Tough situation greeted SWAT team
By Mark Eddy
Denver Post Staff Writer
April 29 - In the week since the Columbine High School massacre, the responding SWAT teams have faced criticism from students, other officers and the public for supposedly not acting fast enough.
But SWAT officers nationwide say it's impossible for the public to know what was being done, and one of the first officers at the scene said he and his team were in the school within 30 minutes of the first shots.
"I didn't even take the time to change clothes, I just threw on a bulletproof vest, a tactical vest, my helmet and my gun," said Denver SWAT officer Jamie Smith.
Smith was enjoying a day off mowing his lawn about a mile from the school when a neighbor told him about the shooting.
SWAT teams spend most of their time knocking down doors during drug busts and dealing with one or two gunmen barricaded in a house. But they also train for situations where they must enter quickly and hunt down suspects who are killing hostages, Smith and others said. "We call them shooting sprees when the suspect is in there taking lives and you don't have time to formulate a plan, you don't have time to wait for the equipment van to get there," Smith said. "It's just chaos."
Smith and his partners - Ken Overman, Ross Monahan, Mark Lewis and Tony Iacovetta - moved from room to room through the school looking for what they were told were two to six shooters who may or may not be students, he said. "Our philosophy is if we can stop the killing of lives right now, we do it," Smith said. "Typically we take the first few officers on scene, we don't wait for an entire team, and we become the aggressors. We go in, we listen for the sounds of the shooting, the screams, the chaos and we try to track down whoever's doing this."
But listening at Columbine was nearly impossible, he said, because of the blaring fire alarm.
"The alarm was so loud that you couldn't hear any gunshots, you couldn't hear any screaming," he said. "We couldn't direct our efforts to any part of the building because we didn't know where they were. So the tactics we normally would do in this case were defeated by the noise. At that point we pretty much had to search every classroom we went by."
Nothing at Columbine worked in the officers' favor, said Larry Glick, director of the National Tactical Officers Association.
"That incident in Denver ... was truly the worst-case scenario ever encountered by SWAT," he said.
The combination of an unknown number of unidentified shooters moving through a large building with lots of kids being shot or held hostage created something no SWAT team ever wants to face, he said. Glick, who watched live television reports of the shootings, said it's understandable that the public feels the SWAT officers didn't move in fast enough.
"I watched the first 30 minutes of the live broadcast and even my emotions started to rise, wanting to know why it appeared we weren't doing more," he said. But he called officers he knew in Jefferson County and was told SWAT teams already were in the building.
Some relatives of Dave Sanders, a teacher who bled to death as SWAT teams moved through the school, and students who tried to help him have criticized police because they took students out first and then carried out the injured teacher.
But the main job at that point is to get uninjured people to safety and then tend to the wounded, Glick said. The tactical organization is reviewing the response at Columbine, as well as the command, control and communications at the scene, Glick said.
"The situation where you have an active shooter with a number of potential victims, we've only experienced that now with the recent shootings at schools over the last three or four years - yet tactical teams have always trained" for that scenario.
Because of durable construction and complex layout, and because they house large numbers of students, schools are ideal for maniacs determined to cause as much death and destruction as possible, said Major Steve Ijames, head of a SWAT unit in the Springfield, Mo.
"You really can't pick a better place than a school," Ijames said. In the aftermath of the Columbine slaughter, Denver police sent officers to every high school to familiarize themselves with the layout and asked for blueprints of all the schools, Smith said.
Ijames said SWAT teams around the country had better prepare themselves for more school attacks.
They'd "better sit down with pen and paper and figure out a way to counter that type of thing if it happens," he said.
By Mark Eddy
Denver Post Staff Writer
April 29 - In the week since the Columbine High School massacre, the responding SWAT teams have faced criticism from students, other officers and the public for supposedly not acting fast enough.
But SWAT officers nationwide say it's impossible for the public to know what was being done, and one of the first officers at the scene said he and his team were in the school within 30 minutes of the first shots.
"I didn't even take the time to change clothes, I just threw on a bulletproof vest, a tactical vest, my helmet and my gun," said Denver SWAT officer Jamie Smith.
Smith was enjoying a day off mowing his lawn about a mile from the school when a neighbor told him about the shooting.
SWAT teams spend most of their time knocking down doors during drug busts and dealing with one or two gunmen barricaded in a house. But they also train for situations where they must enter quickly and hunt down suspects who are killing hostages, Smith and others said. "We call them shooting sprees when the suspect is in there taking lives and you don't have time to formulate a plan, you don't have time to wait for the equipment van to get there," Smith said. "It's just chaos."
Smith and his partners - Ken Overman, Ross Monahan, Mark Lewis and Tony Iacovetta - moved from room to room through the school looking for what they were told were two to six shooters who may or may not be students, he said. "Our philosophy is if we can stop the killing of lives right now, we do it," Smith said. "Typically we take the first few officers on scene, we don't wait for an entire team, and we become the aggressors. We go in, we listen for the sounds of the shooting, the screams, the chaos and we try to track down whoever's doing this."
But listening at Columbine was nearly impossible, he said, because of the blaring fire alarm.
"The alarm was so loud that you couldn't hear any gunshots, you couldn't hear any screaming," he said. "We couldn't direct our efforts to any part of the building because we didn't know where they were. So the tactics we normally would do in this case were defeated by the noise. At that point we pretty much had to search every classroom we went by."
Nothing at Columbine worked in the officers' favor, said Larry Glick, director of the National Tactical Officers Association.
"That incident in Denver ... was truly the worst-case scenario ever encountered by SWAT," he said.
The combination of an unknown number of unidentified shooters moving through a large building with lots of kids being shot or held hostage created something no SWAT team ever wants to face, he said. Glick, who watched live television reports of the shootings, said it's understandable that the public feels the SWAT officers didn't move in fast enough.
"I watched the first 30 minutes of the live broadcast and even my emotions started to rise, wanting to know why it appeared we weren't doing more," he said. But he called officers he knew in Jefferson County and was told SWAT teams already were in the building.
Some relatives of Dave Sanders, a teacher who bled to death as SWAT teams moved through the school, and students who tried to help him have criticized police because they took students out first and then carried out the injured teacher.
But the main job at that point is to get uninjured people to safety and then tend to the wounded, Glick said. The tactical organization is reviewing the response at Columbine, as well as the command, control and communications at the scene, Glick said.
"The situation where you have an active shooter with a number of potential victims, we've only experienced that now with the recent shootings at schools over the last three or four years - yet tactical teams have always trained" for that scenario.
Because of durable construction and complex layout, and because they house large numbers of students, schools are ideal for maniacs determined to cause as much death and destruction as possible, said Major Steve Ijames, head of a SWAT unit in the Springfield, Mo.
"You really can't pick a better place than a school," Ijames said. In the aftermath of the Columbine slaughter, Denver police sent officers to every high school to familiarize themselves with the layout and asked for blueprints of all the schools, Smith said.
Ijames said SWAT teams around the country had better prepare themselves for more school attacks.
They'd "better sit down with pen and paper and figure out a way to counter that type of thing if it happens," he said.