Brother of airport shooting suspect says US gov't failed him

The brother of a man accused of shooting five people at a Florida airport questioned today why his brother was allowed to keep his gun after US authorities knew he'd become increasingly paranoid and was hearing voices.

After serving in the National Guard in Iraq, 26-year-old Esteban Santiago had trouble controlling his anger and told his brother Bryan Santiago that he felt he was being chased and being controlled by the CIA through secret online messages.

But when he told agents at an FBI field office his paranoid thoughts in November, he was evaluated for four days, then released without any follow-up medication or therapy.
 

"The FBI failed there. ... We're not talking about someone who emerged from anonymity to do something like this," Bryan Santiago told The Associated Press, speaking in Spanish outside his family's pale yellow house nestled in the lush mountains of the southern town of Penuelas.

"The federal government already knew about this for months, they had been evaluating him for a while, but they didn't do anything."

In recent years, the 26-year-old Estaban Santiago a new dad, family said had been living in Anchorage, Alaska. But there were signs of trouble.

Esteban told FBI agents in Alaska that the government was controlling his mind and was forcing him to watch Islamic State group videos, a law enforcement official said Friday.

The official was not authorized to discuss an ongoing investigation by name and spoke on condition of anonymity.

The FBI office in Alaska, which declined to comment on Bryan Santiago's comments ahead of a planned Saturday news conference, interviewed Esteban Santiago and then notified police, who took him in for a mental health evaluation.

Also, he was charged in a domestic violence case in January 2016, damaging a door when he forced his way into a bathroom at his girlfriend's Anchorage home. The woman told officers he yelled at her to leave, choked her and smacked her on the side of the head, according to charging documents.

A month later, municipal prosecutors said he violated the conditions of his release when officers found him at her home during a routine check. He told police he had lived there since he was released from custody the previous month. His Anchorage attorney, Max Holmquist, declined to discuss his client.