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AT WORK

“…planning and decision-making on surviving a killer don't guarantee anything, except better odds than everyone around you…”
Jerry Sanders
Chief of Police, San Diego (ret)

MURDER IN PUBLIC PLACES
excerpt from pages 136-138

As with any explosive and violent crime, a mass murder scene demands two basic abilities to give you a better chance of survival:

1. Intense concentration on escape: This enables survivors to block out everything unimportant at that instant—fear, pain, confusion—and channel their mind and body to one survival aim: escape. That kind of concentration begins with an attitude of willingness to take extreme risks during extreme danger.

2. Survivors are those whose reaction time is measured in split seconds. That begins with survival decisions made ahead of time. Keep your response immediate, direct, and explosive.

At four in the afternoon on July 18, 1984, James Huberty walked into the McDonald's in San Ysidro, California, carrying three high-power semi-automatic guns. Almost immediately he began shooting people at random. Families cowered under tables, parents tried to protect their children, fear paralyzed everyone. He reloaded all three weapons two separate times and prowled the room, finishing off anyone he found still alive. He fired over 250 rounds at police and citizens until a SWAT sniper on a nearby rooftop finally took him out with one round to the 10-ring (center of the chest). He had killed twenty-one and wounded nineteen.

Never before in U.S. history had there been a mass murder of that magnitude. At that time, Jerry Sanders, my former partner and chief of police of San Diego (ret), was the commanding officer of SWAT and the officer in charge. In Jerry's words, "That crime scene changed me more than any I have experienced. That massacre helped me to understand more fully the value of playing out in my mind what I plan to do if the worst goes down, not only planning for when I'm on duty, but for when I'm off duty too, with my family. It's the most important step you can take to stay alive. Now I'm never mentally off duty. If the shooting ever starts, your reactions must be instantaneous and subconscious."

Whether you create a diversion, throw something through a window, or just jump through it, do it immediately and don't let anything stop you. Getting cut up going through a window is rather minor, compared to the alternative. It's a matter of priorities—getting hurt and cut up versus getting killed.

In 1991, in Killeen, Texas, another massacre, almost identical to that at McDonald's, occurred in Luby's Cafeteria: A lone, heavily armed gunman entered the restaurant. In San Ysidro, he walked in; in Killeen, he drove his pickup truck through the windows into the main dining room. The killer began shooting diners without warning, selecting victims at random.

My friend Al Morris and two other officers of the Killeen Police Department entered Luby's under fire and shot the frenzied gunman; twenty-three people were dead.

The one difference between the Killeen massacre and the San Ysidro one was a simple, heroic act by one man, Tommy Vaughn.

Vaughn was having lunch with friends in Luby's main dining room when the truck drove through the window and the gunman started shooting. Immediately, Vaughn picked up his table and attempted to heave it through the plate-glass window. The table bounced off—the window held. Without hesitating, he charged the window and shattered the glass with his body. Although he was badly cut, he escaped. Immediate reaction and leadership saved his life and that of those who followed him.

Vaughn overcame the paralyzing fear that enveloped everyone else in the room and survived. For all of us, the survival equalizer, the odds reducer, is not size, gender, age, or type of gun, it's our immediate reaction that counts most.

For More: Book 1/Rhonda's Story