Miami Beach Woman Looked Into Eyes of Fort Lauderdale Airport Killer

MIAMI BEACH — Missy Greenberg looked into the steely brown eyes of a killer on Friday and somehow knew that the carnage at Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport was drawing to an end.

“I was laying on the ground. He’s there and he’s got a gun. Like oh my God, oh my God. That’s all I kept repeating was ‘oh my God,’” Greenberg recalled in an interview with Patch late Saturday night from her home in Miami Beach.

She and her King Charles Cavalier Spaniel, Gracie, were huddled on the floor of Terminal 2 outside the Starbucks near baggage carousel 21 when a suspect identified by police as former Iraq War veteran Esteban Santiago Ruiz reentered the airport some 20 feet away. He had already fired his legally packed handgun indiscriminately inside the terminal then walked outside and fired some more.

By his look and demeanor, Greenberg could feel that the man had completed whatever twisted mission brought him from the harsh winter of Anchorage by way of Minneapolis to the endless summer of South Florida — all with a carefully detailed plan that would take just minutes to execute — retrieving his semi-automatic weapon from Delta baggage, carrying it into a bathroom, loading it with 9 mm cartridges and then horrifying travelers and others with his methodical cruelty.

He made sure that each shot had the maximum potential to be lethal by aiming at the heads of the helpless, according to police accounts.

By Greenberg’s account, the suspect fired until he couldn’t fire any more — five people lay dying or dead and six others were wounded.

It all happened so fast, just seconds really, but it felt much longer when you were there.

“When he walked back in that door I just felt that he didn’t have that look in his eye, like he kind of looked defeated,” recalled Greenberg. “His shoulders were down. He was looking, but he wasn’t looking to shoot. The gun was at his side. I don’t know if you believe in angels, but I just felt my dad on my back on top of me telling me that it was going to be okay.”

That’s when she saw the dark green uniforms of the Broward County Sheriff’s deputies closing in on the man they later identified as Santiago Ruiz.

“Finally,” she thought. “Three cops came one way. One was coming another way and they told him ‘put down your weapon.’ He slid it on the ground. You can see it in the picture and he’s just down. he had no more ammunition. You could tell he had shot what he had.”

Terrified, Greenberg lifted her phone from the airport carpeting to snap a single record of her harrowing ordeal

“I only took that one and I was very frightened,” she acknowledged. “But I just felt like it just needed to be captured because no one would believe how close you come to actual disaster like that. I just wanted to show the one frightening image and that was it.”

Reflecting back, Greenberg had luck on her side too — from the moment she parked her car in one of the airport garages and found out that her nieces’ flight had experienced a slight delay — just long enough to keep them from descending the escalator from their gate and meeting up with her in the baggage area at the same time the suspect embarked on his deadly rampage.

Greenberg was also lucky because the person sitting closest to her when the frenzied attack began knew the things one would know only if they had a military or police background.

Most importantly, the woman recognized the initial three popping sounds for what they were.

“She says to me ‘that’s gunshots.’ So we hit the floor. And, as we heard it, she was counting the rounds. And after it got past six she said … He had at least 18. And you kept hearing them go off. There wasn’t a lot of screaming. It was like an eerie calm. Then you heard more shots outside. She says to me ‘he reloaded.’”

Greenberg can’t put the scene out of her mind.

“Thank God they didn’t shoot at him. I don’t think I could have handled seeing that,” she said of the police takedown. “There was one woman that just kept screaming another woman’s name — Gloria.”

The chaos wasn’t limited to travelers.

“You could just tell speaking to the agents, they were told they were given misinformation — It was at car return, it was Terminal 1. They didn’t know when they arrived where they were going at first. It was a little scary,” Greenberg explained.

Once the airport was placed on lockdown, she and Gracie would spend the next eight hours checking by phone on her two nieces — 21-year-old Danielle Narins and her sister Rebecca, 18, who had traveled from LaGuardia Airport to spend time with she and her husband, David.

Danielle and Rebecca were safe but taken by bus with the other passengers on their plane from the airport tarmac to a hanger where the Miami Dolphins store their plane and then finally to Snyder Park until authorities could determine what to do with them.

“The younger one, Rebecca, called me. She was hyperventilating. She wanted to get to me. She didn’t know how to get to me,” said Greenberg. “They took them to a hanger and then they just dropped them off at Snyder Park. They didn’t know where they were. I feel terrible. It really was, it was so chaotic.”

One of the SWAT members kindly took Gracie for a walk at some point. The dog was a trooper too.

“She was a Godsend to a lot of people there. She really was,” said Greenberg, her voice filling with emotion. “She was sitting on laps and kissing people. It was really something to see. She knew that people were frightened and terrified and she was so good. Nothing. She didn’t bark. She didn’t eat. She didn’t drink.”

Those trapped in the terminal with them forged a bond, sharing phone chargers and experiences.

“One girl I was sharing with told me he looked in her eyes,” Greenberg recalled. “They made eye contact and he shot the woman next to her. She saw the rage.”

Finally, at 7:45 p.m. Greenberg and Gracie were among the first wave to be released from the lockdown, probably because Greenberg came to the airport without luggage and had her own car.

“But leaving, there were cars strewn all over the ramp,” she said. “It was like the apocalypse, I mean just cars strewn. You were weaving in and out to get out with no direction, no police officers. It was weird. You’re just trying to find the highway between all these cars that were just abandoned.”

Her nieces wound up at a diner they walked to from the park, where they had their first meal in South Florida. They still had not received their bags as of Saturday but that was a minor inconvenience and reason to plan a much-needed shopping trip. To get their mind off the previous day’s events, they toured the Wynnewood section of the city, had a bite to eat at the Salty Donut and then watched a movie with the Greenbergs — in the safety and comfort of their home, which is where they really wanted to be.

On the first night everyone had trouble sleeping.

“We took a little bit of a sleeping pill, all of us and I think once that kicked in it helped,” acknowledged Greenberg. “I keep seeing the shooter with the gun in his hand. That’s every time I close my eyes. That’s how I see how close he was to me.”

Photos by Missy and David Greenberg.