A man armed with what police say was an assault rifle and carrying materials expressing anti-government sentiment opened fire Friday morning at Los Angeles International Airport, killing one person before being chased down himself, authorities said.
Eyewitnesses said the suspect asked people, “Hey, are you TSA?” — the acronym for the Transportation Security Administration — according to a federal law enforcement official. If they said “no,” he would move on.
In the aftermath of the shooting, investigators found information on the suspect expressing not just anti-federal government sentiment but also anger at the TSA specifically, according to the federal law enforcement official.
By then, a TSA officer was dead — the first employee of that relatively new agency to be killed in the line of duty, according to American Federation of Government Employees president J. David Cox. At least one other TSA employee had been shot in the leg, according to a former Los Angeles Police Department ranking officer who was briefed by investigators.
The suspected gunman himself was detained after being shot in the chest multiple times, according to an intelligence source briefed by Los Angeles police.
He was identified later by the FBI as Paul Anthony Ciancia, a 23-year-old from Los Angeles. Law enforcement sources told CNN that, in addition to the southern California city, the suspect also had an address in New Jersey.
Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center said that, hours after the incident, it received three male victims — one in critical condition and two in fair condition. One of the two in fair condition suffered gunshot wounds, another suffered an unspecified injury, said Dr. Lynne McCullough, an emergency physician at the Los Angeles hospital.
Two patients were transported to Harbor-UCLA Medical Center in Torrance, said David Klurad, a trauma surgeon there.
One was what Klurad described as a “middle-aged” person with minor injuries from being shot in the shoulder. The other had no signs of life when he arrived at the hospital, the surgeon added. It wasn’t known if this person was the slain TSA officer.
