ORANGE PARK, Fla. – An ambush shooting of a federal agent delayed the travel plans for five Florida doctors expected to help Hurricane Maria victims in Puerto Rico.
The doctors, from Florida Hospital in Orlando, were scheduled to fly out of Cecil Airport on Jacksonville's Westside and land in Puerto Rico Wednesday morning.
They were set to travel with Customs and Border Protection pilots from the Air and Marine Operations unit at Cecil, but were told when they arrived that because of the shooting of one of the unit's pilots on Tuesday, none of the CBP pilots working out of Cecil would be flying for 24 hours.
But a CBP spokesman told News4Jax that arrangements were being made to take the emergency room physicians, who are all originally from Puerto Rico, to the island Wednesday.
The doctors are specially trained in disaster triage, which is much needed in the country. They loaded up their van Tuesday and headed to Jacksonville, expecting to fly out Wednesday morning.
“Sometimes God moves things around, maybe to have a better ending in the future, so I always take it that there is something that it wasn’t going to work (earlier) today,” Dr. Katia Lugo said. “It's better to delay this mission for a little bit. We are going to get there. It doesn't matter when.”
Lugo and her group will be scouting the medical needs in some of the hardest hit areas of Puerto Rico to figure out how to best help the people.
The shooting that delayed Lugo's team happened just before 4 p.m. Tuesday in the parking lot of a Publix on Oakleaf Plantation Parkway in the Oakleaf Plantation neighborhood.
A gunman shot a customs and border patrol pilot in the abdomen, then took his own life, which caused his vehicle to hit several others in the parking lot, according to the Clay County Sheriff's Office.
The agent underwent surgery and was in critical condition Wednesday.