By Andrew Welsh-Huggins
Associated Press
COLUMBUS, Ohio — A police officer credits his training for allowing him to quickly stop the man responsible for a car-and-knife attack at Ohio State University a year ago, according to a video released Monday.
That training “kept my whole world from collapsing in on me” during the moments during which he shot and killed the attacker, Ohio State Officer Alan Horujko says in the 14-minute video produced and released by the university.
Horujko has declined interview requests. The university said he agreed to share his experiences through the video as the attack’s one-year anniversary approached on Tuesday. The school plans a commemorative event Tuesday on campus.
“We’re trained to be problem solvers, very active, very quick,” Horujko said. “These things develop in milliseconds, and you have to make these very complex decisions and keep making them as you go along the way.”
Horujko shot and killed Abdul Razak Ali Artan on Nov. 28, 2016, after the 18-year-old drove into a crowd outside a classroom building and attacked people with a knife. Horujko’s actions were cleared by a grand jury in May.
Thirteen people were injured in the attack.
Horujko, 29, said he’d trained for a knife attack just a month earlier. It was a coincidence Horujko was so close when the attack started: He had just arrived to help firefighters who had evacuated a building due to a gas leak unrelated to the attack.
The Somali-born Artan came to the U.S. in 2014 as the child of a refugee. He had been living in Pakistan from 2007 to 2014.
Authorities believe Artan’s attack was partly inspired by an American-born cleric killed in a U.S. drone strike in Yemen.
In a series of Facebook rants posted just minutes before the attack, Artan nursed grievances against the U.S.
“If you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks, then make peace” with the Islamic State group, he warned in those posts. He also railed against U.S. intervention in Muslim lands.
After arriving on campus, Artan drove his brother’s Honda Civic over a curb and into a crowd of people and crashed it into a planter. Artan then got out and started slashing at people with an eight-inch knife, records show.