Alyssa Randazzo, accompanied by her brother Tyler Randazzo and her boyfriend Rusty Brost, was finishing her vacation aboard a cruise ship on Friday. It was the group of IU students’ final night before making port on Saturday morning in Fort Lauderdale and flying back to IU for their second semester classes.
That evening, however, they discovered there was a shooting, which took the lives of five people.
“Thank God we weren’t in the airport at the time,” Brost said.
The IU seniors, Alyssa Randazzo and Brost, used the cruise ship’s computer lab to search for a replacement flight, all of which were booked or cost more than $1500. With no other options, they decided to rent a car and drive 16 hours back to Bloomington.
The group arrived in Indianapolis at 2:15 a.m. Sunday to pick up their car they had left at the airport before returning to Bloomington.
They were able to be back to Bloomington in time for their classes on Monday.
Had their flight not been canceled, Randazzo said she would have been nervous to go to the airport following the attack.
“But I talked to Rusty,” she said. “And he told me it would be the safest place in the world with the heightened security.”
The couple were two of more than 10,000 travelers whose flights were interrupted by the shooting.
The shooter’s name was Esteban Santiago. He was able to check a gun through security in one of his bags.
“I just felt angry,” Brost said. “Not even so much at the shooter, but I was watching CNN and saw that he got the gun in through a checked bag. It just blew my mind.”
They both said the shooting, and the fact that they were almost present for it, made the attacks they hear about on the news so often feel less distant.
“Mostly when things like this happen, I’m pretty far away,” Randazzo said. “This could happen to anyone, anywhere.”
The couple was one day late to the scene of the shooting. They were able to watch events on the news, rather than in person, because of that.
“It really got to me because we were so close,” Brost said. “Another 24 hours, and we would have been there.”
