Ten years ago today, two teenagers carried out a plan with the goal of killing more than 500 people at their high school. They succeeded in killing 12 students and one teacher, and injuring many others.
April 20, 1999, the day of the Columbine High School mass shooting, was a wake-up call for Allen County schools and law enforcement.
“People could not ignore the fact, finally, that it could happen anywhere,” said John Weicker, co-chair for the Allen County School Safety Commission.
Within months of the shootings, the safety commission was formed locally and a school safety specialist was mandated in each school district in Indiana, both through state and local funding.
The safety commission - composed of public and private schools; colleges; safety specialists; and local police, fire and medical responders - meets monthly to develop plans to keep local schools safer. Results have been added cameras, numbers on all outside doors, locking of doors, security buzzers, lockdown drills and the school resource officer program.
The SRO program is made up of Allen County and city of Fort Wayne police officers. The men and women are stationed at each high school across the county. Carroll High School has the added benefit of a K-9 unit.
“Before we had him, we had more issues with kids bringing drugs into schools,” said Allen County Sheriff Officer Kevin Neher, who works with Max, a skilled black Labrador, at Carroll. Max is trained to detect drugs and guns in the school.
“Even though we'd all like to believe we live in Mayberry, it's not like that,” said Anita Gross, co-chair for the safety commission.
After Columbine, local law enforcement began to re-evaluate set procedures regarding schools. The conclusion: Don't wait around if there is an active shooter inside a school.
“We don't mess around. We don't sit outside. We go in and we find them and we kill them,” said Bryan Peterson, fire instructor in the division of training and development at the Public Safety Academy of Northeast Indiana.
At Columbine, as Peterson explained, the shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed suicide shortly after noon, but police were receiving reports hours later that the shooters were still in the building with hostages.
Hours went by without police and paramedics entering the school. Some died during the wait.
Now, the local SWAT team embeds paramedics in its squad so that during high-risk crime scenes, those people have the protection and are trained to help the injured or dying.
But with all the security changes, the best safety measure, school and law enforcement officials agreed, is communication.
In 80 percent of school shootings, Peterson said, someone knew it was going to happen.
At Columbine, Harris and Klebold had notes on when to buy the ingredients to make napalm and when the cafeteria was most crowded for when the bombs should explode. One had turned in a class paper that said he was going to kill everyone in the school, and the two made a class video demonstrating that very thought.
“(It's) the red flags these kids put up,” Peterson said of the Columbine shooters. “They did everything short of calling up the TV stations and (saying), ‘Hey, we're going to shoot up the school tomorrow.'”
All schools now encourage students to talk to an adult - and adults to do something with that information.
“If you can keep it in confidence, kids don't want that stuff in schools. They will come and tell you,” Weicker said.
