Samantha Brown’s flight from San Diego to Dallas was just starting to board Monday when crews halted passengers due to an unfolding incident at Dallas Love Field.
Brown, returning from Comic-Con International with her husband, was among the thousands of passengers waylaid as the airport was closed for most of seven hours after a woman fired shots into the ceiling near the Southwest Airlines ticket desk and was quickly shot by a Dallas police officer on site.
It made for a hectic stretch where Southwest Airlines had planes arriving and departing all throughout the night, a major change of pace at an airport that usually closes at 11 p.m. and reopens around 6 a.m. the next day.
Brown’s flight arrived in Dallas at 2:17 a.m., and with the two hours to get bags and drive back to Little Elm, it was after 4 a.m. when they got home.
“My dad was in town watching our kids and he got a late start heading back to Mississippi because he took our kids to their summer school program to let us sleep a little longer,” Brown said Tuesday. “I ended up asking my boss if I could stay home so I could get some extra shut-eye.”
After nearly a third of Love Field’s flights were canceled Monday, operations bounced back to mostly normal by Tuesday. Only seven flights were canceled by midday, less than 2% of flights, and about 22% were delayed, normal for the airline and the airport, according to Flightaware.com.
The entire airport was open, though with a noticeably increased police presence. That included areas near ticketing where the woman, identified as 37-year-old Portia Odufuwa, went on a threatening rant to passengers and employees before brandishing a pistol, firing several shots into the ceiling and toward a nearby officer who intervened. Within seconds, Dallas Officer Ronald Cronin shot Odufuwa, the only injury during the incident. Police Chief Eddie García said she was in stable condition following surgery.
“For us, after the safety of our customers and employees was confirmed, it was a standard irregular operations event much like weather,” Southwest Airlines spokesman Chris Perry said in an email. “Once we were able to resume normal operations at DAL yesterday evening, we started the standard process of rebooking customers affected by the cancellations and operated as many flights as we could with the crew availability we had at DAL.”
In addition to the 90 flights canceled Monday at Love Field, Southwest canceled 16 more flights nationwide due to the disruption from the shooting and bad weather in the Northeast.
It was a significant fraction of the 366 flights a day in and out of the airport by Dallas-based Southwest and Atlanta-based carrier Delta Air Lines.
The airport was crowded Tuesday morning with passengers with rebooked flights looking for ways to continue their postponed travel plans. The Southwest kiosk shot by both the responding officer and the suspect had been removed and physical signs of the incident were gone.
Serina Davenport was at the airport Tuesday afternoon to pick up her son, who was returning from a trip to Chicago.
Davenport learned of the shooting when she went to check on her son’s flight Monday.
“I was nervous, very scared because I didn’t know how it was going to impact my son returning back to Dallas today.”
Davenport arrived earlier Tuesday because she thought there might be delays entering the airport because of security, but everything went smoothly.
“When we first walked in, we saw security at the door,” Davenport said. “I feel fine today. I’m not nervous at all.”
Jeremy Caldwell, who is from Dallas, said he hadn’t heard about the shooting. He was waiting for his bags Tuesday and saw a flight advisory Monday, which may have been due to the shooting, but didn’t specify what it was for. During his flight and check-in, Caldwell didn’t hear anything about it.
“Not that I consider it necessary,” Caldwell said. “But, I mean, it might be nice to know.”
Caldwell said he feels desensitized to shootings.
“It’s terrible, but I’m not surprised at all,” he said.
Ellen and Dawson Vosburg were on the way to the airport Monday when they got a text saying their direct flight back home to Columbus, Ohio, had been canceled.
They were at the airport Tuesday morning for a new flight that was “not very direct,” with a whole day of travel planned, Ellen Vosburg said.
“I was a little worried that security would be a little crazier coming in, just from there being more people here and the added sort of fear, but it doesn’t seem any different than usual,” she said.
Dawson Vosburg said rebooking the flight with Southwest was quick and straightforward but “most of the time was spent agonizing over the bad options.”
He said he was glad the shooter didn’t hurt anyone, but there’s a sense of “futility,” noting that the Sandy Hook shooting was about a decade ago.
Ellen Vosburg said the incident at the airport feels “par for the course in our country these days,” but she didn’t feel much anxiety arriving at the airport Tuesday.
“In fact, I was a little surprised that things seemed to be running pretty normally, at least on this side of things,” she said.
