GILROY
– If city police ever have to handle another threat of a
homicidal person with a gun at school, Assistant Chief Lanny Brown
said he wouldn’t change a thing from Friday’s emergency
response.
GILROY – If city police ever have to handle another threat of a homicidal person with a gun at school, Assistant Chief Lanny Brown said he wouldn’t change a thing from Friday’s emergency response.
But Gilroy Unified School District Safety Officer Roger Cornia said he would do things differently, specifically lifting a lockdown in a more orderly, informative manner next time.
On the whole, however, Cornia, Brown and other police officials said school staff executed the emergency plan well, in a way that ensured students’ safety.
On Friday morning, a female student – masking her voice to make herself sound male – told 9-1-1 dispatchers she had a gun at the school and planned to shoot a teacher. It was the first time Gilroy police ever had to put their “active shooter” protocols into play at a school.
The threat, as it turned out, was a prank from three students who weren’t at school, but police and school officials didn’t know that at the time and had reason to fear a slaughter like the Columbine High School massacre in 1999 in Colorado. The three 17-year-old students, two girls and one boy, were arrested Friday afternoon.
“The words were very powerful and threatening, as well as the tone,” Brown said of the call. “We put all that together, and we just can’t afford to assume that it doesn’t have merit.”
In the five years since Columbine, city police have planned and trained for dealing with a shooter in one of their schools. According to police self-evaluations afterward, they passed with an A.
The threatening call came in at 9:29 a.m. At 9:33, heavily armed police officers gathered outside the school and swept the school complex “on the probability that there was someone armed,” Brown said.
“We formed these minimum-four-person action teams,” the assistant chief said. “The first sweep is looking for anything obvious, searching the hallways, just making sure, looking without looking in the nooks and crannies.”
By 9:36, police had secured the threatened teacher and locked down the school, locking students and teachers in classrooms with lights out and window blinds shut. No one could leave a classroom for any reason.
Things stayed like that for nearly three hours, until – after a more extensive search proved there was no threat – police lifted the lockdown at 12:25 p.m.
Brown said all Gilroy police officers have been trained in the active shooter protocols.
“It’s a very fast, very assertive approach,” he said. “Part of that is putting the longer, more powerful guns in all the cars, buying the officers the ballistic helmets. It’s almost like a quasi-SWAT-team setup when you don’t have time to wait for the SWAT team.”
“That’s what happened at Columbine,” he said. “The initial patrol response got there, started setting up, and waited for the SWAT team to get there. They weren’t ready.”
As training for possible future incidents, the incident was “excellent” practice, Brown said.
One of the action team members – a Gilroy police official who said he has been through active shooter training twice – went so far as to say, “This was a great day.”
He especially praised the way city police, California Highway Patrol, sheriff’s officers and school officials worked together.
“If this was real,” the official said, meaning if a gunman was actually in the school, “we feel confident we would have been able to squelch it in a timely manner.”
Brown agreed.
“I am very pleased with the rapid response,” he said. “I wouldn’t do anything different.”
Cornia’s assessment of the school’s response was less glowing but still positive.
“My son goes here, and I wasn’t worried one iota,” he said.
Nevertheless, he said, “We want to do it perfect.”
During a mass exodus starting at 12:25 p.m. Friday, it became obvious that many students leaving GHS still didn’t know exactly what had happened. They said they had gotten their only information from cell phones and news sources on the Internet, television and radio.
Therefore, rumor and misinformation abounded.
“Our teacher told us everything would be OK, don’t worry, but that’s when cell phones started to ring and different stories were being told,” student Marisa Ceragioli said. “I heard so many stories, like there was a sniper on the roof, there was a gunman walking around campus.”
Just before the lockdown was lifted, Brown said, “The worst thing that we could do is just pull up stakes and go home, because then all the students and the teachers would leave, and then they would fill in the blanks.
“Not knowing the truth and what the facts are, they would typically make up their own story as to what happened here.”
Cornia said that during the lockdown, school officials told students and teachers nothing about the reason for the emergency measures.
“Most of our energy goes into dealing with the police and making sure that it’s a safe environment,” Cornia said. “We worry more about getting the information out after the lockdown.”
School staff planned an orderly release in which every student would be told what happened verbally and with a handout from the school district.
What ended up happening, Cornia said, was that “Once a certain amount (of classes) are let go, everybody just goes.
“We probably got about a third of the students with the full information.”
To compensate, the district went all-out to inform students and parents during the weekend. Students at every Gilroy school were sent home with the letter, which also was mailed to GHS parents. The district also e-mailed GHS parents and set up an automatic phone dialer with a recorded message explaining Friday’s incident.
Brown said parents he ran into around town afterward “were very complimentary about the information they received from the school district.”
Cornia noted that the intercoms in many of the classrooms are broken. Also, he said, “We want to clean up on how parents pick up” kids in an emergency.
At Columbine, he said, “The parents hurt the situation. The emergency vehicles couldn’t even get in because the parents were driving and parking all around the school for blocks.”
Both Cornia and Brown said school staff did well with their most important job – cooperating with police on the lockdown.
“They were very crisp, very cooperative,” Brown said.
“Situations like this can get real confusing, and I thought it went real well,” Cornia said.
Excerpts from a conversation at about 9:30 a.m. Friday between a Gilroy police 9-1-1 dispatcher and a female GHS student, age 17. The student made similar threats in a prior conversation with a CHP 9-1-1 dispatcher:
9-1-1: “Hello? (pause) Hi, can I help you? (pause) What’s going on?”
Caller: “I need to call in a threat on a teacher.”
9-1-1: “You want to do what to a teacher?”
Caller: “A threat. … The last couple days she’s been getting on my nerves.”
9-1-1: “What is your name?”
Caller: “If you don’t come get her, I’m going to bust a cap on her ass.”
9-1-1: “Are you at the school?”
Caller: “I’m at Gilroy High School. I’m telling you right now, … (garbled) … on her ass.”
9-1-1: “OK, what class are you in right now? (pause) Where are you at? (pause) Where are you at in the school? (pause) Hello? (pause) What’s going on? (pause) I need to know where you’re at.”
– End of call –
