A cold-blooded LAX gunman shot a TSA officer repeatedly at point-blank range – and then returned to finish the job after he saw the dying man move, firing at him again, investigators said.
Alleged airport assassin Paul Ciancia, 23, whipped out a .223-caliber assault rifle from a duffle bag and opened fire on uniformed TSA worker and dad of two Gerardo Hernandez, 39. Ciancia then “began to walk up an escalator, looked back at the wounded officer, who in video appeared to move, and returned to shoot the wounded officer again,” according to a federal complaint charging Ciancia with first-degree murder.
Ciancia, an unemployed motorcycle mechanic from southern New Jersey, told investigators he acted alone in the murderous rampage, The Associated Press reported Sunday, quoting an unnamed law-enforcement source.
Ciancia was driven to LAX in a black Hyundai by a roommate and did not have a ticket for a flight, investigators said.
The roommate reportedly didn’t know Ciancia planned to blast his way through the airport’s Terminal 3, killing Hernandez and leaving four others, including two TSA workers, injured.
Ciancia was chased through the terminal and shot four times, including in the leg and face, by a sergeant and officer of the Los Angeles Airport Police. Cops managed to briefly talk to him at the scene before he was rushed to the hospital. He is now ‘unresponsive” at the hospital and under 24-hour guard.
The gunman never intended to make it out of the airport alive, according to Rep. Michael McCaul, chair of the House Homeland Security Committee.
In his handwritten one-page manifesto, recovered after the attack, Ciancia wrote that he “made a conscious decision to try and kill” TSA employees “to instill fear in your traitorous minds,” according to the criminal complaint.
“It’s clearly one of those notes that reads, ‘I’m going to kill people, and I don’t want to kill civilians,’ with the idea that he’s going to die at the end of this,’’ McCaul told CNN’s State of the Union.
The congressman said the note indicates that Ciancia clearly “wanted to talk about how easy it is to bring a gun into an airport and do something just like he did.”
“It’s very difficult to stop these types of attacks,” McCaul said. “It’s like a shopping mall outside the perimeter, it’s almost like an open shopping mall. So it’s very difficult to protect.”
Investigators Sunday were still conducting interviews and trying to determine why Ciancia targeted the TSA. Authorities have said he never applied for a job with the agency.
Ciancia was also charged with committing violence at an American airport and could be charged with the death penalty.
Hernandez, a married father of two kids, is the first TSA employee to be killed in the line of duty. He was a behavioral detection officer, assigned to ferret out passengers who are acting strangely, officials said.
Meanwhile, the FBI is asking anyone with audio or video of the shooting to upload them or call 888-226-8443.
With Post Wires