911 calls reveal panic, confusion amid airport shooting scare
Newly released 911 calls from Sunday morning’s chaos at Harry Reid International Airport, sparked by the fear of an active shooter, convey the panic and confusion that spread suddenly through the crowd of travelers, leading to mass flight delays.
“There’s an active shooter at the airport,” one man says in a call to 911 dispatchers in the minutes after the 4:30 a.m. incident.
He added he hadn’t seen anything further because he had been running for “two to three minutes.”
“It was chaos, it was people screaming, falling, gunshots, everything,” the man says.
It turns out there was no active shooter, but travelers didn’t know that at the time.
What did happen, according to the Metropolitan Police Department, was that a man ran through a secured door of Terminal 1. A series of about 10 loud banging noises that sounded like gunshots triggered a wave of panic. The banging noises were actually caused by falling stanchions, or line dividers.
Stefan Hutchison, 33, of Oakland, California, was arrested. His attorney, Michael Troiano, said Hutchison was likely having a mental health episode.
It was the second time in 24 hours that Hutchison had been arrested at the airport.
On Saturday morning, police said Hutchison was arrested after a man walked past two TSA agents at a screening checkpoint, then ran into a Hudson News store and stole a pair of $170 sunglasses before he was arrested.
During the shooting scare, one woman who says she is hiding in a stairwell begins to cry while talking to a 911 dispatcher.
“And how many shots did you hear?” the dispatcher asks the woman, who stops talking. “How many shots did you hear ma’am? Hello?”
“I’m here,” the caller says. “I’m trying to be quiet. I don’t know what’s going on.”
The woman, crying, admits she didn’t hear any shots, but rather, two booms. She said she thought there was a shooter because everybody else thought there was a shooter.
“Everybody was running,” the caller says through sobs. “And we heard something go boom and everybody said there was someone shooting.”
“I just saw the large group and then I saw one of my co-workers, and he informed me there was a possible shooting,” said another caller who identified himself as Transportation Security Administration agent.
“We’re all just kind of scared and freaked out,” a man says in another call. And in the background of his call, a woman says, “Nobody knows what’s going on.”
Contact Brett Clarkson at bclarkson@reviewjournal.com or 561-324-6421. Follow @BrettClarkson_ on Twitter.
