Training changed course of the Texas mall shooting

Jamie Landers and Kelli Smith, Tribune News Service

Boyd was surrounded by first responders who had come together in the afternoon of May 6 to pay respects to one of their own: Capt. James ‘Bull’ Graham of the McKinney Fire Department, who was killed in an off-duty crash three days before

Allen Fire Chief Jonathan Boyd was only minutes into a funeral service at the McKinney ISD football stadium when a text from his wife lit up his phone. She heard there was a shooting at Allen Premium Outlets. Was it real? Boyd was surrounded by first responders who had come together the afternoon of May 6 to pay respects to one of their own: Capt. James “Bull” Graham of the McKinney Fire Department, who was killed in an off-duty crash three days before. As Boyd stood to leave, he watched as messages, calls and worried whispers spurred others to follow. It pained them to walk away, Boyd said, but Graham’s family understood. The job waits for no one.

On the nearly two-mile drive from the stadium, call notes from 911 dispatchers and radio traffic revealed casualties in multiple locations. Details were sparse, but that alone was enough for Boyd to know his team was on the cusp of the kind of incident they had long prepared for, yet hoped would never come. By the time Boyd arrived at the mall, an Allen police officer who was nearby on an unrelated call had sprinted toward a 33-year-old man moments after he fired into a crowd with an AR-15. The officer fatally shot him, ending the deadly rampage in less than five minutes. Eight people were killed, seven were wounded and hundreds more were traumatised. Daniel Williams, an Allen Fire division chief, said training reduces an active shooter response into three goals: Stop the killing, stop the dying and evacuate rapidly. Chance allowed for swift completion of the first goal, and with first responders arriving in droves from Graham’s funeral, they tended to the wounded just as fast.

The optics were too aligned to be chalked up to coincidence, Williams said. Graham’s family considers it to be his final act of service. “So many of those things were set in motion for a reason, and they’re very appreciative that there was one more effort on his behalf that contributed to the success of an incident,” Williams told The Dallas Morning News. “That situation put a lot of people in place.” In an interview with The News, three first responders — Boyd, Williams and Allen police Lt. Kris Wirstrom — reflected a year later on how the day unfolded, how years of preparation steeled them for the unprecedented and how tragedy taught them to lean on their training and then on each other.

“Something horrible happened here” Wirstrom, an Allen officer since 2001, was the department’s incident commander that day, meaning he oversaw the shooting response and coordinated resources. Gunshots at the outlet mall didn’t immediately raise alarm; similar reports had been made in the high-traffic area before. Wirstrom explained “shots fired” calls have different magnitude scales, comparable to how tornadoes, earthquakes and hurricanes are ranked, but overlapping voices coming through his radio caused information to splinter. He didn’t know what to believe. Then there was a shift. The cadence and pitch of the officer tracking down the gunman changed from elevated to quiet, Wirstrom said. That officer, alone and breathless, was running toward bursts of rapid shots, body-worn camera footage released by Allen police nearly two months after the massacre showed.

The officer first classified the gunfire as a mass shooting as he walked by the mall’s H&M. The footage blurred multiple bodies on the ground outside the store. “The number of people that were laying on the ground bleeding was the principal indicator that something horrible had happened here,” Wirstrom said. Volleys of gunfire echoed in the distance as the footage showed the officer following the noise. Then, the officer spotted him. He aimed his gun and fired more than 10 shots. The footage ends with the officer hovering over the body of the gunman, who was bleeding on the sidewalk in front of Fatburger. “We got him,” the officer said. In the days and weeks after the shooting, the officer repeatedly declined interview requests through the department and his attorney. A year later, he again declined to be interviewed. His name has not been publicly released.

“It doesn’t matter about all the preparation and resources if you don’t have individuals willing to make that type of sacrifice for their community,” Boyd said.

After the shooter was declared dead, Wirstrom said he went against conventional wisdom by splitting his team in two, with half on tactical medical work for the injured in front of H&M and the other half investigating the possibility of other shooters. Dozens of fire department and EMS units came from Fairview, Frisco, Lucas, McKinney, Plano, Princeton and Prosper to help, adding to the disjointed response. At the same time, Williams explained, thousands of people were trying to exit the mall in every direction. Those who were inside stores when the gunfire rang out were cowering in supply closets and dressing rooms, taking turns calling 911 to ask when they could come out, or if the man standing at their door was a cop or a killer. Those who had been outside were told to run as far and as fast as they could. Some civilians were acting on adrenaline after scouring Nike for a new pair of basketball shoes turned into packing wounds with clothes pulled from racks and towels from the trunks of their cars. They yelled for help, for more ambulances, as police drove by looking for the rumoured second, third, fourth and fifth shooter.

“A chaotic scene doesn’t even begin to really cover the magnitude of it,” Williams said. As Wirstrom ran from point to point, checking on different teams, he was repeatedly told everything that needed to be done was taken care of. What am I supposed to be doing with my hands right now? he wondered. With every unit in place, there was little for him to do. Wirstrom said he doesn’t like to draw parallels between the Allen shooting and other mass casualty events, but noted it came less than a year after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022. Law enforcement has been heavily criticised since the shooting. Officers waited more than an hour to confront the shooter, who was barricaded inside adjoining classrooms with dozens of students. “If you look at Uvalde, it took them 77 minutes to confront their gunman,” Wirstrom said.

“Well, in 76 minutes, our gunman had been dead for well over an hour and we were finished with primary searches in 565,000 square feet of retail space. We’re hustling to get through there. And you have to train for that.”