Training For Active Shooter

By VERNON ROBISON

The Progress

The sounds of gun shots rang out through an Overton neighborhood for about 10 minutes on Saturday morning, Dec. 3. The shots came from the campus of Mack Lyon Middle School. Dozens of law enforcement and emergency medical crews rushed to the scene ready for action.

But it wasn’t at all what it seemed. Rather it was the first large-scale, multi-agency active shooter training exercise ever conducted in the Moapa Valley.

The event, which lasted a little more than an hour, ran local emergency responders through a complex and chaotic scenario. It included the apprehension of two active shooters roaming the campus. Then it continued with coordinating emergency medical response to triage about 20 victims, perform basic first aid, extract all victims from the school and arrange transport to various hospitals for care.

Nearly 90 people participated in the exercises. These included about 30 local volunteer firefighters, 10 local Metro officers, 5 NHP troopers, 10 Metro active shooter incident experts called in from Las Vegas and about 30 civilian role players called in to help make things even more real.

The scenario was planned in a coordinated effort between local Metro Sergeant Keegan Doty and Moapa Valley Fire District Chief Stephen Neel.
“Overall I felt it was a great success,” said Neel in an interview after the event. “I feel like our objectives were met in testing our capabilities and our response.”

Neel acknowledged that there were areas that went very well and other facets that needed work.
“But that is the whole point,” he said. “This type of exercise is designed to highlight areas to improve. Now we take those back into training with our guys and we work on those things.”

Doty agreed that the purpose of the exercise was for his officers to be better prepared for anything.
“You never want an actual event to be the first time you face something like this,” Doty said. “We do the training now so that we will be better prepared for it if that day should ever come.”

The scenario officially began at about 9 am with shots being fired in the front office of the school. A small group of young roleplayers ran out of the front door screaming as the gunfire continued from inside.

A few minutes later, CCSD officer Jimmy Lescinsky was the first responder on the scene. Without backup and without delay, Lescinsky immediately ran into the building toward where the shots were being fired. A brief firefight occurred in which Lescinsky was shot and injured.

Within a couple of minutes, two Metro officers made contact with Lescinsky who told them the direction the gunman had gone.

More gunshots and screams came from a hallway near the office. The officers ran to engage, being joined by other officers who had arrived in the meantime. They navigated through a smoky hallway filled with the bodies of more than a dozen students who had sustained injuries in the simulation.

The gunman was eventually apprehended in the Assistant Principal’s office.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the campus, a second gunman was opening fire. Other officers who had also arrived on scene moved to apprehend this perpetrator as well.

The scenario even included a small number of armed civilian parents who entered the campus on their own to assist. In planning the exercise, Doty recognized that this is a real-to-life possibility in the Moapa Valley community. But in a real-life event of this kind, Doty highly discouraged it.
“Two of the three armed parents got shot by NHP who mistook them for perpetrators,” Doty said. “It is not a good idea.”

Doty acknowledged that there might be times for concealed carrier civilians to help out in such a situation. But that would mainly be if the armed civilians happen to be there just as the incident is starting to unfold, and before any law enforcement response.

“If you are johnny-on-the-spot and something like this is unfolding, that would be up to you whether to engage or not,” Doty said. “But once the cavalry has arrived and law enforcement is in the building, it is a very bad idea. If police are on site, let them do what they are trained to do. These are high stress, high emotion events. There is a lot of chaos and quick decisions are made without delay. It is not a good place for untrained civilians to be.”

Once the campus was determined to be secure, the Rescue Task Force (RTF), or emergency medical services, were given the go-ahead to enter the building and begin treating and transporting the injured.

In this event, law enforcement officers were able to apprehend the shooters within about 10 minutes. It was at around the 20 minute mark when RTF arrived and began treating the first casualty.

Neel said he was pleased with this. “Our time to getting to our first patient was less than half of what they do in training exercises in Las Vegas,” Neel said. “That is a huge difference.”

Neel explained that the major factor in that difference was an open radio communication line between police and fire.
“Moapa Valley is the very first firefighting organization in all of Clark County to have the Metro radio channel,” clarified Sergeant Doty. “That is a big deal. It hasn’t been done before.”

Doty said that in other areas of the county, the police and fire commanders must coordinate with each other only through dispatch. This adds time to the process, he said.
“We had to go to bat a little bit to get that communication link out here,” Doty said. “But we really do need it. Being in an outlying rural area, there is already a lot stacked against us here. This allows us to communicate right away on where the safe spots are so that medical teams can move in with no delay.”

At the 35 minute mark, the first casualty was being loaded into an ambulance. All patients had been transported within just over an hour after the exercise had begun.

“I’m glad that we were able to get all the various entities here and do this today,” Doty concluded. “This is something that should have been done years ago. And we should be doing it more often. What we learned today will be the subject of training for a long time to come.”