Everyone survives

The traditional way of thinking when it comes to mass shootings is that the person holding the gun needs to be stopped as quickly as possible, by whatever means necessary.

In recent years, Crook County Sheriff's Office has placed its faith in the opposite approach, pioneering a way of thinking that shifts focus onto the individuals in the path of that gun and gives them the tools to protect themselves.

"It's empowering the kids and the teachers to do things by themselves – not wait on law enforcement, not be huddled in a corner. You do what you need to do to avoid the situation," says Sheriff Jeff Hodge.

Years spent striving to train as many kids and adults as possible across the county fulfilled their promise on Wednesday during what is believed to be the largest active shooter training scenario to ever have been staged in Wyoming while school was actually in session.

It was an opportunity for everyone who might be involved in an active shooter incident at Sundance High School, from law enforcement to medical personnel, to put into practice what they've learned.

It was a chance for students and staff in particular to make use of their training to make quick decisions based on the available information and execute whatever plan they felt was most likely to succeed.

Evacuation, barring the doors, hiding, confusing or distracting the assailant – the training covers all this and more, creating a playbook of alternative reactions and teaching individuals how to determine which one offers them the best chance under the circumstances.

When the rolls were called at the end of last week's exercise, everyone in the building had "survived".

The Value of Unpredictability

Aside from Emergency Management Coordinator Ed Robinson and the Crook County Sheriff's Office, most people involved in Wednesday's scenario had only a limited idea of what to expect.

Those involved in the planning knew where the "incident" would begin and had prepared the actors who would be playing "victims", but even they couldn't know exactly how it would play out. The scenario was deliberately designed to be random – only the "shooter" knew where he was going to go.

As it turned out, the "shooter" was taken down by Deputy Jory Tadlock and Trooper Jared Williams. The duo was first to arrive and enter the building, stopping and securing him in a matter of minutes.

During a smaller training exercise a couple of years ago, which also involved high school students and staff, the actor playing the "shooter" was also brought under control quickly, but in that case by two teachers, who utilized the layout of the classroom to tackle him as he entered.

Either way is acceptable.

In fact, any solution works.

The point of the training, after all, is to teach you how to evaluate the situation and make the best decision for your safety given the options available in that specific time and place.

The unpredictability makes things a lot harder for your assailant, who won't know where to look for you or how you will react if they find you.

As the old saying goes, no battle plan ever survives contact with the enemy. One of the biggest lessons the active shooter training aims to impart is how to adapt and think on your feet.

"Some classes had already talked about what they were going to do and had made the decision that they were going to evacuate, but the circumstances changed," says Hodge.

"It was a fluid situation and they changed with it and barricaded and locked down."

The Most Important Thing

Just like the details of how the "shooter" was stopped, how long it took law enforcement to respond to the incident is almost irrelevant.

For the record, the "shooter" was engaged two minutes and 15 seconds after law enforcement received the page.

But what really matters is that everyone in the building was able to protect themselves from him.

The actor who played the "shooter" fired his first shot in the concessions area at the back of the entrance hall. He moved from there towards the front classroom corridor, where he tried to convince the occupants of one room to let him in.

Nobody opened the door.

From outside, it was impossible to tell whether anyone was even still inside.

The "shooter" then turned and made his way back towards reception just as law enforcement breached the building.

All the while, members of staff locked down in the reception area were able to watch his movements on the security cameras and narrate them over loudspeaker. The building's occupants were aware exactly where he was, which meant they also knew where they were safe from him.

Other than the actors who played his victims, at no point between the first shot fired and the last did he see a single student or member of staff.

Everyone escaped.

Everyone survived.

Deputy Sheriff Alex Jessen explains that he started a timer when the page came over the radio. The initial response team waited one minute before they mobilized to simulate the fact that they could have been anywhere in town at that moment on a regular day.

Again, this ties back to the reason for the training in the first place: there will always be a delay before law enforcement can respond, and the individuals in the thick of the crisis need to be able to protect themselves while those seconds tick by.

"If that call came in and Dispatch started screaming down the halls, we would be in our trucks and down there," Jessen says. On the other hand, you can't break the laws of physics.

As things played out, it likely wouldn't have mattered if Jessen had set that timer for ten minutes, or even an hour. Everyone in the building had either hunkered down or evacuated.

Those who secured themselves inside rooms did so well enough, laughs Robinson, that, "We were trying to get into some of those rooms that were barricaded and even we couldn't get in."

Had it been a real event, Hodge points out, "They could have broken the windows and got out," but that obviously wasn't feasible during a simulation.

With all this in mind, it's reasonable to conclude that the "shooter" would have had a hard time finding any victims, no matter how long he'd had to wander the building.

"I looked at it as an overwhelming success for the kids and the faculty and staff," says Robinson. "And then it was a success for all the players in it, agency-wise, to learn where we needed to improve."

Mass shootings are obviously a sensitive topic, but Principal Jim O'Connor believes the experience was invaluable for everyone involved.

"There are still people that it was really hard for, and we understand that, but I do think our student body and our staff came away with an understanding that they do have some control – especially in our building, they have a lot of control as to what the outcome can be," he says.

The Aftermath

The school was not the only location to see action. Numerous other agencies took part, from Sundance Volunteer Fire Department to Crook County Memorial Hospital and its EMS crews.

