A 63-year-old man wielding a machete was shot at New Orleans airport Friday night after attacking three TSA officials at Louis Armstrong International Airport.
Richard White attacked two security officials with wasp spray, pulled a machete from his waistband and cut a guard at a security checkpoint.
White slashed a female TSA official’s right arm. Carol Richel was taken to the hospital and her injuries are non-life threatening.
“He sprayed the male in the face. He struck the female with a machete that he pulled out at that point in time and had a laceration across the upper right arm,” says sheriff Newell Normand, of the Jefferson Parish sheriff’s department, during a news conference.
He was shot in the chest, the thigh and the face by Lt. Heather Slyve, before being taken to hospital. He reportedly was carrying a sack of six Molotov cocktails during the attack, but was not able to detonate them.
Normand also shared, “There was an innocent bystander who sustained a graze wound to the arm and there were a couple of members of the traveling public, while in the scrambling, while shots were fired, that happened to cut some limbs on some of the furniture there while trying to get away from that particular area.”
(UPDATE: White, a Jehovah’s Witness, died of his injuries during surgery on Saturday at 4 p.m., after refusing certain types of medical care.)
