SAN ANTONIO — Moments after San Antonio Parks Police shot a gunman outside the San Antonio International Airport Thursday, travelers say people began running past TSA checkpoints while hollering, "Shooter! Shooter!"
"It kind of looked like they were late for a flight," said Curtis Rogers, flying home to Kentucky. "Then someone yelled, 'Active shooter.' We saw people running left, and we went left."
Lee Ann Yarbor flew to San Antonio from San Diego. She says a restaurant worker pulled her, her husband and her service dog behind the shop's counter to duck and hide.
"I was just hoping to God that I wasn't going to get shot," she said. "We didn't know if there were dead people down there or what was happening."
Yarbor says she wasn't sure who'd been shot or what exactly happened until more than an hour after the shooting stopped.
She was hundreds of feet from explosions at the Boston Marathon, eight years ago Thursday.
"I was thinking, 'This is crazy that this is happening again,'" she said. "I didn't even associate that the day was April 15."
She stayed inside the airport during the entire lockdown, posting videos to Instagram.
TSA moved Rogers and other passengers outside, onto the tarmac and below the terminal.
"I called everybody immediately and said, 'Hey, if you see this on the news, I'm OK,'" he said. "At this point, it's naïve to think it can't happen to you. Everybody says, 'Oh, this can't happen,' but it happens regularly, it seems like."
Doug Rosini, flying out on business, detailed his experience to reporters shortly after he left the building.
"I saw this, heard of people running and heard somebody yell, 'Shooter, run!,' and when somebody yells, 'Shooter, run,' you run," he said. "The only thing running through my mind was getting back to my family—the thought of that not happening."