By Steve Schmadeke
The Chicago Tribune
DEKALB, Ill. — The medical training provided to Northern Illinois University police officers likely saved lives, but police arriving from other departments did not always take direction, creating what could have been a dangerous situation after a gunman opened fire on campus two months ago, killing five, two NIU officers told a national conference Monday.
Lt. Darren Mitchell told how officers who entered a lecture hall moments after the shooting ended found the gunman, a former graduate student, dead on stage and some students, uninjured, still frozen in their seats. Mitchell and Lt. Todd Henert gave the closing address at a campus security conference hosted by the University of Central Oklahoma, which also Webcast their remarks.
“A lot of people thought our chief was out of his mind,” Mitchell said of NIU Police Chief Donald Grady’s proposal to train all officers as emergency medical technicians, which was adopted about five years ago. “We’ve since had numerous occasions where our officers . . . have engaged in lifesaving treatment in order to help people. [Feb. 14] turned out to be the pinnacle . . . of how helpful it was.”
The 911 calls started flooding in at 3:06 p.m. that day, about the same time two campus officers about 200 yards away saw screaming students running out of Cole Hall, Mitchell said. The two officers, joined by another officer on foot patrol, ran to the building. The first officer entered Cole Hall from a back door at 3:08 p.m., and others, including Mitchell, were inside the lecture hall a minute later, he said. A total of 13 NIU officers responded.
Officers began to treat and triage injured students at 3:10 p.m., Mitchell said, and Cole Hall, where some people were hiding in the basement, was cleared at 3:15 p.m. The Fire Department was “reluctant to come in initially” because there were reports of a second gunman, Mitchell said, but police officers were able to treat students immediately, which “helped to save lives that day.”
Henert said teams of two officers were assigned to go door to door around campus to make sure they found all the wounded. NIU police also asked Illinois State Police to send a tactical response team because a threat scrawled on campus months before said there should have been two shooters at Virginia Tech University, Henert said, and police wanted to be prepared for a second gunman.
But some of the outside help was unneeded, Henert said. Five mobile command centers were sent to the school. A bomb squad showed up.
“Everybody wanted to help, and we loved that,” he said. “But to control the incident that’s happening in your community and campus, you need to make specific requests and get people to your check-in area.
“One team took it upon themselves to go room to room through [a] building and were pushing students into the open when they were safe where they were.”
He said other officers, hearing reports of a second gunman, began running into buildings from different directions.
Most experts speaking at Monday’s conference spent most of their time reviewing the events at Virginia Tech, where 32 people were slain a year ago. But Brett Sokolow, president of a risk management consultancy, was also somewhat critical of the way NIU tried to warn students on its Web site Feb. 14. He said the posting, which said there was a shooter on campus and to be on guard, was likely put up so quickly because of legislation pending in Congress that would require notification within 30 minutes. “Is that a valuable warning?” he said of the message. “Isn’t it just as likely to panic people?”
FBI Assistant Executive Director J. Steven Tidwell said campuses need to transform themselves to better identify students who could become violent. “One of the things we are now all doing is building picket fences,” he said. Universities should “have enough picket fences that sooner or later you’ll see them step over one.”
Copyright 2008 The Chicago Tribune