"Countywide cooperation" seen as key to mass shooter response

AVON — The Emerald Event Center on Thursday was filled with people hunched over gaming laptops and talking back and forth, planning their next moves. Despite appearances, this was not an esports competition and the attendees were not playing a game — they were first responders from across Lorain County participating in a simulation of an active shooter event. Thursday was the final session of a three-day course given by C3 Pathways, a Florida-based company that provides "integrated emergency response" training to first responders around the country. Integrated response refers to the strategy and methodology of collaboration among all different entities when responding to a mass casualty event. In the event of an active shooter situation, C3 Pathways instructor Bill Godfrey said, there is no time for disagreement, setting up a hierarchy or failing to communicate among first responders. "All those things take time, setting up a response takes time," Godfrey said. "When people are bleeding, the one thing they don't have is time." The purpose of C3 Pathways and its simulation services is to show first responders how a response to a mass casualty event should look and allow them to practice immediately hopping into whatever role in that system is needed to stop the threat and save lives. The simulation consists of three command centers, each handling a distinct aspect of the response, a dispatch center handling calls and radio traffic and a variable number of teams on laptops that place them in the scenario virtually. In the scenario represented Thursday, a member of C3 portrayed a shooter who entered a virtual courthouse wearing body armor and carrying a rifle who opened fire on civilians. Three were killed and 10 were wounded, and the "shooter" then barricaded himself in a back room with several hostages. Police officers from multiple departments, EMTs and firefighters responded to the scene, each handling the role in the response they had been taught over the prior days of courses and simulations. That scenario is just one of nine that C3 Pathways can set up for a virtual simulation, with some of the other scenarios being a high school, college campus or a church. The C3 Pathways team was brought in by a partnership of Lorain County Law Enforcement Chiefs Association, the Fire Chiefs Association, the Lorain County Emergency Management Agency and the Ohio School Safety Center. The training was provided free to all participating Lorain County agencies, thanks to funding from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and allocated through the Texas A&M Engineering Extension Service (TEEX). The four local partners spent the last year laying out a countywide Active Shooter / Hostile Event Response (ASHER) Plan, based on the methodology and process recommended by C3 Pathways. "When we started this plan, we knew about C3 Pathways, their active shooter incident checklist and all the stuff they have done so it just made sense to incorporate that checklist into our plan. … It's the industry standard, in my personal opinion," School Safety Center Region 2 Mobile Training Officer Dan Makruski said. Sheffield Police Chief William Visalden, who is the Lorain County Chiefs Law Enforcement Association president, said the plan's purpose was to ensure that all the county's departments were aligned if an active shooter event occurs. "It's all about being on the same page," Visalden said. "We've got over 40 police and fire departments in Lorain County. We're training our own methodology, our own structure across the departments and the different disciplines … If something like this happens, you're going to call everybody. So we have to have the same structure and methodology in response." Having the plan is crucial, Visalden said, but its success in any given situation relies on communication between safety forces. Programs like the one in Avon this week serve the dual purpose of training with a plan but also just introducing first responders across departments and disciplines. Makruski said existing relationships and open communication are crucial in an active shooter situation, but that those have to be built up ahead of time. "Cooperation between the law enforcement and police and fire in this kind of a situation is huge," he said. "When you get there you don't have time to figure out who's gonna do what and build those relationships. You can't do that on scene, you have to do that now." Both Visalden and Makruski, a former member of the Amherst Police Department and current part-time Lorain County Sheriff's Deputy, said that they have seen that cooperation built up like never before this year. "This is very historic where law enforcement and fire are coming together on such a large scale," Visalden said. "In the 20-plus years I've been here I don't remember that ever happening on such a large scale as this. So thank you to the leadership of Lorain County (department heads)." Following the simulation on Thursday, just one of several simulations carried out on the last day, the C3 Pathways team provided an honest critique of how the team responded. They pointed out issues like police officers removing gunshot victims from the building too early before a perimeter was secure and ambulances had arrived. Participants also recounted how they could improve, or how they handled curveballs like the shooter calling dispatchers without warning, forcing them to become emergency negotiators. Overall, Godfrey said the response in the courthouse simulation was the best the Lorain County trainees had displayed that week. All injured people were treated within 20 minutes and removed from the scene within 26 minutes, the hostage taker agreed to a peaceful surrender and no police officers fired a shot in their response. "I cannot tell you how many times this scenario is mishandled and they end up in a gun battle with the suspect," Godfrey said. "Bystanders get hit, responders get hit or (the suspect) self-detonates. So great job, good clean-shoot report." Importantly, Makruski said, those who trained during the simulation in Avon this week are now equipped to go back to their home departments and train their fellow officers and firefighters in the county ASHER plan. Visalden said he wants to see the training and simulation program return to Lorain County, but, more importantly, hopes cooperation between departments and agencies continues to improve. "For years to come hopefully these kids here continue to build relationships and continue to do this," he said. "The relationships weren't like this when I started, that's for sure. It probably wasn't even like this when they started, so hopefully for the next generation coming in, this is the norm: countywide cooperation." Contact Owen MacMillan at (440) 329-7123 or omacmillan@chroniclet.com.