As told by Alex Flynn
“Is” is. “Is” remains distinct from “should be,” “could be,” “was,” and “shall be.”
With that bleak thought, I then sit down in the Trowbridge Elementary School’s principal’s office. I’ve been here before, but that is another story. He has a round table with two chairs. Thankfully, adult chairs. Meaning the lieutenant and I each take a chair, a chair usually occupied by a parent who came in here for a meeting with the principal.
The principal’s office represents bad news for us all, no? We go into the principal’s office (dread). The door gets closed (uh-oh). Someone starts talking (here it comes).
Lieutenant George Goodnow—a recent re-spelling of the local name Goodenough—adjusts his gun belt, ladened as it is with pistol, cuffs, radio, chemical spray, ammo, and the rest. He barely fits between the arms of the adult version of the school chair. The tawny-colored uniform shirt of the Vermont State Police stretches tight over the LT’s buttons.
“Sir, it is time we discuss the active shooter plan for the school.”
This time it is the principal’s heart that undoubtedly climbs into his throat. For all of the kids who have ever wanted to see the principal squirm, this is that moment.
“As you know the State Police have decided to close the barracks in Starksville and we are consolidating in new barracks about forty-five minutes north.”
I ought to let him continue, but given that you don’t live in Trowbridge Vermont, let me take a moment to point out that he described the fact that the troopers moved their offices north about a decade ago and I have never told this story in all that time. I sit here on a fall afternoon thinking of this odd event in my life, having just read of yet-another school shooting here in the United States.
Returning to the story’s events and the principal’s office, the lieutenant measures the distance in time between the former and future barracks. The principal and I both know that the normal drive time from Trowbridge Elementary to the then existing VSP station was already thirty minutes. Which I can do in about twenty-five minutes with lights-and-siren. In other words, a slow drive regardless of the status of an emergency. You can pick the high road or the low road. The high road carries you over a mountain. On the low road you push through a dark, narrow, twisty hollow accessed by a two-lane road next to a mountain river, often with no radio or cellular reception.
I do the math in my head. If a cop were in the new barracks when the principal hit the big red “oh shit” button, it would be an hour-plus before that cop arrived at this school. I assume the principal has already done this math or, like me, is doing it while the LT talks.
“As barrack’s commander, I am meeting with local schools to suggest that they revise their active shooter plan and drills to accommodate the increased response time.”
I forget the rest of the words from that meeting. I remember walking into it. I remember what I wore and what George wore. I remember the look the principal wore. I remember wondering what the existing school shooter/active shooter plan was. I remember the table, the chairs.
I do not remember walking out.
Who then is the most likely first responder to the school in the event of an active shooter? Me, a paramedic and chief of an EMS agency? Or maybe the fire chief? I’ll come blitzing down the paved road in my chief’s ride with red-lights and siren. Then what?
In The Little Ambulance War of Winchester County, I told a story of the one time we called SWAT to Trowbridge. It took about four hours for the team to arrive from Burlington. Their response truck looked just like the ones you see on TV: big, heavy, bullet proof, built-like-a-brick. And so not fast on the highway. Even with blue-lights-and-siren, this is the sort of emergency vehicle that gets passed by New Yorkers driving white Teslas to their weekend-places. Let’s assume that SWAT was never part of the active shooter plan for Trowbridge Vermont.
Being raised by Captain Flynn of the Boston Police Department, I lived the realities of cops, firefighters, and street medics. By my university days, I was a certified EMT and working ambulances in the metro area. I possessed an active imagination then and still do today.
I would think about, in a mental exercise that feels almost like fantasizing, emergency calls. These are not the fantastical thoughts of charging on to the field in a bright uniform leading a winning team to the state championship or standing on a podium getting a medal.
Those are normal teenage thoughts. I, on the other hand, would mentally paint myself into impossible situations then ask myself to get out of them. It was like watching a teenager version of Hercules in my head.
“Ok, you come up on a guy on the street with his liver being plucked by ravens, what do you do?”
“You’re in a bank and you see a guy wearing a trench coat concealing a broom stick, or a rifle, or a shotgun. What do you do?”
For some people, this might seem an odd way to live through the silent moments between wake and sleep.
See, I have already run from bank robbers. And for a few months, my father hired an elderly mobster to serve as our once-and-only-ever butler. I have also watched my sunglasses tumble several stories down the steel frame of a building. I was doing CPR, and the glasses honored the draw of gravity.
I imagined treating leg injuries that one might see in a war movie. It’s like sharing a fantasy life with Stephen Spielberg. As a rural medic, I later experienced treating those same injuries...on farms, with loggers, on the roads, and wherever humans and big machinery, and/or guns intersect.
You don’t need to climb into my mind to know that it is an odd place. That’s ok, you are safer from the outside. In the principal’s office, as George discusses the withdrawal of the state police from this region, I engage in one of these emergency call imaginings: The tone drops and dispatch informs fire and EMS of an active shooter incident at the school. We are given the customary instructions to “stage away” and await the arrival of the police.
What do I imagine the first responders and parents in Trowbridge do? The Fire/EMS radio mumbles instructions all day long in kitchens here. It is the local equivalent of twitching the front curtains. How the townspeople respond to the dispatch depends on who is in town and who hears the call go out.
