By Martha Bellisle
Associated Press
SEATTLE — As police raced to a Washington state high school last week in response to reports of a possible shooter, they faced the daunting task of trying to secure a maze of buildings that make up the sprawling campus, according to police radio traffic from the scene.
About a minute after 911 dispatchers reported at 10:39 a.m. Oct. 24 that they were receiving calls of a shooting in the Marysville-Pilchuck High School cafeteria, one officer got on the radio from inside said: “It’s confirmed. We have a shooter. We have five down.”
A few seconds later he added, “The shooter is DOA. We’ve got apparently four” and then “the shooter is down. Two causalities.” Two minutes later: “I have two that are still breathing and alive. Looks like I have three possibly deceased.”
Jaylen Fryberg, a 15-year-old freshman, was quickly identified as the person who opened fire at his classmates before killing himself. Also dead was Zoe Galasso, while 14-year-old Gia Soriano survived that first day, but died Sunday at the hospital. Shaylee Chuckulnaskit, Nate Hatch and Andrew Fryberg remain hospitalized.
Recordings of police radio traffic, sent to The Associated Press in response to a public records request, reveal the breadth of the police response and the difficulty as officers spent next two hours trying to get thousands of students to safety. Authorities have not yet released 911 calls from inside the school.
After one hour, 51 minutes, an officer called in to report: “I need four buses. We have several hundred kids still sheltered in place.”
One hour, 20 minutes into the crisis, the dispatcher told the command post that a parent called to report his son received a text message “indicating that they were lucky (Fryberg) only had six rounds. I don’t know if that was from the subject or secondary.”
The commander responded: “That needs to be addressed immediately.”
As officers arrived at the area, the command post moved them around — closing off this road, securing that building, taping those doors and filling those buses.
They had to get medics to the injured, but they didn’t know if anyone else was part of the shooting. That made the officer inside anxious.
“Advising it’s head wounds,” he told the dispatcher at 5:43 minutes into the crisis.
“Scene’s secure for aid -- get ‘em in here,” he said at 6:44 minutes.
“Aid can come in, they need to expedite,” he said at 8:11 minutes. And at 9:47 minutes, he said “We need aid ASAP.”
Ten minutes into the crisis, officers reported they had four medical units moving into the school and they identified a landing zone for a helicopter.
But they still needed to secure Washington’s largest high school and reunite those 2,500 students with their parents.
Officers went building to building, knocking on the locked doors and yelling “police.”
“We’ve got a group of 25 coming out of the library,” one officer said 34 minutes into the crisis.
The students and teachers had followed protocol and locked themselves in secure places, but that created a needle-in-a-haystack situation on a campus made up of dozens of separate buildings.
“We’ll be moving six out of the Edward Charles building,” one officer reported, using names to clarify the letter-name of the building. Others called out that they had 60 special-needs kids, about 30 from another room, three more and a teacher.
They moved some students through the parking lot before being advised that the cars had not been cleared. A new set of officers rushed in to make sure no other shooters were hiding in the vehicles.
It went on like that for hours.
They finally loaded the students on buses and carried them several blocks away to the Shoultes Gospel Hall church, and to their frantic parents.
The school 30 miles north of Seattle was closed this week and will reopen Monday. While a typical school day begins at 7 a.m., classes are scheduled to start at 10:30 a.m. instead. The school will have grief counselors available, said Aaron Toso, spokesman for the school district.
Copyright 2014 The Associated Press