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On Monday, July 25, a woman in Dallas was shot by authorities after allegedly opening fire with a handgun at Love Field airport.
In an official statement to the Press, Dallas Police Chief Eddie Garcia told reporters that the suspect, identified as 37-year-old Portia Odufuwa, is accused of entering the airport at approximately 11 am, changing her clothing in a restroom, and emerging with a handgun, which she reportedly fired at the ceiling.
CBS reported that after she began firing, an officer subdued her by shooting her in a lower extremity. No one besides the alleged perpetrator was hurt in the incident.
According to NBC, an eyewitness account suggested that the suspected shooter may have carried out the shooting after supposedly becoming disgruntled with her husband's infidelity.
Witness accounts of the Dallas airport shooting
In an interview with the New York Post, one witness, Kristen Smith, described what happened during the shooting. Smith told the outlet that she was with her 10-year-old son when the firing began. She recalled how a crowd started running in their direction, while "saying ‘run’ and ‘active shooter.’ ”
She added:
“At first, I just saw a teenage girl running and thought, ‘she’s just trying to catch a flight’ and then behind her, a whole crowd just running. In the climate we are in now with all the shootings we had, people just reacted.”
Eyewitness Colby James told the NBC that he had vaguely heard the suspect say something about her husband cheating on her, before she opened fire:
"And she basically said she was about to blow this sucker up."
It must be noted that at the time of writing this story, Dallas authorities had not released any official statement about the motive behind the shooting.
In another Tweet, Max Geron, a police chief from Rockwall, Texas, who happened to be in the Dallas airport at the time of the incident, also provided an account of the situation and commended the TSA for its prompt action.
As per the Independent, court records show that the suspect, Portia Oduwafa, had previously been accused of a 2019 bank robbery in Wylie, Texas. While she was initially arrested, the charges against her were later dropped.
Rising gun violence in America
The airport shooting is among over 300 active shooter situations recorded by the Gun Violence Archive in 2022.
It has garnered attention as these incidents of mass gun violence are seemingly becoming normalized, with high-profile cases emerging in Illinois, New York and Oklahoma. The Love Field shooting comes just two months after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, which is the deadliest school shooting in the history of the state.
As of now, the airport shooting case remains under investigation and Dallas authorities have not yet identified the suspect's potential motivations.
