By Lisa Backus
The Herald
FARMINGTON, Conn. - The suspect was holed up two floors below as his wife explained to Farmington police he had been drinking again and had become belligerent.
The third pair of officers who responded to the call brought the man up two floors and watched for a few seconds as he traded barbs with the woman. It turned out he was still carrying his gun which he pulled out before he was handcuffed.
Before them, a pair of officers tried to go down the staircase and wound up exchanging gunfire with the man.
But the first pair talked the man into coming up one floor, where they could see him clearly. They made him turn around, his hands in the air, several times. Although he had no gun visible, they made him face the opposite direction as one officer deftly patted him down and grabbed the pistol tucked in his pants.
The scenario was loosely based on an incident three years ago in which Newington officer Peter Lavery was shot and killed responding to a domestic violence call.
“It wasn’t about second guessing what someone else did,” Farmington Training Unit supervisor Sgt. Patrick Buckley said. “It’s about raising the question: Maybe we should do things differently.”
The six officers, five from the Farmington police department and one from University of Connecticut Health Center police, spent nearly four hours recently participating in exercises designed to give them real-life experience when facing a variety of shooter situations.
Every member of the police departments, including Farmington Police Chief James Rio, will participate in the training.
The day started with instructions on safety and how to disarm an armed attacker. The guns used were actual Farmington police .40-caliber Sig Sauer pistols fitted with barrels that shoot Simunitions gunpowder-propelled bullets made of colored soap.
The guns can’t fire an actual bullet with the Simunitions barrel attached, and each gun was marked with blue tape after being fitted with a Simunitions barrel. Officers were not allowed to bring in their own guns or weapons of any kind, and each was searched for contraband before the exercises began.
The training was staged at the vacant Mercyknoll nursing home in West Hartford. The building, with several large halls and smaller rooms still filled with random furniture, provided a backdrop to allow officers to look for gunmen behind closed doors and in darkened hallways.
Sgt. Paul Lemieux and officers Susan Divenere and Eric Augustyn acted as shooters or victims, with Buckley and Sgt. Shawn Brown critiquing the outcome and providing suggestions on how best to handle the situation.
“Remember the Lavery incident,” Brown told the second set of officers after they had engaged the domestic-violence suspect in a shooting match.
"(Newington police) were entering the unknown. Rather than walking down the stairs where you’re walking into his domain, call out to him and talk to him. Bring him to where you are.”
The officers also “cleared” a dark hallway while aiming flashlights and guns simultaneously, peeking around corners and looking for shooters in unlikely places. They had to determine in a split second if the paper suspect was a risk carrying a gun or not toting a water bottle.
During one scenario, two officers walked into a room where a suicidal man was holding a gun to his head, leading to suggestions on how else to handle the situation.
“There was no reason to go in there as long as he was by himself,” Brown said.
“Talk to him and get him to come to you. Don’t give up any ground you have, but talk him into coming to you. Running in here probably isn’t the best thing to do.”
But if confronted with an active shooter when bullets are still flying and victims are trapped the response calls for something entirely different, Buckley said.
“It used to be that the local police department set up a perimeter around the area and waited for the SWAT team to show up,” Buckley said. “But after the Columbine shootings, we know you can’t wait.”
Two Colorado students killed 13 people eight years ago at Columbine High School.
In a related simulation Monday at Mercyknoll, four officers entered the hallway in a T-formation, three across the front with one center back. Screams and repeated shots could be heard throughout the building.
They advanced with instructions for each to watch their own 90-degree perimeter in their range of vision and not be distracted as the action unfolded.
They advanced together up the hallway and traded gunfire with an assailant hiding in a room to the left. But they were surprised when another attacker came at them from the front. Bullets (and paint) sprayed throughout the hall.
Most of the officers would have been killed.
“An active shooter is a situation where it’s not that shots have been fired but that shots are being fired now,” said Lt. William Tyler. “You can make sure several things happen, but you have to change the situation.”
He said the possibilities include the shooter surrendering, the shooter barricading himself, the shooter killing himself, the police killing the shooter or the shooter escaping.
“Any one of those five, even the shooter escapes, is an improvement beyond the initial situation you’re facing,” Tyler said.
Sgt. Buckley, the training supervisor, the lessons learned were designed to provide officers with experience in a variety of situations and locations.
“You can’t prepare for an ambush,” Buckley said, “But these types of situations you can prepare for and if they understand what it’s like to do it under stress, they can do it automatically when the time comes.”