EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW: 25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents
/25 Years after Columbine - A SWAT Retrospective on School Incidents
By: Dr. John Giduck
In the morning of Monday, April 16, 2007, 23-year-old Seung-Hoi Cho shot two students in a dormitory on the Virginia Tech (VT) campus. Several hours later he walked into Norris Hall, chained the three sets of doors shut, then proceeded to mow down students in classrooms on both sides of a second-floor hallway. In all, he killed 32 students and professors. Another 27 were wounded or injured.
When the call came out that there was an active shooter in the building, SWAT teams from Blacksburg and VT police departments went racing there. Arriving in only two minutes, they fought their way into the building, then raced up two sets of stairs at either end of the hallway forcing Cho to take his own life. Lt. Curtis Cook led the VT SWAT operators into Room 211 where the killer was found. It remains the greatest mass shooting murder at a school in U.S. history.
This year marked the 25th anniversary of the mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado. Since that seminal event, the nation has endured hundreds of other school shootings. Lessons that America believed police had learned at Columbine in how to respond to attacks in our schools have sometimes been ignored. It seemed an appropriate time to gather the thoughts and reflections of the man who led a rescue team into the worst one of all, as he looks back over a quarter century of mass killings in our schools.
Beyond providing a few briefings for other SWAT teams and having taught ALERRT classes at VTPD as a certified instructor, Curtis has seldom spoken publicly of his experience. This year, he agreed to sit down and answer questions on the lessons American police should have learned from these horrors and what they need to be prepared for in the future.
Prior to joining VTPD, Curtis was a Navy Surface Rescue swimmer, then a deputy sheriff with the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Office in Virginia, where he served as a patrol sergeant and SWAT team Entry Leader. He joined VTPD in 1997 and became the SWAT commander in 2007 as a lieutenant. The attack at the school happened shortly after that. Curtis retired from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service. When Columbine happened, Curtis was a patrol officer at VTPD and had just started instructing officer survival at the police academy.
BLUE (Dr. John Giduck): What were your thoughts on Columbine, how it was handled and what LE needed to learn?
CURTIS: I think most everyone in LE had the same thoughts after Columbine: The police did what they’d been trained to do, but there was also the realization that people are going to die if you wait on SWAT. It was apparent after Columbine that the traditional response wouldn't work in that type situation. New techniques and procedures had to be developed for active shooters.
BLUE: Do you believe that LE nationwide learned what it needed to from Columbine?
CURTIS: I think it got the attention of law enforcement, but I'm sure a lot of departments struggled with how to task patrol officers with a response that SWAT would normally handle. In addition to just the tactical side involving entry and movement, the new issues were how to deal with explosive devices and mass casualties. If they weren’t going to be able to wait on SWAT, patrol officers had to be trained to respond and eliminate the threat.
I attended several presentations on Columbine that taught me and a lot of officers important information. But there were other events outside of school shootings that everyone needed to learn from and incorporate. For that, I also attended debriefs on the North Hollywood shootout and even the Texas Tower shooting. Columbine footage was being shown as part of our Immediate Action Rapid Deployment (IARD) training, and the Hollywood shootout identified the need to have specialized training and place rifles in police vehicles to respond to heavily armed suspects. But in the end, you can give police all the training in the world, equip them with better body armor and weapons, but none of that will ever make a difference if they aren’t doing everything they can to get into a building and move as quickly as possible to eliminate the threat and save innocent lives.
BLUE: Is it your impression that LE nationwide did adopt the tactics it was obvious were necessary for responding to active shooters in schools?
CURTIS: Yes and No. I know that many departments were adopting the LAPD – IARD training and techniques post-Columbine, and many departments were using their SWAT teams to train patrol officers in building searching and room clearing. But even after VT, I was shocked to learn that some departments had still not conducted any formal active shooter training. I think it was clear, however, that you not wait on SWAT to arrive at a school shooting. ALERRT has since become the standard for LE active shooter training across the US, but I have no idea how many departments have received that training.
BLUE: What are your professional thoughts on the responses to school shootings like that at the Marjory Stoneman Douglas school in Parkland, FL in 2018, Uvalde, TX in 2022 and the Covenant School shooting in Nashville, TN in 2023?
CURTIS: In Florida, I understand that the school resource officer (SRO) thought the shots were outside because shots sometimes don't sound like shots. However, it’s at that time, just like VT, when you have to quickly identify where the shots are coming from and relay that information to all responding officers. Once he learned the shots were inside, he should have entered. I believe he failed to act and failed to protect. What seemed to make that worse were flaws in the school’s lockdown procedures, which caused a serious delay in the code-red activation.
I think the deputies that arrived and took cover behind their vehicles instead could have formed a contact team and entered the school. From what I understand, they had active shooter training and not immediately moving into the building was contrary to that training. So, at least the training was correct. But that’s been the problem at times. We all know what must be done in these situations, but it’s not always being done.
I believe departments should be putting their most highly trained officers in schools. I fear that many departments feel the uniform presence alone, or parking a police vehicle in front of a school, will deter a shooter. It may, but that SRO inside needs to be highly trained and equipped for active shooters.
