced,” she said. A female passenger standing next to her, she said, was shot in the head and killed.
Another witness, Mark Lea, from Minnesota, spoke of helping those who had been shot, including a woman with a shoulder wound who was looking for her husband.
“I saw that she had a through-and-through on the right shoulder, and she said: ‘Where’s my husband, where’s my husband?’” Lea told KETV. “I asked her to describe him and I looked right over there and saw a white-haired guy in a blue shirt. He was not moving, not breathing.”
Authorities have yet to formally identify any of the victims or survivors. Family members named an elderly couple from Council Bluffs, Iowa, as victims of the shooting, saying the husband, Michael Oehme, 57, had died and the wife, Kari, 52, was recovering in hospital with a gunshot wound to her shoulder.
Media reports also identified a 62-year-old grandfather from Virginia and a great-grandmother from Georgia, who was in Fort Lauderdale for a cruise to celebrate her husband’s 90th birthday, among the dead.
Rick Scott, the Florida governor, said at an early morning briefing that he had visited some of the victims of “an absolutely horrific day” at Broward Health medical center.
“We all want answers. Individuals have been killed and some are fighting for their lives,” he said. “I’m a dad and I’m a granddad. I just can’t imagine this happening to my family or any other family.”
Scott promised that the killer would be held responsible “to the fullest extent of the law”, and tried to reassure tourists that Florida was safe.
“We love our tourists and we’ll do everything we can to encourage them to come here,” he said, claiming that crime in the state was at a 45-year low.
The baggage hall in Terminal 2 remained closed, although all other areas of the airport reopened and flights resumed after almost 16 hours. Airport authorities said they were trying to reunite 20,000 bags and personal items, abandoned during the chaos on Friday, with their owners.
The last of thousands of passengers, stranded for hours on planes or the tarmac, and many forced to spend the night at a nearby cruise terminal, were evacuated from the airport by early Saturday.
The Associated Press contributed reporting
