Perhaps it wasnt just micromanagement, which very well may have been the case, but perhaps it was also a case of tactics. While I was active duty, I was part of a first rate EST team whose primary mission was counter-terrorism ( lets face it, thats what these little miscreants really were, terrorists), so you could imagine most of our training included scenarios very similar to this one-wounded innocents and targets inside still killing. The way we handled scenarios like this, was to have a HEAVILY armed entry team, whose job was to secure ground and engage hostiles if encountered. The entry team WOULD NOT aid the wounded at that point, but would relay the location of the wounded to a second team, following the entry team, that usually had a great many medics in it. They would get the wounded out in a timely fashion while securing the rear. Having said that, however, at this time I in no way feel the SWAT teams are at fault here. They have orders they have to follow, and cant just go barging in on their own, no matter how much they wanted to (and I'm sure they wanted to) Lets face it folks, Rob's right when he said we cant armchair quarterback this operation. Hell, we dont even know when they had anything beyond a general description of the killers. When did they have positive ID : pictures of the two? Charging in and engaging any white adolecent male wearing black would have gotten even more innocent kids killed. Some might say ID'ing them would have been easy, just shoot the kids with the guns, but it rarely works like that. Too many other variables in the equation. Did SWAT do the right thing? I dont know that yet as all the information has not been collected, analyzed, and released. Did SWAT do what they could given their training and the situation at the time? I think so. For what its worth, 01paw