San Antonio police shoot, kill gunman at airport terminal

A gunman is dead after San Antonio police shot and killed him at San Antonio International Airport on Thursday afternoon, according to coverage from Fox News and other outlets. Officers had responded around 2:30 p.m. local time to reports of a wrong-way driver near the airport's parking garage on Airport Boulevard.

When an officer confronted the driver, the man allegedly opened fire with a .45-caliber handgun, firing at the officer and toward the terminal behind him. The responding officer returned fire and struck the suspect, who was transported to a hospital and later pronounced dead.

Police Chief William McManus credited the responding officer with preventing a larger tragedy. 'The officer who stopped this individual saved a lot of lives,' McManus said, according to the reporting. 'The shooter had a lot of ammunition and a big handgun that he was shooting indiscriminately.' McManus added, 'We were very lucky today not to have a lot of people injured or killed.'

A possible link to an earlier shooting

Investigators said they believed the same man was responsible for an earlier shooting from a freeway overpass in San Antonio that same day, based on matching descriptions and shell casings recovered at both scenes. The exact connection between the two incidents was still being confirmed at the time of the initial reporting.

Injuries and the aftermath

One bystander was injured by shrapnel and another was hurt while fleeing the scene; neither injury was described as serious, and no officers were hurt. Police said the man had a documented history of interactions with the department and that officials believed mental illness may have contributed to the shootings, though a full account of that history was not detailed in the available coverage.

The suspect's identity and record

KSAT later identified the gunman as Joe Gomez, 46, and reported that Bexar County court records showed seven arrests between 1999 and 2014 -- including a 1999 charge for attempting to elude police, two DWI arrests in 2011, and separate felony drug charges in 2011 and 2014 -- but "no history of arrests for violent or weapons-related criminal offenses," according to those court records as reviewed by KSAT.

KSAT's follow-up reporting also resolved how Gomez died: the responding officer, identified as John Maines, shot Gomez twice outside Terminal B, after which Gomez turned the gun on himself and fatally shot himself, according to an updated police account cited by KSAT. That account clarifies the discrepancy in the earliest reporting over whether Gomez was killed solely by the officer's return fire.

The surveillance video

San Antonio police released surveillance footage of the shooting roughly two months later, in June 2021, under a department policy adopted in December 2020 that requires release of portions of video and 911 calls tied to officer-involved shootings resulting in death, according to KSAT's reporting on the release. The footage, which had no audio, showed Gomez exiting his vehicle with a handgun and firing toward Maines, bystanders and passing vehicles, then ducking behind his car's driver-side door during the exchange; the moment of Gomez's fatal self-inflicted gunshot was not visible on camera, per KSAT.

KSAT reported that Maines began firing after hearing a warning from another officer, walked toward Gomez's vehicle and struck him twice, and that Gomez was later pronounced dead at University Hospital, with an autopsy confirming the fatal wound was self-inflicted. Maines was placed on administrative duty following the shooting, a standard step after officer-involved shootings, according to KSAT's account. No other individuals besides the two bystanders were reported injured.

US In News compiled this archived account from contemporaneous coverage by Fox News, CBS News and KSAT. It restores a story originally published on this site in April 2021; figures are as reported at the time.