As to Uvalde, I don't even know where to start. After Columbine and VT, it’s hard to understand how this could happen. It was without a doubt a total failure of LE until the Border Patrol guys went in. It’s another clear case of failure to act to save lives and protect, and poor or untrained supervision and management. If the officers had active shooter training, why didn't they utilize it? I hate to hear things like: “The officers got shot at, so they stopped and left the building.” Yes, you may get shot at, and you may get hit, but in that circumstance, in my opinion based on my training and experience, they needed to try to fight their way in to save those children.
In the Covenant School shooting, the officers did what they were supposed to: They made entry, moved rapidly to the shooter and eliminated the threat. Despite the tragic loss of life, it was a success for LE. But there are still lessons to come from it. If the school would have had trained, armed police or security, they may have stopped the shooter much earlier, just as happened in the Apalachee School shooting in Georgia in September of this year. Despite the outcome of the Parkland, FL shooting, there really is no substitute for having armed, trained police or even security inside a school.
BLUE: In looking at all this over the years, how do you see the events at VT in April 2007 and how you/VTPD and Blacksburg handled everything that occurred that day, including your response to the Norris Hall shooting? In hindsight, if the same attack happened today, would you do anything different?
CURTIS: I think Cho made a horrible error when he committed the first murders. Although it did create somewhat of a diversion, he didn't anticipate the activation and deployment of two SWAT teams. It was clear that command from both BPD and VTPD were actively assessing everything together and making critical decisions. Like Columbine, we encountered something different, a new tactic, something unique in the doors chained from the inside of a building with limited access points and small windows. Responding officers did what anyone would have: They tried to enter through the doors, then changed tactics and found a different way in.
As far as actions in Norris Hall, everyone on the teams did exactly what they were trained to do: go directly to the sounds of gunfire, gather intel while moving, and when no shots are being fired, slow down, communicate, search for the gunman, identify and eliminate the threat, then treat and evacuate the wounded.
Like so many other cowards, he chose not to engage our team and took the easy way out. I have to remind myself often that the actions of those teams did contain him and forced him to stop shooting. That saved lives. Many more people were in the building and he had plenty of ammunition. We were fortunate in that we had command staff from both departments that worked well together, we had officers from other departments that trained and worked together. The teams had a mutual understanding of tactics and procedures for dealing with active shooters. As far as what I would do different, I've spent many sleepless nights since 2007 asking myself that same question. Basically, I would have used any means necessary to create an entry point, most likely utilizing a truck or vehicle to try and ram the doors. With the design of the doors and frames at Norris Hall it may not have worked, but looking back, it might have been another option.
BLUE: What should police officers nationwide learn from all of this?
CURTIS: I think what should be learned from VA Tech is when responding to an active shooter, you have to expect the unexpected, and you have to anticipate that you may encounter something that you have never trained for in the past. Departments need to do regular joint training and “what if” the scenarios to death. It needs to be understood that these killers study each other; they study police tactics and responses, and try to find ways to defeat those tactics. Police should be doing the same thing with the attacks that have come, to include terror attacks like the Bataclan Theater shooting in Paris in 2013 or even the Pulse Nightclub in Orlando, Florida in 2016. The Pulse Nightclub shooting may not have been an actual terror attack, but those two events saw a similar tactic used that police weren’t ready for. But who on the LE – or even government – side is paying attention, studying these things and advancing our training ahead of the next attack? I can tell you, though, that there are a lot of bad guys out there doing that very thing.
While there are many things we should have learned from Columbine and the many school attacks that have happened since, the single overriding lesson is that police cannot delay a single second. Each second lost is a bullet that didn’t have to go into the head of a kid. Though it may be controversial still, that even includes a solo officer going in if backup is not arriving immediately. Under no circumstances can you wait minutes or an hour, as happened with Uvalde. You are a trained, armed adult and this is the calling you answered in life. You may get shot and you may die, but you can fight back. For children inside, they have nothing to fight back with and them dying is a 100% certainty.
In addition to his Navy and law enforcement service, during his police career Curtis served as an instructor, both in-house and at the police academy, in Firearms, Defensive Tactics, Active Shooter response, Chemical Weapons/OC Spray, SWAT, CQB, Advanced Patrol Tactics and Homeland Security. He has also taught Citizen Emergency Response Team courses and women’s self-defense. After retiring from law enforcement in 2014 with 28 years’ service, he worked another two years at the VA Tech Department of Emergency Management.
Dr. John Giduck has a law degree, a master’s degree in Russian Studies and a Ph.D. in Middle East Studies. His dissertation was on the evolution of jihadist terrorist mass-hostage siege tactics throughout the world. He has trained police departments and SWAT throughout the US. He is the author of Terror at Beslan: A Russian Tragedy with Lessons for America’s Schools; Shooter Down! The Dramatic, Untold Story of the Police Response to the Virginia Tech Massacre, along with co-author Police Commissioner Joseph M. Bail; and When Terror Returns: The History and Future of Terrorist Mass-Hostage Sieges. He can be contacted at john@circon.org.
