An expert in how to handle active shooters struggled to keep his voice steady as he offered advice about how to survive a situation such as the mass attack in Las Vegas – because his close friend’s son was one of the victims shot in the deadly spree.
Marty Adcock, who became a police officer after serving in the Marines, is the program manager of the grant-funded Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) program out of Texas State University, which offers courses to teach police and other officials how to prepare regular citizens for unexpected gun attacks. ALERRT was created in 2002 and in 2013 was named the National Standard in Active Shooter Response Training by the FBI.
‘I was called at 1.30 this morning,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘My best friend from the Marine Corps, his son – who’s a paramedic in Los Angeles – was there in Vegas on vacation and was shot twice.
‘This is a young man I’ve known since the day he came to this earth, but they’ve got him listed as a yellow – which, in medical terms, you have greens, which is uninjured; yellows, who are what they call less severely injured; reds, who are immediate, who need surgery now; and then you have blacks, who are dead. So that’s how they color code it. He was downgraded from a red to a yellow and awaiting surgery right now. He took a round through the chest and one through the abdomen.
‘He’s a good kid, and he’s gonna be all right,’ said Mr Adcock, who wished to keep the young man’s name private. ‘While he was trying to provide aid to someone else that was injured, he was shot.’
No one expects it to happen to them – a deadly mass shooting interrupting their ordinary routine. But tragically, it does happen, as the world was reminded this week by the worst mass shooting in US history; gunman Stephen Paddock killed 58 and wounded hundreds more when he opened fire from the 32nd floor of the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas.
Gunman Stephen Paddock killed 58 people and injured 515 when he opened fire Sunday night from the Mandalay Bay hotel in Las Vegas
The victims had been attending the Route 91 Harvest Festival; the shooting currently stands as the worst in United States history
Retired NYPD Sgt Louis Rapoli and Lt Trent Lebo of Maryland State Police teach law enforcement officers how to train civilians to behave if faced with an active shooter
ALERRT Program Manager Marty Adcock awoke early Monday morning to hear that his friend’s son was shot and wounded in the Las Vegas attack
Active shooters have taken aim at unsuspecting victims everywhere from offices and salons to schools and nightclubs. And the key to survival, experts say, is preparedness and awareness.
Law enforcement officials across the United States are training civilians how to react in active shooter situations, which occur about once every three weeks, according to the FBI; courses such as the ALERRT’s Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events (CRASE) are built around achieving that goal and offer an ‘Avoid, Deny, Defend’ strategy. ALERRT has trained more than 86,500 civilians in the course.
‘We’re trying to program that hard drive in the brain, so when something does happen, people will have a response planned and have something to do should a critical incident happen,’ said instructor Louis Rapoli, who spent 25 years with the NYPD. While he was assigned to the School Counter-terrorism unit, he conducted threat assessments and investigations and trained law enforcement and civilians in active shooter response.
‘Avoid, Deny, Defend’ may sound like common sense, but in a panic, people often aren’t thinking clearly; it helps, instructors insist, to have the strategy firmly embedded in their memories beforehand.
First, civilians stuck in an active shooter situation should attempt to get as far away from the attacker as possible: that’s the ‘avoid’ instruction. If that’s not an option, however, they need to ‘deny’ access to their location, ideally locking a door, creating a barricade and turning off the lights. Even a belt can be used to jam a doorway, for example. Most active shooters want to kill as many people as possible in the shortest space of time, Mr Rapoli said, and will often just move on if they encounter an obstacle that will slow them down.
‘People that are in locked locations don’t tend to get killed in active shooter events,’ he said, describing such attackers as looking for the ‘path of least resistance … they’re like water.’
Finally, if there’s no way to avoid or deny the shooter, potential victims need to defend themselves – using whatever means necessary and looking around for anything that could be used as a weapon. Retired Sgt Rapoli uses an example of how most police officers, when in a restaurant, will sit near the kitchen; not only does that offer access to a secondary exit, but the kitchen also offers ‘weapons’ in the form of knives, pots, pans and other items. When he teaches the CRASE course around the country – such as on a recent Tuesday morning at East Orange Campus High School in New Jersey, attended by about two dozen law enforcement officers – he plays an audio tape of a 911 call from Columbine’s library, shows an instructional video and offers anecdotes from other infamous and tragic mass shootings in the US.
