By Jeanette DeForge
masslive.com
SPRINGFIELD, Mass. – They all went into school without a script: The police officer who played the shooter. The transportation manager shot multiple times. The teacher who barricaded her students in a classroom.
And the EMT who called for his mom after being wounded.
Monday morning, multiple first responders joined with Springfield educators to conduct the active shooting drill, giving a chance for police, firefighters, dispatchers, emergency medical responders, educators and others to train for a disaster with mass casualties.
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“The plan is there is no plan,” said Police Capt. Brian Beliveau, commander for the event.
For the most part, Beliveau said he wanted the roughly 100 volunteers who served as victims, staff, students and parents to decide what they would have done if the shooter was real — and for police and other first responders to react.
“We don’t have an opportunity to plan it in real life. I don’t want people to act in a certain way,” he said. “I’m OK with failure. You don’t learn with a win.”
That meant that one of the first responding police officers had to remind his colleagues, who gathered around the shooter after he had been killed, that there were victims who needed attention, or they too would die.
This is the third year that Springfield police, firefighters, dispatchers and the city’s real-time crime analysis center joined with outside agencies to conduct a full-scale drill with the school department, said Adam Fenn, director of safety and security for the Springfield schools. Joining in were American Medical Response, Baystate Health, Mercy Medical Center and the Massachusetts Emergency Management Agency.
Locations and disasters change every year. Organizers wanted to stage a drill at a smaller school, after using high schools in the past. So Monday’s event was held at the Mary Dryden School, with neighboring Pope Francis High School volunteering their campus for a staging area.
As would happen in a real situation, first responders set up the nearby Frederick Harris School as a reunification center. It received victims and provided a place for families to gather to get information, Fenn said.
The drill comes after a year that included a spate of false alarms in schools and a long debate over extending a policy allowing the city’s real-time crime analysis center to access live footage of school cameras set up in the halls. It also came 16 months after a gun was fired in the High School of Science and Technology.
“We will roll out best practices and look at new tactics,” Fenn said.
Immediately following the drill, participants reviewed the responders’ actions and will return later to analyze it step-by-step, looking for flaws that can be corrected. After past drills, training was added to help police and others improve, Beliveau said.
The ‘shooter’ arrives
After assigning roles of teachers, students, parents and victims, organizers split up volunteers so they were in classrooms and other places, just as they might be on a normal day.
Administrative staff stayed in the office and parents were sent off campus to get coffee and wait until they were notified of the “shooting.”
They instructed the volunteers to follow their instincts, whether it was to barricade themselves in a safe place or try to run and escape.
Then, Springfield Police Officer Rashad Evans , wearing a black sleeveless T-shirt and baseball cap, entered the building carrying a duffle bag just after 9:15 a.m. He walked into the restroom, pulled out a fake rifle and started walking down the hall while a recording played of multiple bullets being fired.
After rattling a few doorknobs, he walked into the library and started shooting. Three minutes later, the first two police officers arrived, followed quickly by two more who carefully walked down the halls with fake red guns, searching for the shooter.
The four confronted him outside the hallway five minutes after the shooting began. Both fired. “The shooter is down,” one officer announced over the radio, telling other responders he had been “killed.”
Police, now joined by several more officers, checked Evans for weapons and one held a gun on him to ensure he was no longer a threat. Then another shouted, “Hey you have people dying in there,” reminding the first responding police they needed to provide medical help.
Minutes later, AMR paramedics and EMTs arrived. Police directed them to a library door that led outside. They pulled up ambulances, donned bulletproof vests and helmets and started to triage victims who suffered leg wounds, a chest wound and a bullet to the head.
While some shouted out in pain, others played dead.
In a mock press conference later, Ryan Walsh, police spokesman, announced that four people, including the shooter, had died and that eight other staff and students were brought to the hospital, with seven suffering serious injuries.
While the victims were being treated in the library, one officer went searching for keys. A team of four then went room-to-room opening doors in search of victims or other shooters.
In several, they found a mix of teachers and students hiding. They ordered them to put their hands above their heads and led them to safety.
One of those people was Marlene Gilling-Fong, a special education first-grade and kindergarten teacher, who sacrificed a vacation day to participate in the drill.
In a typical day at Dryden School, Gilling-Fong said, about 24 children and six adults are present in two classrooms. Since the children are young and have disabilities, it is challenging to keep everyone safe in an emergency.
“Someone has to be informed and I took it on myself to do it,” she said. “I felt at least one staff member has to be empowered to take charge if something like this happens.”
A total of 22 staff from AMR volunteered to respond to the scene as well as serve as victims. The company will also participate in an analysis of the drill, so it can learn what went wrong and ways to improve the response, said Kim D’Angelo, a paramedic and operations manager for the company.
“Working with other public safety departments is not an opportunity we have often, so we appreciate being involved in this,” she said.
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