I presume by the time I get on scene, I’ll find lots of guns, guns held by people accustomed to shooting critters, paper targets, orange road cones, and even a few road signs from moving trucks. However this school shooter story unfolds in my head, it ends badly for everyone.
In most versions, it is either me or another fire/EMS team member who is placed in the backseat of a police cruiser with their hands cuffed behind their back. What do the cops do? They arrive at a school shooting an hour-plus after dispatch tells fire/EMS to “stage away.” We just don’t have enough family names up in these hills. We share names just like we share families. Our entire student body fits into a standard yellow school bus with fifty seats. Cute, right? Old-school rural, right? Until you understand that our first responders are the parents, uncles, aunts, cousins, or in-laws of each and every kid in those classrooms. There is no “stage-away.” There is no “await arrival of police.”
We would mentally deputize ourselves in our fire/EMS uniforms and solve the problem. That means one or more first responders would be sitting in police cars after it was all over. The heroics of shooting a school shooter lands into a sticky place for professional police. Scene-of-crime technicians will inventory bullet casings, rifles, shotguns, pistols, and even the knives that we all have. They will carefully construct 3-D models of the events. Somebody done shot someone, therefore someone gets locked up. Those are the rules.
Then what about the media? They’ll want the names of everyone. They’ll want to print the story of who done what to whom. Someone needs to be a hero and someone the villain.
Nobody wants to be that hero.
Imagine being the paramedic or firefighter who killed a gunman in a school. That’s not a battle any career can tolerate. And the publicity would be catastrophic. Imagine if the gunman is whacked on drugs or maybe whacked because they are off their meds and experiencing delusional paranoia. To the shooter, Wendigos may be a real threat to the school. Or a parent could be intending to protect a child from a real threat, such as from an abusive family member who presents a real danger. Imagine being wrong? Imagine missing your intended target?
There is no right.
Regardless, the morning news programs would want interviews.
No!
I know what the team there would do. It would be for the right reasons. It would be tackled like a complex wildland fire or a horrific wreck on the state highway. We may be volunteers, but we train and work together in hazardous environments where most of our patients are armed. We’re actually good at this. We know how to develop a strategic plan. We know our resources. We communicate with professional skills. We work together, but we never once trained as the armed response to an active shooter. On that horrific day, we would be the only team there.
Please don’t make us that team.
That’s where my fantasizing carries me. My left cheek on a cruiser with my ankles kicked away from the midline. One trooper patting me down for weapons while another aims a pistol towards the center of my mass. Then instead of an after-action review, I am imprisoned alone in the back seat of a cop car.
If not me, then someone I know very well.
No!
You know the old saying, if not me, then who?
We don’t do the stand-still thing well, certainly not with our children in our school. There is no waiting, there is only action.
We know the right answer. Call the police and let them handle it. We just can’t do that though, can we?
None of this has [yet] happened in Trowbridge.
I am in the room when the state police tell the local principal to redraft the active shooter plan because the local police will be too far away to respond.
It used to be, back when this happened, the Town of Trowbridge contracted with the state police for twelve hours of patrol per month.
Until the state government later said: “No.” They said: “Dear tiny towns of rural Vermont, you must find another agency to provide your police services. Thank you. Signed: The Vermont State Police.”
The selectboard then had to hire the Winchester County Sheriffs to patrol for the few hours per month that we can afford with our tiny-town budget. Our tax money tends to get split between school costs and gravel for constantly repairing the 70 miles of gravel roads in our hills. Goodbye tax money, all gone.
We hired the sheriffs to patrol for a few hours a month, and they allocated a deputy to coordinate the routine misdemeanors that no community can ever find solutions to. But the sheriff’s department does not respond to 9‑1‑1 calls because we don’t pay them to respond to 9‑1‑1 calls. They are a police agency that bills for all services, by the hour. You pay for the cop and for the cruiser. It sounds mean to say this, but our deputies, by definition, are rent-a-cops. We have no county government and no county taxes. The sheriffs do not get a budget from the county (which does not exist). Furthermore, it doesn’t get a budget from the state because the state can barely afford the state police.
Which is worse, the cop that shows two hours after 9‑1‑1 is dialed, or the cop that doesn’t show up?
Therefore, about ten years ago, the local state police commander stated to the elementary school principal that there is zero chance that his agency can respond to or support the school during a critical incident and that the school must make other arrangements.
What do we do? As far as I then knew, we never developed a plan.
I wondered. Whose face do we see through the rear window of a police cruiser Is it Robby? Is it Al? Is it Harry? Is it Sam? Is it me?[LP1] I could be Brighid or Regina. That’s right, any one of us would step forward for that horrible duty and know that on that day you became a soldier and a soldier who stepped in front of someone else’s bullet. There is no neat ledger column for that debt.
If there is no real plan, then someone will do something. Right or wrong, someone will do something.
Not every story is funny or ends well. You learn that lesson early when responding to other people’s shit. The only other time I had seen inside that principal’s office, we discussed another no-win scenario. On that day, we discussed a kid who lived his life at the wrong end of violence, filth, drugs-addicted parents, and neglect. That story, like this one, has a non-ending ending, like a story that forgot the: ‘happily ever after’ or a sentence without a period