Agencies examine response to WCC shooting
By John Joyce
Published in News on May 3, 2015 1:50 AM
An after-action assessment conducted by the Wayne County Sheriff's Office and other participating law enforcement agencies conducted in the wake of the fatal shooting at Wayne Community College on April 13 highlighted both areas of success and need for improvement, Sheriff Larry Pierce said.
He said the event, in hindsight, could be described as "organized chaos."
On Monday April 13, at 8:09 a.m., Kenneth M. Stancil III, 20, walked onto the college campus, shot and killed school employee Ron Lane, 44, and then fled.
Local and state law enforcement and supporting agencies responded to what they believed was an active shooter scenario, systematically sweeping through the buildings trying to locate potential victims, hostages, perhaps multiple shooters.
After several hours, the "all clear" was given.
Lane, the only victim, was pronounced dead at the scene. Stancil, by then identified as the sole suspect, was long gone. He would be captured the next day sleeping on a beach in Daytona Beach, Fla., and brought back to Wayne County for prosecution.
A week later, representatives from the sheriff's office, Wayne Community College, the Goldsboro Police Department, the state Highway Patrol, Alcohol Law Enforcement, the county Office of Emergency Services, Wayne County Public Schools and the Mount Olive Police Department attended the debriefing.
Not all of the agencies involved in the debriefing actively responded to the shooting at the college, but each could potentially benefit from the lessons learned that day, Pierce said.
"There were a lot of entities coming in, a lot of personnel coming in that had to be dispersed on teams. Maj. Jay Memmalaar (GPD) was actually incident commander and our Capt. Steve Mozingo served as operations commander," Pierce said.
Maj. Tom Effler commended Mozingo and the job he did that morning.
It was Mozingo who first applied the term "organized chaos" to the response to the shooting, Effler said.
"We had (a debriefing) ourselves here last week," he added. "All in all I think the sheriff will tell you we think everything went pretty good. The rapid deployment training throughout the state is the same, pretty much for all agencies. And it showed during all this because these guys all had the same training."
He said officers from various agencies who had never met one another or worked together were able to hook up at the scene, form teams and knew right away how to operate going through the buildings.
Had Stancil still been on scene, or had more than one shooter been involved, Pierce said he is confident his deputies and the additional law enforcement agencies that responded were sufficiently prepared to handle either scenario.
The Goldsboro Police Department, which commanded the scene at the college and is the investigating agency charging Stancil with murder, does not have a SWAT (Special Weapons and Tactics) Team, but is actively looking into what it would take to create one.
The Wayne County Sheriff's Office employs an operational SWAT team of 15 members, all of whom were called into action the morning the college came under fire.
"They go through specialized training before they are ever allowed to participate on the team," Pierce said. " And then they have a 12-month probationary period. Once they actually make the team they are assessed throughout the year and they train twice a month," he said.
Pierce said the SWAT team hand picks its own members after volunteers successfully complete rounds of qualifying.
"Of course, it's made up of volunteers from different divisions. They compete for those positions and the team themselves actually recognize whether or not they want that particular member. They appoint their own members."
Pierce then approves or disapproves the selection. Rarely would he disapprove a member selected by the team, he added.
The sheriff's office has requested a line item be added to the next budget to be voted on by the county Board of Commissioners to fund additional state training for the teams -- classes that used to be free, Effler said.
"There are so many SWAT schools throughout the country now that specialize in different things they do, and the schools are starting to cost us now. They used to be free but now are starting to cost us," he said.
In addition to the budget, funding for the SWAT team and other sheriff's office programs are sometimes collected through seizures.
Some SWAT equipment is extremely expensive, Pierce said.
He said a normal bulletproof vest an officer wears on the street can cost anywhere from $600 to $700. SWAT vests have to be made differently to stop higher caliber rounds and cost between $2,500 and $3,000.