ST. LOUIS — Police, fire and school officials say all their work training for active shooters saved lives this week.
Security officers at the St. Louis Public Schools campus saw a man enter the building with a rifle and called police right away. Administrators warned classrooms over the loudspeaker with a code phrase. Students and teachers locked doors, turned off lights and huddled away from windows. Police and emergency crews arrived quickly, evacuated the school and found the shooter.
The St. Louis fire chief called it the result of a “massive amount of training.”
The police chief said officers didn’t hesitate to storm the building.
“The drills worked,” DeAndre Davis, director of safety and security for St. Louis Public Schools, said Tuesday. “The kids worked. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. They barricaded those doors. They got away from those windows, and when it was time to evacuate, they did the best they could. They got out of that building.”
Everything went as well as it could have, all three chiefs said, given the scenario. And the reaction to their response, at least so far, stands in stark contrast to that of other recent school shootings. Police were heavily criticized in 2018 for waiting outside Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, while a gunman killed 17. And police struggled to coordinate a response in May this year in Uvalde, Texas, where 21 died.
In St. Louis, authorities say 19-year-old Orlando Harris busted a window out of a door at Central Visual and Performing Arts and Collegiate School of Medicine and Bioscience, a two-school campus at Arsenal Street and South Kingshighway near Tower Grove Park. He entered the buildings carrying an AR-15-style rifle and about 600 rounds of ammunition, police said.
He shot and killed two people: 61-year-old Jean Kuczka, a mother of five who taught health and physical education, and sophomore Alexzandria Bell, 15, who loved art and dance, friends and staff said.
Four other students were shot and injured — two in the leg, one in the arm, and one in the hands and jaw. Two more students suffered abrasions, and a girl fractured her ankle.
But it could have been far worse, authorities said.
They described a campus that locked down quickly when the shooter arrived.
Theater teacher Lauren Ogundipe said on Tuesday that the school held intruder drills frequently, at least once or twice each semester. One drill had already been held this school year. Teachers are told in advance before the drills. Administrators make announcements over the intercom using a code, she said.
“We are to barricade ourselves in our room, locked,” she said.
Ogundipe said that when some people heard the code on Monday, they assumed it was another drill. But they followed the procedure.
Davis, the security director for St. Louis Public Schools, described security officers on duty. The ones stationed at the school aren’t armed, he said — they serve as sports coaches and after-care supervisors and hope to build relationships with students.
And it was a security officer who first called police on the gunman, authorities said.
The security officers then began directing police to where the shooter was. They gave police “the outline of the building,” Davis said.
City leaders have complimented the quick response by police officers, too.
“They did an outstanding job,” interim St. Louis police Chief Michael Sack said Monday evening. “I don’t know how they could have done better.”
Throngs of officers arrived four minutes after receiving the call for an active shooter. The officers confronted the shooter eight minutes after they arrived. And police reported “suspect down” two minutes later. Some of the police officers, both on-duty and off-duty, arrived quickly because they had been attending a funeral nearby for a colleague.
Sack, Davis and Mayor Tishaura O. Jones all credited active shooter training.
Davis said police and school employees had such training about a month and a half ago and have ongoing sessions. Sack said every police officer in the department goes through active shooter training once per year.
The mayor mentioned other school shootings in the nation and said, “because of this grim reality, the St. Louis Police Department, St. Louis Public Schools, our charter schools and the mayor’s Office of Children, Youth and Families have been conducting frequent trainings on how to respond to emergency situations like what we experienced yesterday.”
“Trainings and active shooter drills are essential to ensuring that they responded as quickly as they did,” Jones added.
The St. Louis Public Schools board president said Tuesday he felt a shooting in the city was a matter of when, not if.
“One of the hardest things is that people keep saying the district did everything right, that the police did everything right,” Matt Davis said at a news conference at the district’s downtown headquarters. “And yet we’re still left with tragedy. A safe place, a sacred place for our childhood, and it’s been taken away from our kids in this city.
“We have got to do better.”
Parent Ebony King lauded police but also Principal Frederick Steele at Collegiate school where King's 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore.
King was texting and talking with her daughter Monday as her daughter hunkered down in a classroom as the gunman was on the loose.
"My daughter heard her principal clearing out the hallways," King said. "She said, 'Mom, I can hear him shutting the doors and moving the kids out of sight.' She just said she felt safe and she was OK."
King said the drills paid off.
"The police response, you know, they responded swiftly, they did an amazing job, but you've got to understand, Dr. Steele is a first responder too because he's a principal at the school and he has no weapon," King told the Post-Dispatch in an interview Wednesday morning. "He was actively going throughout the school making sure they were locked in their classrooms and out of sight."
King can't help but think of how quickly things could have gotten so much worse.
"Just think if they didn't have the drill and he didn't practice it with the students," King said. "I'm thinking that it could have went wild, like the Texas shooting, where so many kids were lost.
"Unimaginable what could have happened to our babies," King said. "So many lives were saved."
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(Blythe Bernhard of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch contributed to this report.)
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