and came up with a game plan on how we were going to do this event. On January 29, we issued the contract to her. We had some con- ditions with the contract. They were going to pay for the security be- cause we weren’t going to pay for it. We billed her for the security, which, by the way she didn’t want to pay. She is used to going to these That expense was going to come on us. For a $2,000 rental, why am I going to take a $50,000 loss? That cost was passed on to her. You pay it or you don’t come into the facility. We also required that the event become a ticketed event; that way
we had information on everybody who was coming to the event. We had names, addresses, phone numbers, emails, etc., of everyone that was attending the event. We knew who needed to be here because we went through our process of how do we know who is coming on the lot and who should or should not be here. We also said that there would be no audiovisual for the event. They couldn’t pay us to do the audiovisual because wanted to be a participant in that. They did not do any audiovisual. We had preset with a microphone
gave police time to do eye observations. There were trained individuals from the police department watching individuals’ behavior, and that was their only job. They were able to pick folks up at that time and ob- serve them all the way in. An individual would have to show something at that point to take that many steps to the facility. The cartoons were already drawn and turned in to the New York
“Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have taken place if those weapons would have been out there...? We wouldn’t be talking about this event in the manner that we are right now because there could have been hundreds of casualties...”
ity. We had metal detectors and had no bags. Not even just clear bags,
already on and all they had to do was hit the on button and it was of the day there were pictures of what the contest was. That was their main deal because it was a contest. who told me why he couldn’t arrest those individuals for the event on show up here again. In my opinion, this was the single best thing we said and that a school scheduled event had to take place at the same time, and then those individuals would not be allowed to walk around with weapons. so happen to fall on this day that we did graduation training. The are- na rental is a 12-hour rental for the facility. We scheduled that training from 12 pm to 12 am, so during those hours it was still a school district property. Therefore, no weapons would be allowed on the property during that time. Can you imagine the bloodbath that would have taken place if those
weapons would have been out there along with the incident that did happen? Those individuals who thought they were helping the police when the shooting started… We wouldn’t be talking about this event in the manner that we are right now because there could have been hundreds of casualties at that point. We decided on 24 hour police security patrols around the building two weeks prior to the event. We constantly ran them around the building in case anybody wanted to plant anything. We also showed a heavy, physical police presence at the facility. We set up so patrons would enter through the west lot. They would have to enter the lot with their pole area on the north on this side of the street. They had to take 278 steps minimum and some walked more to the conference center. That
but no bags were allowed to come into the event. We had two cleaning people, two operations people, one full-time, one part-time, and then myself. On March 9, the plan was set. We’re ready to go. A day didn’t pass
when Kevin and I didn’t have a conversation, just kind of still bounc- going through every scenario. We made ourselves active by role play- ing, as if we were trying to disrupt something, and what we would do. What were the weaknesses of the building? What were our strengths? We played that game every day. Spring break came on March 9 and we were able to kind of get
away for a week. The building was closed for regular maintenance and that helped us kind of clear our heads, because every day since that we’re getting 500 and then we had to get with our IT people so they From March 17 to May 2 we had daily meetings. We had various visits in between. We had the FBI, Homeland Security, [and] ATF. They were sharing information with us and participating in the game plan. They did their own measures of what they were doing that we weren’t privy to.
Game Day Now it’s time to execute that plan. I get up every morning and walk three miles a day. That morning I
I came in and we had our graduation training that day. We started
IAVM 15
We had probably 150 attendees for the event and another 50 to 60 press. We decided to put the media all the way over on our east lot, facing the conference center, but at the furthest point of the lot, not allowing them to walk up. They parked in their TV vans and trucks and that area was basically their zone. They weren’t allowed to walk over to the facility. They had to stay there and report there with the exception of the representative that each media outlet had that was al- ready vetted to come into the event. The way we lined up the media trucks went from the start of the parking lot all the way to the end of the park- ing lot and they also served as a barrier over there. It was an additional barrier to the facil-
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