SWAT team swarms campus

Dozens of police officers carrying their guns and gear surrounded the Miller Administration Building to rescue three simulated gunshot-wound victims in an active gunman response-training scenario yesterday. This multiple-jurisdictional exercise involved police officers from the Weber State University, South Ogden and Ogden City Police Departments along some emergency-medical personnel from the Ogden City Fire Department's Engine 5, the Ogden Metro SWAT team and a University of Utah MEDEVAC helicopter team. The drill involved an active gunman in the administration building who shot three women. The first two women who were shot, Kayli Shadow from the purchasing office and Diana Meiser from the Provost's office suffered from a gunshot wound to the abdomen and leg respectively. Three members of the South Ogden P.D. and the Engine 5 medic team entered the building within 15 minutes of the incident to rescue these two women. The third victim, Vice Provost Emily Deeter, remained under barricade with the shooter for several hours until the SWAT team entered the building to take out the shooter and rescue her. WSU Police Chief Dane LeBlanc said that all victims in similar situations, ones in which the shooter is still alive in the building, have generally had to wait until the threat is completely eliminated before being rescued. "The building has to be secure before medical will come in and do anything," LeBlanc said. "In our planning for this, we met with the Ogden City Fire Chief and talked about how it doesn't make sense to let victims sit any longer than they absolutely have to." "It is the responsibility of the on-site commanders to decide if it is safe for medical to enter the building with an armed escort while the shooter is still under barricade." LeBlanc said he had never heard of another agency using the armed-escort medical extraction tactic before this exercise. Meiser said she thought the training was a valuable learning experience for everyone involved. She said the employees working in the building got to practice their evacuation procedures and the police and medical personnel got to practice their techniques. "Time was of an essence and they moved with speed and intensity," Meiser said. "I really feel like they knew what they were doing." Shadow said the police and paramedics were also decisive and quick thinking. During the extraction, the Engine 5 medical team loaded Shadow onto a gurney they had brought up the elevator with them. With a person on the gurney, however, it would not fit back into the elevator. In a quick decision they decided to leave the gurney and carry Shadow out on a stretcher. Sergeant Trent Olsen of the South Ogden P.D. said multiple-jurisdiction training helps different departments and medical teams stay on the same page so that their actual response to emergency situations are natural. "Most departments have similar standard operating procedures," Olsen said, "but it is important for us to work together in training so that there are no surprises when an actual emergency is underway. Plus, a lot of shootings take place on university campuses and at schools so this is great multi-jurisdictional training for us." In addition to being training for all the officers and medical personnel, this event was also an opportunity for WSU to test its recently created Code Purple emergency information technology. Code Purple is a notification system WSU uses to send voice and text messages to the phone numbers students list at the time of enrollment. "The difficulty is that a lot of students use their mom and dad's house phone number when they enroll," said John Kowalewski, the WSU director of Media Relations. "It is impossible for us to know how many of those people who have not actively entered a cell phone number into the system will actually get emergency notifications." Kowalewski said that only about 20 percent of all students, staff and faculty members have currently entered a verifiable cell phone number into the Code Purple system. The system is not only used for emergency situations such as the one practiced yesterday, it will also be used to notify receivers when school is closed because of snow or anything else that may affect their health or safety. Students, staff and faculty members can update their emergency contact phone number using their personal eWeber portal.