Five years ago Thursday, Los Angeles International Airport’s Terminal 3 became a “war zone.”
A 23-year-old anti-government extremist with a grudge against the Transportation Security Administration opened fire, killing TSA Officer Gerardo Hernandez of Porter Ranch and wounding two other TSA employees and an airline passenger.
Paul Ciancia of Sun Valley was quickly shot and apprehended by Los Angeles Airport Police. But those several minutes of terror exposed security and response deficiencies that LAX officials say they’ve worked hard during the last five years to address.
On that sunny autumn day, Ciancia entered the busy terminal at about 9:18 a.m. Within two minutes, he approached 39-year-old Hernandez, who was checking boarding passes at the base of an escalator, according to airport documents. Ciancia began firing a semi-automatic weapon at him “at point blank range.”
Some nearby TSA employees and passengers took cover. Others fled the area.
Ciancia started to ascend the escalator, paused and then returned to the checkpoint on the ground floor and continued shooting Hernandez, who was still moving, at point-blank range.
Ciancia then got back on the escalator to head to the screening checkpoint upstairs, where most people had already evacuated. There, he shot and wounded two other TSA officers – one in the leg and the other in the ear – who were helping an elderly man retrieve his shoes and other belongings, said Officer Rob Pedregon, public information officer for Los Angeles Airport Police. Pedregon was also among the six officers who ran toward the gunman, wounding and apprehending him.
A short time later, Ciancia wounded an airline passenger, who was able to then crawl into a store for safety.
At 9:19 a.m., a call was made from a “red phone” — likely by a TSA employee — that rings directly to Airport Police. The dispatcher heard shots ring out but there was no way to know at the time who made the call or where it came from.
At 9:20 a.m., a nearby airport employee, who happened to have the Airport Police dispatch number in his cell phone, called the agency to inform them of the shooting. (Emergency 911 calls made from cell phones at LAX go directly to either the LAPD or the California Highway Patrol and then must be relayed to Airport Police.)
The interception of the shooter was “quick and successful” due to this “sharp” airport employee who “knew who to call and what to say,” according to an after-action-report by Los Angeles World Airports, which owns and operates LAX for the city of Los Angeles.
The employee’s call allowed the Airport Police dispatcher to calmly inform and guide responding officers “to prevent further tragedy,” the 2014 report found.
Pedregon, then a patrol officer, recalled entering Terminal 3 amid heavy smoke, alarm bells and the strong smell of gunpowder in the air. When Pedregon and another officer ran up the escalator and joined their colleagues upstairs, they saw clothes, shoes and personal belongings “strewn everywhere.”
After the sergeant there gave a signal, the six of them went into a diamond formation and started searching the hallway and the concourse area where the gunman had walked through shortly before.
“It was like no words were spoken,” Pedregon said, adding they had just had an active-shooter drill a few weeks prior at the Ontario airport.
The officers exchanged gunfire with Ciancia from about 30 yards away. He was shot several times and wounded. No police officers were injured “by the will of God,” Pedregon said.
Since that day, numerous changes have been made at the airport to improve security, response and communication, according to airport officials. Among them, the “red phones” that employees use to dial directly to dispatch now indicate from where a call originated.
There also are more of these phones inside the terminals, along with panic buttons for employees to use in case of emergency, said David L. Maggard, Jr., chief of Los Angeles Airport Police.
Several hundred new cameras have been added throughout the airport’s central terminal area since Nov. 1, 2013, for better security coverage, Maggard said. There’s also the Airport Response Coordination Center, an around-the-clock coordination hub for airport operations and response activities, which organizes “what is now a remarkably large bank of closed-circuit TV cameras” and includes more personnel.
Overall, Airport Police officials have seen a roughly 20 percent increase in sworn officers deployed to the field compared to five years ago, many of whom are more visible to the public, Maggard said.
Marshall McClain, president of the Los Angeles Airport Peace Officers Association, said he’s concerned that cell phone callers are still not routed directly to Airport Police but instead to the Los Angeles Police Department or the CHP.
He said he has testified before the Los Angeles City Council “about the ridiculousness of the system” well before the 2013 shooting occurred.
However, Maggard said LAPD and CHP transfer 911 calls related to the airport to their dispatch within seconds. The airport also is in the midst of getting a new computer-aided dispatch records management system, which will help them receive incident information from Los Angeles police faster and more comprehensively, the chief said.
Airport Police and LAPD, which has a substation at LAX, are now able to communicate directly to one another over radio frequencies, something that was not possible before the 2013 shooting due to logistical issues, officials said.
Members of the public can now text 67911 from LAX to reach Airport Police if they can’t dial 911 or speak to an operator in an emergency, Pedregon added.
The airport is also in the midst of designing a new police station on 12.5 acres to consolidate some eight different sites the department currently uses.
It will “bring us all together to create a sense of synergy among the many, many people who work here and protect the airport,” Maggard said.
Patrick Gannon, LAWA’s deputy executive director of public safety and security and the airport’s police chief at the time of the shooting, noted that the airport’s public address systems are now linked together to better communicate to passengers during a crisis. Previously, each terminal had its own independent system. The airport has also partnered with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and can send emergency wireless alerts to cell phones users in the vicinity much like Amber alerts.
What happened at LAX five years ago can happen again at any airport across the country, though airports are usually more difficult targets because of enhanced security and overall awareness, noted Erroll Southers, a transportation security expert who previously worked as an assistant chief of police for LAWA.
The majority of terror plots – not just at airports but overall – are thwarted due to citizens who see something and say something to authorities, he said.
Adversaries who target airports, however, generally understand their probability of success when it comes to the potential number of casualties, disruption of operations and financial impact.
“If I want to demonstrate that the government doesn’t have the capacity or ability to protect you, I would attack what you deem to be your hardest target,” Southers said.
