An airline agent at Dallas-Forth Worth Airport has been suspended after he punched a woman during an altercation that was caught on video.
The brawl happened Thursday when the employee and woman first engaged in a verbal argument. In a video captured by bystander Tomas Shannon, the employee shouts, “Don’t touch me ever in your life!” as he steps toward the woman.
“You touched me first and then you got in my face. Don’t ever invade my personal space.”
Stepping back, the woman then shouts at the man to get out of her face and calls him a homophobic slur.
After another man attempts to break up the fight, the woman swings at the employee’s face, prompting him to chase after her. They both fall to the ground, and when they get back to their feet, the employee strikes the woman in the head from behind.
More onlookers then step in to break up the fight. The employee continues to yell and tries to coax one of the onlookers into a fight, saying, “Knock me out.”
Spirit Airlines confirmed that the employee, who was working for a vendor on behalf of Spirit, was suspended. The company said in a statement on Twitter that it was working with law enforcement and “does not tolerate violence of any kind.”
The fight was apparently over a seating problem, Dallas news station KDFW reported. The Spirit employee told police the woman got off the plane complaining there wasn’t a seat for her, and she became uncooperative after the employee told her to wait in line for a gate agent.
Thomas Shannon shot the original video and posted it to his Instagram page. He is a professional cinematographer and filmmaker. He said he’s frequently in airports and traveling around the world.
“I’m at the Panda Express,” Shannon said, describing where he was before the incident happened. “We hear yelling. I just drop my food on the counter, run over as fast as I can to see what was going on. My first instinct was to just grab my camera and see.”
The video has gone viral online, garnering more than 5 million views in only 24 hours.
In the video, you can see a man in a maroon shirt – the airline employee – yelling at a woman, saying “you have lost your mind…don’t you touch me ever in your life.”
“You touched me first, and then you got in my face,” the man added. “Don’t ever invade my personal space.”
The woman then yells “get out of my face” back at the man while pushing him multiple times.
Throughout the video, the woman says racial and homophobic slurs at the man. Another man intervenes, then the woman hits the airline employee. In response to being hit, the man then runs after the woman and eventually hits her back.
“I think we need to have the dialogue of physical violence and safety at the airport,” Shannon said. “And why airports are so dangerous.”
The video also shows multiple people trying to subdue the man and break up the fight.
At the end of the video, another man confronts the Spirit Airlines agent for “fighting a woman,” where the two square off chest-to-chest with their hands behind their backs.
