An armed vigilante was arrested at an Arizona airport following a Christmas shooting that left ‘three injured’.
Gunshots were heard near a restaurant outside of Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport’s security checkpoints in terminal 4 just after 9.40pm Wednesday evening following an isolated fight that quickly turned violent.
An adult female and two adult males were shot, leaving the female with life-threatening injuries. A separate male was stabbed during the incident.
‘I do believe that this was a family dispute that escalated,’ Phoenix police Sgt. Mayra Reeson told reporters.
The shooting came after a group of people – who police said were all familiar with each other – had a physical fight which prompted one of them to pull out a firearm.
Marvin Miller, a cleaner at the airport for three years, said he heard three gunshots in succession from the lower level ticketing area of Terminal 4, AZ Central reported.
‘I heard three shots,’ Miller told the outlet. ‘They were different from fireworks. Gunshots are a big difference.’
When officers arrived at the scene, they were met with three people suffering from gunshot wounds and another in a Terminal 4 parking garage with ‘at least one stab wound,’ Reeson said.
An armed vigilante was arrested at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport on Wednesday evening shortly after an adult female and two adult males were shot and another stabbed in a separate incident
An underage girl along with the man with the stab wound were detained in the garage in connection with the shooting, although possible charges remain unknown.
‘Of course this was scary, this was Christmas evening, everybody’s trying to get home,’ Reeson said.
But in what Reeson described as being a ‘completely separate incident’ from the shooting and the stabbing, an additional armed man showed up at the airport that very same night.
‘This man received a text message that he believed there was an active shooter at Sky Harbor,’ Reeson said.
The man proceeded to get into a dispute with police officers, who then arrested him outside of the airport.
‘There was no active shooter; there never was,’ Reeson said.
Officers were seen taking a man without shoes or a shirt into custody, moments before another officer was seen carrying two firearms, including a handgun, in an evidence bag at around 11.30pm.
The identity of the two people detained in the parking garage are still unknown, but police did retrieve one gun.
Reeson noted that the man who showed up later that night will be booked into jail as well, but his charges are unclear at this time.
It also still remains unclear whether the text the man got about an active shooter at the airport was related to the original shooting.
No other travelers at the airport were injured, but the incident did prompt the temporary closure of the security checkpoint as well as the Sky Train operations to be paused as a safety precaution.
Police are still investigating if the group was from Arizona, why they were at the airport and whether they were there as a means to travel or for another reason.
