Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Years later, Columbine lessons linger
Being prepared for an attack is new reality, many say
Thirteen killed. 24 wounded.
Those numbers still haunt Columbine.
On April 20, 1999, two teenage gunmen walked into the high school in Littleton, Colo., firing nearly 200 rounds in what remains one of the deadliest school shootings in the nation’s history.
Nineteen years later — in the wake of the Feb. 14 massacre at Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High — critics are questioning whether anything has changed.
What were the lessons learned from Columbine? And did any of those lessons help at Stoneman Douglas?
“Some people think nothing has changed — and that’s not true,” said Dr. John Nicoletti, a police psychologist who helped first responders, teachers and students affected by Columbine. “There’s tons of success cases throughout the country, but we never hear of it. People have made threats. And we do an intervention, and we prevent it.”
After the Columbine shooting, schools across the country embraced new security measures, including regular lockdown drills, metal detectors, seethrough backpacks and security guards on campus.
No one had heard of lockdown drills 19 years ago, said Dave Cullen, who spent 10 years researching and writing the book “Columbine.”
“Now every schoolkid in America knows what they are,” he said.
In the Jeffco Public Schools District, which includes Columbine, students start learning drills at age 3. In South Florida, lockdown drills generally begin in elementary school.
“We make a commitment every year to do lockdown drills and train every kid on strategies for success and survival. We start at 3 years old in our district. Preschool. You’ve got to start somewhere,” said John McDonald, executive director of security and emergency management for the Jeffco Public Schools District. “We’re teaching them how to respond to a threat, not just in a school but in a mall, a movie theater, a church.”
Training students on how to respond during an active shooter event serves a dual purpose, he said, because “the strategies we use will help law enforcement shut down the threat as fast as possible.
“It’s really about being emergency-prepared and not emergency-scared,” he added. “Lock down, lock out, shelter and evacuate.”
Two weeks after the Parkland shooting, McDonald visited Fort Lauderdale to meet with Broward County Schools Superintendent Robert Runcie and offer tips on crisis management.
“I just wanted to share the lessons we learned,” McDonald said. “We talked about the things they may be facing in the next year. It does take a significant amount of time to recover.”
Much went wrong at Columbine. The attack lasted 49 minutes, but the SWAT team didn’t enter the school until two hours after the shooting began. Officers went in just two minutes before the gunmen killed themselves. It would be another three hours before the officers discovered the shooters were dead.
Making matters worse, the SWAT team entered on the wrong side of the school, far from the library where most of the victims were, because they didn’t have blueprints. Today, most police departments have blueprints for schools in their district, just in case.
“It took several hours for them to reach the library,” said Cullen. “They thought there were several shooters, and they were going from room to room, working their way toward the library. They went in the wrong direction and they didn’t know where to go. School administrators were trying to sketch out the school for the SWAT teams.”
Arvada Police Commander A.J. DeAndrea, one of the first SWAT team members to search Columbine on the day of the shooting, said the events of that day made it clear that law enforcement needed to come up with a new protocol.
“Columbine was the watershed moment where law enforcement realized we had the wrong plan in place. We could not wait for SWAT teams. We needed to train officers to enter the building right away and address the threat,” said DeAndrea, who trains police in the United States and Europe on how to respond to active shooter incidents.
Since then, police departments nationwide are told not to wait: Go inside and confront the gunman, even if you’re the only cop on the scene.
It was a key lesson that did not help at Parkland, because the armed school resource officer at Stoneman Douglas High waited outside while the gunman fired at students inside.
What happened at Parkland shows that even the best-laid plans can fail, experts say.
Police officers weren’t sure where the gunshots were coming from and, at one point, tried to enter the wrong building in search of the gunman. But they did make it inside the right building 10 minutes after gunshots were first reported.
“When we responded at Columbine, there was no protocol to follow because there weren’t mass shootings back then,” said Nicoletti, the police psychologist. “Now we have an active shooter protocol. Rather than wait, you go in to take out the shooter.
“But you have to get it right every time. And once in a while, you don’t. And then you have a Santa Barbara or a Virginia Tech or a Newtown — or a Parkland.”