Sloppy journalism at its best.
"There was a shocking sight for some folks" = we couldn't actually find any eyewitnesses, but there are bound to have been some
"Jeff Weingart was killing time at the airport" = the next name that came up on our stock list of fictitious characters to whom we could attribute an invented quote
About the only fact that appears beyond dispute is that SWA48 does show two departure times from HOU yesterday on FlightAware, so clearly it did return for some reason.