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Hero shields Broward teacher from Fort Lauderdale airport shooter
 [Miami Herald] Annika Dean was waiting for her luggage at the Fort Lauderdale airport when she heard gunshots and turned to see a man walking toward her with a gun in his hand.Mr. Bartosiewicz and wife at the photo to the right. As a teacher in Broward County schools, Dean had received disaster training, but during the school shooting drills there had always been somewhere to hide. Under a desk, in a utility closet, behind a locked classroom door. But at the airport, with the gunman just 30 feet from her, Dean had nowhere to go. "There was no way I could have escaped," she said. "I would have been right in his path if I had tried to evacuate through the doors." Instead, Dean dove to the ground next to a luggage cart and kept her eyes on the carpet, afraid to look up. People all around her had dropped to the floor. Dean stayed still and quiet, but a few passengers shouted obscenities at the shooter. He continued shooting, not speaking. For the first 30 seconds, Dean prayed fervently that she would survive and that her two children would not be left without a mother. Then a man dropped down and lay on top of Dean, quietly telling her that he would protect her. The shooter walked over to them, the man later told Dean, and began to shoot over them, but Dean kept her eyes down and didn’t realize how close the shooter was. It was hard to know exactly where the shooter was because he didn’t say a word. "He wasn’t talking, he was very quiet," said Dean. "Other than the gunshots, which were very loud," Dean didn’t hear anything else. "Sometimes he sounded close, sometimes he sounded farther away," she said. After what Dean said felt like a minute and a half of shooting, the police arrived. By then, the gunman was on the other side of the baggage-claim area, and when it was clear that he had been detained, Dean and the man who had saved her got up from the floor, both unharmed. "The first thing I said to him was I thanked him and told him that it was terrifying and what he did brought me comfort, that it was just so comforting," she said. "I thanked him throughout the day and told him he was a hero." The man who saved Dean, identified by the Sun Sentinel as Tony Bartosiewicz, could not be reached for comment. His daughter told the Sun Sentinel that her father was on a cruise and could not be reached. She said he was a retired electrician from Rochester, New York, who was traveling with his wife, Jennifer Cleeton, who was in a different part of the baggage-claim area when the shooting occurred and was also unharmed. Posted by: Besoeker 2017-01-09 |
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