I noticed a couple of “breaking news” posts on social media yesterday involving what sounded like yet another mass shooting, this one at the Love Field Airport in Dallas, Texas. Not much more information was released until quite a while later, but when the details began to emerge, it certainly sounded like one of the strangest cases of a mass shooting that’s come down the pike in quite some time. A 37-year-old woman named Portia Odufuwa arrived at the departure terminal at Love Field, went into the bathroom, changed her clothes, and came back out with a gun and began firing as many as ten shots. She herself was shot by a police officer. That brief description certainly seems to fit the bill in terms of what we typically hear about mass shootings, but as soon as you look a bit further into the details, the story changes considerably. (Associated Press)
A 37-year-old woman fired several gunshots, apparently at the ceiling, inside of Dallas’ Love Field Airport on Monday before an officer shot and wounded her, authorities said.
The woman was dropped off at the airport at about 11 a.m., walked inside near the ticketing counters and entered a bathroom, Dallas police Chief Eddie Garcia said at a news conference. She emerged wearing a hooded sweatshirt or some other clothing that she hadn’t arrived in, pulled a gun and fired several shots, apparently at the ceiling, he said.
“At this point, we don’t know where exactly the individual was aiming,” Garcia said.
The first thing that jumped out at me was the fact that the shooter was a woman. Mass shooters are almost always men. Using the FBI definition of a “mass shooting” (meaning a single instance in a public place with three or more fatalities), over the last forty years there have been 127 mass shootings carried out by individual men and only three by women who were not helping a male. This puts Portia Odufuwa in a rare class right off the bat.
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But was she even intending to carry out a mass shooting? The way she is described as going into a bathroom to change into a hoodie and emerging with a gun certainly makes it sound as if she was. But the next curious factor is that the police are reporting that she fired all of her shots into the ceiling. (A witness described hearing at least ten shots being fired.) And the police officer did not kill Odufuwa. He shot her in the “lower extremities,” presumably in the leg. She was then arrested without incident and nobody else was injured.
While the police released few details, local reporters talked to several witnesses who may have shed more light on the story. One witness described hearing “a loud argument” break out behind her, followed by a single gunshot and then as many as ten more rounds. So this may not have been a random attack at all. Who was the shooter arguing with? Had she shown up at the airport with a gun because she intended to kill someone or did she just randomly have it with her?
And why did she fire all of her shots into the ceiling? She apparently never pointed the weapon at whoever she was yelling at or we would be reading some very different headlines. I suppose it’s possible that she either planned to kill a specific individual or conduct a mass shooting but got cold feet at the last minute and decided to fire the weapon into the ceiling in a dramatic fashion.
Perhaps we’ll learn more after the police have had a chance to question her and she retains a lawyer. But at this point, I’m not entirely sure what they can charge her with, particularly if she’s the legal owner of the firearm (which has yet to be announced). I’m sure there will be some sort of unlawful discharge of a firearm charge brought against her. But in Texas, it is legal to carry your concealed firearm in the non-secure portions of airports. Since this all allegedly took place in front of the ticket counter she wouldn’t be in any trouble for that. From the sound of what little we know so far, unless she bought the firearm illegally, Portia Odufuwa may be more likely to spend some time in a mental health facility than a prison.
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