There is a new school in town, but it’s not full of children with backpacks and pencils. It’s a school for law enforcement officers with guns, learning how to stop school shootings.
Nearly two decades after the tragic shootings at Columbine High School and an alarming number of other deadly attacks in schools across the country, the Frank DeAngelis Center for Community Safety, once known as Martensen Elementary School, was unveiled in Wheat Ridge last week. The site now offers a one-of-a-kind authentic environment for first responders to train with active school-shooter simulations — like the one Wheat Ridge Police Officer Tyler Fashempour encountered on Friday.
Fashempour is in a dark, empty classroom. He has a gun trained on a man straight ahead of him, who has one arm in the air and the other by his side, his hand obscured by items on a table next to him.
“Show us both of your hands, sir,” demands Fashempour. The suspect disregards the order. His obscured hand twitches furtively, and without warning he whips it into view, pointing something silver and shiny at the officer.
Fashempour fires a shot and the suspect hits the ground.
The lights in the room come on, and the table and suspect fade to black as the simulation comes to an end. Fashempour lowers his fake gun and turns to his trainer, Darrel Smith, patrol commander with Security and Emergency Management for the Jefferson County Public School District, who sits at a desk in the corner of the room during this training session. He rewinds the simulation footage and shows Fashempour that the item in the suspect’s hand was a staple gun.
Once part of the Jefferson County Public School District, Martensen closed in 2011 because of budget cuts and sat empty for two years. In 2013, the school came back to life under the direction of John McDonald, executive director of security and emergency management, and has been visited by police departments and other first-responder agencies from across the nation.
Last Wednesday, Martensen was officially dedicated as a training facility at an open house ceremony. The building’s new name honors former Columbine High School principal, Frank DeAngelis, who led the high school through the 1999 shooting there.
For four years McDonald worked to remodel the abandoned school, including covering the building’s forest green exterior with a coat of police blue.
“This building is a reminder of all those lives that were lost and all those lives that we will save in the future,” McDonald said at the center’s open house. “This will continue to be a place of education. The students are just different — now they are first-responders.”
The center has welcomed a variety of agencies, including SWAT and the Navy SEALs, to use the classrooms, still crowded with desks, for training authenticity.
“One of the biggest challenges we have in law enforcement is that it’s hard for us to find locations to do tactical training,” Wheat Ridge police chief Dan Brennan said. “It’s a pretty dynamic exercise, cops have real guns, they go through tactics to approach, search, assess victims for medical attention and try to neutralize the suspect.”
In 2013, law enforcement throughout Jefferson County requested the use of a school building for training purposes 42 times, but it wasn’t easy getting into one.
“It was tough to get a school because they’re always in use,” McDonald said. “So you go to an empty warehouse and they’d be like, ‘pretend this wall’s there, and pretend that’s not there,’ and it’s difficult to get a realistic training out of that.”
A donation from Ti Training Corp., which specializes in law enforcement training simulations, allowed McDonald to add an interactive use-of-force simulator.
But the simulator isn’t just shooting practice — in some of the available scenarios, trainees are able to de-escalate the situation verbally. It’s all about exposing inexperienced responders to complex interactions and teaching them to handle dangerous situations in the best manner possible.
“A lot of people look at it and think it’s a shoot, don’t shoot type thing … but it’s so much more than that,” Smith said. “If you take it deeper than that, we’re not so worried about did they use OC (pepper spray)? But, how did they de-escalate the person on the screen in the scenario?”
The simulator’s scenarios, which are filmed with live actors, also include domestic violence situations and confrontations with mentally ill individuals. Some of the reenactments featured are based on actual school shootings.
“It’s really realistic once you get into it,” Fashempour said. “Once you go through it a few times you start to see it as a real-life scenario. It’s a great training tool. For me, my heart rate goes up a little bit.”
Written on a wall inside one of the center’s training rooms is a list of eight Colorado school shootings. Below it reads, “19 deceased and 29 wounded in Colorado School shootings … We will never forget so we prepare to respond today for tomorrow.”
