University of Saint Francis Crown Point hosts its annual active simulation drill
A Lake County Sheriff's Department officer guarded the door Monday as he scanned the hallway at the University of Saint Francis in Crown Point while his fellow officers cleared a room.
A woman laying nearby, who had what looked like blood on her clothing and on the tile floor around her, sneezed.
“Bless you,” the officer said, breaking character before returning to point his rubber gun as he guarded the door.
For the third year, students from Crown Point's University of St. Francis and Franciscan Health EMS Academy practiced an active shooter drill Monday morning, joined by the sheriff's department, Crown Point police, Lake County coroner's office and University of Chicago helicopter crew.
“This will prepare us for the worst-case scenario that seems to be happening almost daily in our country, as well as around the world,” said Crown Point Cpl. Mile Knezevic. “You have to train to make sure we do the best that we can do to save the public because that's our job.”
Knezevic led officers, who followed each other as a human train, as they went between rooms at the university, figuring out how to approach a barricaded room and gathering information about the shooter from injured victims.
This year, Rob Dowling, EMS Academy director, was the shooter, walking around with a rubber gun and dropping materials that sounded like a louder version of Fourth of July poppers as students screamed.
When asked afterward how it felt to be the shooter, Dowling replied “horrific.”
“To walk out and see all those law enforcement resources and everybody pointing a gun at you, yeah, I didn't like it,” Dowling said.
While “unfortunately, it's a necessity” to do these drills, Dowling said, it's good to have this practice.
“I think it provides us with a bit of a comfort zone, but also, unfortunately, with a reality that … this may happen, but we're prepared for it,” Dowling said.
In the drill, 20 students were victims and four were killed.
One of those, Takoya Young, sat in a classroom with fake blood painted on the left side of her forehead before the drill. It was an odd feeling knowing she was going to “die today,” she said.
“It's so realistic,” Young said. “My heart is really racing.”
Behind a bench in the hallway, nursing student Emily Eenigenburg lay on her back with fake blood next to her as she waited for emergency responders.
“It kind of gives us a look into how we treat our patients,” Eenigenburg said.
After officers secured the building, nursing students in blue scrubs came in to treat the victims.
“They are triaged initially by the nursing students, just to stop bleeding. Then the paramedic students come in. The students then go out to a triage area out in the parking lot,” said Marsha King, dean of the St. Francis Crown Point campus.
Outside in the rain under a green tent, students figured out how to treat the critical patients.
When they realized they were becoming frazzled in the stressful situation, one student calmed everyone down and walked them through it, repeatedly asking, “What's wrong with this patient?”
Some EMS students took some less critically injured students to the lobby, checking their past medical history and bandaging their wounds. Students Dave Dickerson and Johnny Rosenfeldt said it's good training to practice the complementary roles of nursing and EMS students.
For the four students who did not survive the incident, two coroner's office employees went around with King to explain how they would respond to the victims and work a scene with police.
Outside, near the coroner's van parked at the end of a parking lot, a University of Chicago helicopter took off from a patch of grass away from the scene, as students continued to treat victims in the rain.
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