"It wasn't primarily targeted at law enforcement. We were there and we wanted to go through it, but I think it was a bigger exercise for the school, for EMS and so on," says Hodge.

Apart from the school district's Central Office building, which was the designated evacuation spot and the landing zone for LifeFlight, the hospital performed its own training exercise.

Organizers planned that there would be six casualties and one fatality, each of which needed to be triaged and transported to the hospital. This allowed hospital staff to experience a mass casualty event and practice their response to a significant number of emergencies coming in fast.

Meanwhile, Black Hills LifeFlight agreed to include the scenario in its own annual training and arranged to fly in and collect patients, as would potentially occur in a real situation with serious injuries.

"I would like to thank all the agencies, the school system, and especially all of the actors in this exercise. The hospital employees banded together to successfully manage the influx of critical patients," says Bob Hart RN, Trauma Coordinator.

"The simulated injuries were identified and treated rapidly. We feel if this would have been a real event, all of the patients would have been stabilized and transferred to tertiary centers promptly."

Overall, Hart feels it was a rewarding experience for the county's medical staff.

"This drill exposed some areas for improvement in our mass casualty plan and validated our ability to respond appropriately. I feel Sundance and Crook County are better prepared as much of what we learned can only come from an actual drill," he says.

Not everything can be simulated. Dispatch, for example, had a successful run; during a real event, however, things would certainly have been much busier with calls from kids, parents and community members wanting more information about what was happening.

"Obviously it was smoother and less hectic than the real thing would have been," says April Gill. "In the real world, all of our lines would have been tied up and I don't know if we could even have called out."

It's inevitable and understandable that people would want to know, says Hodge. But if a real event was to happen, he urges the community to give all first responders as much space as reasonably possible to get the situation under control.

Once the simulation came to a close, students and staff had an opportunity to provide feedback and discuss what happened during a debriefing.

"The biggest thing that I was impressed with was talking to the kids and teachers, and hearing them talking about empowerment," says Hodge.

He listened, he says, as they described making initial plans and altering them as the situation unfolded, some of them choosing a completely new approach from the one they'd intended. Even the debriefing was valuable, he notes because, "Just having the discussion puts them a step above those students and teachers who have not had that discussion."

"In our debrief with our staff afterwards, one of the things that was brought up was the conversations that happened before and after were as empowering as the drill itself," adds O'Connor.

"That's all part of what you hope to get out of it – all that preparation causes conversations that lead to kids feeling the ability to make decisions and understanding that they have the right to do what they think is the safest."

Even for law enforcement, who train regularly for an incident of this nature, it was a learning experience.

"We're the biggest critics of ourselves, so we looked at it and there are definitely some areas where we can improve. Even though we've been doing a lot of training, we learned from this one," Hodge says.

Stephanie Benboe, Education Consultant, traveled from Cheyenne to observe on behalf of the Wyoming Department of Education and says what stood out to her was seeing so many agencies working together towards a common purpose. She feels positively about the impact of the training on students.

"Having experience in [active shooter] training can help students react differently, as they now have first-hand experience gained from the drill," she says.

O'Connor also praises the level of cooperation that focused so many individual entities on a single goal.

"For as big an undertaking as it was, and as many entities as there were involved, it did come off with very few major hitches. There were some little bumps, but overall I thought it went as well as you could expect," says O'Connor.

"The whole community came together and used this as an opportunity to learn. Granted, we used the school as the place for an emergency action situation, but it could just as easily happen on the interstate or at the bank or at a major accident that's going to tax all of these major organizations."

Future Plans

Pulling together an exercise on this scale is not easy – there's far more to plan for than just the few minutes it took to secure the "shooter".

"Our number one concern with this was security of the actual scene. There were no other officers even allowed onto that scene that were armed, besides the two people – me and another deputy – who were there in case somebody thought it would be a wise idea to actually do something at that point," says Hodge.

"Security was at the top of our list for that exercise: to make sure there were no unauthorized guns, that there were a certain amount of authorized players allowed in. There were a lot of moving parts."

An exercise this large is not something the Sheriff's Office intends to do every time. This was a starting point from which smaller-scale trainings will come; for example, EMS could pair up with deputies to practice their teamwork once the building is secured.

Active shooter training, on the other hand, is something the Sheriff's Office will continue to encourage. It's a relatively small time commitment, says Robinson; for example, ideally he would like to be in each of the schools in the county for, "Four hours, every six months".

As well as providing refreshers for those who have already gone through the training, this accounts for the natural turnover in the student body and faculty.

Of course, active shooter training is not just intended for a school setting.

"The biggest thing that we wanted our kids to leave this drill with was that this stuff happens all over the place – not just in schools, but in churches, in malls, convenience stores, movie theaters," says O'Connor.

"These are skills that hopefully you never have to use, but we want to give you some idea of ways to survive worst-case situations."

It's about changing mindsets, Hodge says, and making sure people are aware of their surroundings and options. It's a sad world in which this is necessary, he says, but the reality is that the tools provided by the training can help to keep you safe whether you're young or grown, whether you're at the movie theater or the mall.

"It's in everyday life that we're trying to empower people to be aware of your surroundings and save yourself, not depend on somebody else to make those decisions and save you, because that's not always going to happen," Hodge says.

Because, at the end of the day, the goal is always for everyone to survive.