DALLAS — A Dallas police officer called to break up a domestic dispute at Dallas Love Field shot a man Friday after the man rushed at him with a large rock outside the terminal.
The encounter, though brief, threw the airport into chaos, disrupted operations for hours and created massive delays for thousands of passengers.
In a video of the shooting posted to Instagram, the officer is seen firing nine shots. He warns the man to “get down” and “stay down,” while witnesses scream, “Oh God, oh my God.”
The man who was shot Friday was identified as Shawn Nicholas Diamond, 29. On Tuesday, he reportedly was arrested and charged with criminal mischief in Carrollton for driving his car into trees in a median.
The officer was not identified.
Diamond was in stable condition Friday evening, and Assistant Police Chief Randy Blankenbaker said he thought Diamond was conscious when he was taken to Parkland Memorial Hospital. No one else was wounded.
The shooting is believed to be the first in the 87-year history of the city-owned airport, said Mark Duebner, Dallas’ director of aviation.
About noon, the officer, who was stationed at Love Field, was called to respond to a disturbance outside the baggage claim area, Blankenbaker said. Diamond was throwing heavy rocks at a car and striking it with a traffic cone. Authorities said that the car belonged to Diamond’s ex-girlfriend, the mother of his children.
When the officer tried to intervene, “he was rushed by the gentleman with the rock,” Blankenbaker said. The officer moved away, but the man “came toward him again, so he discharged his weapon a number of times.”
Police do not think Diamond had any weapon other than the rock.
The officer will be placed on administrative leave, following Dallas Police Department protocol.
Dallas Police Chief David Brown was among the commanders who went to Love Field in response to the shooting.
At a news conference Friday evening, he said Diamond recently left his home in Maryland and drove to his ex-girlfriend’s home in the Dallas area.
Earlier this week in Carrollton, she became afraid and walked away from him, and as he drove away he ran into trees in the median of Forest Lane in Carrollton. Police caught him and arrested him on the criminal mischief charge.
After Diamond was released from jail, the ex-girlfriend agreed to take him to the airport so he could fly back to Maryland. But she said that as they drove to catch his flight, Diamond became upset and struck her.
At Love Field, as the two angrily unloaded luggage and clothing from the car, Diamond picked up a traffic cone and smashed the rear window of the woman’s car. He then struck the windshield with the cone several times and began throwing landscaping stones through the windows of the vehicle.
It was then that the uniformed officer approached the couple to intervene.
Brown said witnesses reported that as the officer tried to avoid a physical confrontation, Diamond said, “You are going to have to shoot me.”
Even after Diamond fell to the ground, wounded by gunfire, he ignored commands to stay down and began to approach the officer again with rocks in his hands. The officer fired on him again. Brown said authorities had not determined yet how many bullets struck Diamond.
“The tactics the officer used were quite appropriate, and the patience the officer used trying to get the suspect to stay down really tells the story,” Brown said.
The gunfire occurred outside, near the curb in front of baggage claim, but passengers in the terminal heard the shots and began to run in a panic.
Some of them rushed past a Transportation Security Administration checkpoint between the ticketing area and the passenger gates, Duebner said. That forced TSA officials to remove everyone from the gates.
When normal operations resumed, all the passengers who had gone through security had to be screened again. That was the “real impact” in terms of creating the backlog, Duebner said.
Huge crowds filled the airport lobby. At one point, the line for security stretched all the way into the baggage claim area. Meanwhile, outside, traffic came to a standstill. About 30 flights were canceled, Duebner said.
The delays could have been worse. TSA’s shift change is at 12:30 p.m., about 20 minutes after the shooting. The crew whose shift was ending stayed to help the arriving crew unsnarl the mess.
By 3:30 p.m., someone arriving at Love Field would have little clue anything had gone wrong — other than the taped-off area outside baggage claim.
Still, some would-be travelers gave up rather than endure delays.
“The lines are like 5 miles long, and that’s going to be a mess. I’m just going home,” said Alesia Harenberg, 51, who had been waiting in the terminal for a flight to San Antonio when airport security told her she had to go back through the checkpoint.
Others were resigned to the idea that it could be a long travel day.
Doug Wolff, 57, said he learned about the shooting while watching TV on a Virgin Airlines flight from New York’s LaGuardia Airport. Inbound flights were allowed to land even after the shooting.
He said he was relieved to hear the shooting did not involve a terrorist attack. “It’s still tragic, but it’s not something where you have to worry about your own safety,” he said.
(Staff writers Claire Ballor, Caleb Downs, Liz Farmer, Tristan Hallman, Austin Huguelet, Sarah Mervosh, Marc Ramirez, Tasha Tsiaperas and Robert Wilonsky and KXAS-TV (NBC5) contributed to this report.)
Copyright 2016 The Dallas Morning News
Tribune News Service
