Auburn student Calen Santos was on the phone with his mom, sitting in Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport on Friday afternoon when he looked over his shoulder and saw the gunman.
"I heard a scream, and I turned and looked over my shoulder," Santos said. "I saw him. I saw him and then I saw the gun. I just fell to the ground. People were running and screaming, but I just fell to the ground."
Santos was waiting on his plane at the airport just north of Miami, getting ready for his flight back to school at Auburn when the shooting began, he said. He was sitting at his gate in Terminal 2 when he heard a woman behind him say there was an active shooter at the airport.
"I googled Fort Lauderdale Airport and that was the first thing that came up," he said. "I looked behind me and saw on CNN that it said 'active shooter at Fort Lauderdale Airport."
He said, at the time, he thought the shooter must have been somewhere else in the large international airport because everything seemed normal where he was.
"At the time, I just thought he had to be in a different terminal," Santos said. "I didn't really worry about it, and I just didn't think anything of it. A few seconds later, I called my mom and told her that I had read on the news that there was a shooter. I told her I was fine."
As soon as he told his mom that he was safe, he heard the scream, saw the gunman, hit the floor and heard a shot. Santos said he covered his head with a backpack and stayed on the phone with his mom.
"I just said, 'I love you. I love you. I love you so much," Santos said, but when the words came out of his mouth his phone disconnected, cutting him off from his mother. He was in an airport, by himself, hundreds of miles from his mom and miles from his dad, who lives in Miami.
"The shooter was probably 30 or 40 feet from me, and I thought for sure that I was going to die," he said. "He was just so close to me, and I was so close to him. I just thought he was going to shoot me."
Santos wasn't completely alone, though. A man, Mike DiSanti, and his wife Mary, helped Santos get out of the airport alive. He credits the two strangers, and God, with risking their lives to get him safely out of the airport.
"As I'm laying there, this man picked me up by my arm," Santos said. "He picked me up, and his wife, who I was laying on the ground with, and said 'Come on.' But when he was reaching to help me up, these people came by and trampled him."
Mike suffered a broken rib as a result of the trampling, but it didn't stop him from helping Santos and Mary get out of the airport.
"It broke his rib, but he still picked us up, and we ran," Santos said.
The three made it down their gate's jet bridge, down a flight of stairs and onto the airport's concrete tarmac, along with hundreds of other people trying to escape the madness that ensued inside the airport.
"We went outside, and we were all standing there," he said. "I thought everything was okay, so I called my mom again. I told her I was okay, but after that, I guess they didn't get him or something."
Confusion and chaos reigned at the airport for several hours, even after authorities told news media that they had caught the man, Esteban Santiago, who is accused of opening fire at the Florida airport, killing five people and leaving six others with gunshot wounds.
Once they made it outside, Santos said he felt safer, but it still wasn't calm. He said at the time he thought maybe the shooter had gotten loose or that there had been multiple assailants. He didn't know because no one was telling them anything, he said.
"Whenever I got out of the airport is when I felt the safest," he said. "They moved us behind a building, and there were at least 300 of us standing against this building. No one was telling us anything. We thought there were multiple shooters because of the timespan that it lasted."
It wasn't until later that authorities started telling Santos and the others where to go, and he wasn't allowed to leave the chaotic airport until almost 8 p.m. For almost six hours after the shooting, Santos and others waited outside the airport near a building workers were using for construction on one of the airport's terminals.
When he was finally allowed to leave, Santos found his way to a mall to try to find a place to charge his phone. He stayed at an Apple Store nearby until his dad came and picked him up. Later, he got to talk to his mom again.
"My mom, she was so distraught, because she was on the phone with me when it was all going down," he said. "She was so terrified, and I thought she was going to have a heart attack because she was so scared. Her voice was like sheer terror."
All parents have a fear of mass shootings or terrorist attacks, Santos said, but this was a worst-case scenario.
"She was mortified, and was just so scared because I was hundreds of miles away, and there was nothing she could do about it," he said. "There was somebody that was trying to kill people. It was one of the worst things that could happen, an airport shooting, and I was involved in that."
Santos, a sophomore in public relations, was planning to be back in Auburn by Friday afternoon, but he won't be able to fly back until Sunday, which is the next time he could book a flight. But before he can do that, he has to track down the bags and his other belongings he left in the airport.
For some, walking back into the place where such a traumatic event occurred could be terrifying, but Santos said he isn't too worried.
"I’m not scared really," he said. "I don’t think I should live in fear. I feel like I may have a little anxiety whenever I walk in, but I think I’m going to be fine.”
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