The courses focus heavily on one thing: action. ALERRT never advises playing dead as a strategy and uses the 2007 Virginia Tech shooting as a case study to show that rooms that played dead had higher fatality rates.
But tragedies such as the Las Vegas massacre offer their own unique challenges – particularly if victims can’t locate the origin of the gunfire. The ‘Avoid, Deny, Defend’ strategy still applies, Mr Adcock said, but it’s all about ‘finding yourself in a position where you can … look for something that would provide a hard cover ballistic protection to deny them access to you.’
Referring to the Las Vegas shooting, he said: ‘Where they were at, you could see quite a few of the barricades are just lattice-type bar steelwork that really did not provide a solid barrier. So avoiding, trying to move out of the affected area, getting out of range of the affected area is going to be the biggest thing.
‘So yes, Avoid, Deny Defend still applies, but how do you defend yourself against something like that?’ he said of the Vegas gunman’s high location.
He added: ‘Being that it’s a very flat area out there and the overview of the concert venue from Mandalay Bay is unobstructed, there’s real nothing … so moving further away, outside the venue, putting vehicles or other barriers between you and the affected area, is going to be your only option on that one.’
Las Vegas police sweep through a convention center area during a lockdown at the Tropicana Las Vegas following the deadly shooting on the Las Vegas Strip
Experts advise people to try to find ‘hard cover ballistic protection’ to deny an outdoor active shooter access; the Las Vegas gunman took aim from the 32nd floor
Civilians are taught through the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) courses to ‘Avoid, Deny, Defend’ themselves from an active shooter
If a gunman opens fire from the ground at such a crowded event, he said: ‘If you’re in very close proximity – we’re talking, you know, arm’s distance, even small room distance – or avoiding is not going to be an option, you may have to go, “Avoiding or denying is not an option.” You may have to go immediately to the defend mode and try to somewhat take the fight to the attacker, get your hands on the weapon. If it’s a firearm, try to get the weapon pointed to a direction where it can’t cause you or anyone else harm.’
If one person begins to act in self-defense, he said, other potential victims also often step up in an effort overpower the attacker.
‘Once you have started the defense process, normally you’re going to see that other people will pile on and help you out – so it’s an immediate trying to enlist others to save themselves,’ he told DailyMail.com.
Civilians also need to learn what gunshots sound like, instructors said, even if that just means playing an audio file to groups being taught by law enforcement officials – so that citizens don’t attribute the noise to something such as a book falling or a car backfiring.
Before the Vegas shooting, Mr Adcock told DailyMail.com there had already been a definite increase in interest from civilians and various community groups who want to receive training.
ALERRT’s Civilian Response to Active Shooter Events course does not advise people caught up in an active shooting to play dead and instead urges action
Karen (51) and Derek Bernard (53) from Los Angeles react following the mass shooting in Las Vegas on Sunday night
‘I probably answer 30 emails a day from citizens around the country asking where can we get this training at – so I try to connect them with someone in their local area that’s been through the training,’ he said.
Some specific events have spurred those queries, such as the June 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, he said.
‘We have a huge interest from church communities; the religious communities are reaching out to us a great deal.’
Instructors urge vigilance and warn against the complacency that comes with routine.
‘Don’t think that nothing can happen,’ Mr Rapoli said. ‘I think people need to go into this with an open mind and realize that anything can happen … to be prepared, rather than to not be prepared. If you’re not prepared, you’re going to default to your training, which is nothing – and then bad things are going to happen. So I would say everybody should open their minds and say, “Hey, this can happen” – and be prepared.’
And despite the sad fact that there’s a need for active shooter response training at all, ALERRT’s Mr Adcock said it can foster relationships between law enforcement and the community.
‘What I find with most of the officers that go out and teach it, most of them really enjoy going out and teaching it,’ said Mr Adcock. ‘They look at it as their one opportunity to truly have a positive contact with a citizen – because if you think of the contact we have with citizens, they’ve been robbed, they’re just been beaten up, had their identify stolen, they’ve been in a car wreck. Almost every interaction we have with our citizens is somewhat negative: they’re being pulled over, given a traffic ticket. A lot of the officers look at this as their opportunity to go out and show them we truly do care.’
Mr Rapoli added: ‘There’s a lot of good work that people are doing in the community, whether it’s schoolteachers or business or law enforcement … reporting things that are observable behaviors. And believe it or not, there’s a lot of things that are prevented that you never even hear about.’