Parkland

Jon Becker: On February 14th, 2018, an active killer attacked the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland Florida killing 17 people and wounding another 17. The shooter then managed to flee the scene by slipping in with other students who were evacuating. The shooter was apprehended without incident over an hour later.

In the months and years that followed this incident there was a firestorm of media coverage and legal actions directed at responding law enforcement agencies, not only criticizing their response to the incident but also their failure to intervene with the shooter, despite numerous red flags that pre-existed the incident. Additionally a Broward County Sheriff's Office school resource Deputy was charged but acquitted of child neglect and culpable negligence. There were also more than 50 civil suits filed resulting in millions of dollars of settlements as well as reassignments and resignations in the responding agencies.

My guest today is Chief Clyde Parry. On the day of this incident, Clyde was the interim chief for the neighboring City of Coral Springs Florida, and was responsible for setting up the initial command post and assuming instant command for the event. Clyde began his law enforcement career with the Denny Borough police department near Pittsburgh Pennsylvania in 1986. In May of 1987, he relocated to Florida and began his career with Coral Springs Police Department where he worked his way up through the ranks from patrol officer to Chief of Police. Clyde was sworn in as the permanent Chief of Coral Springs 19 days after this event.

There are numerous lessons learned from this event which we will discuss in detail, with the hopes that we will help to prevent future incidents and help future response. This discussion is not intended to second-guess or attack the actions of responding officers but to provide a clear account of what happened and document the lessons learned.

As usual in the debrief we will not discuss the shooter by name or his motives, however in this case we will discuss the numerous red flags that occurred hoping to prevent future incidents. This episode of the debrief has an accompanying decision-making exercise or DME created in partnership with the California Association of Tactical Officers.

This DME is designed to provide a tabletop exercise related to this event for your agency or team to conduct in conjunction with the episode. Downloadable materials for this DME, are also available on the episode page or at the Debrief.live. I hope you enjoy my conversation with Chief Clyde Parry.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units. As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Clyde Parry: It's my pleasure.

Jon Becker: Clyde thanks for being with me today. Why don’t we start with just kind of a quick intro and bio on you. Walk me through your law enforcement career just so everybody understands who you are.

Clyde Parry: I graduated from the police academy in P Pittsburgh Pennsylvania I worked in a small town outside of Pittsburgh for a year before relocating to Coral Springs Florida in 1987. Moist of my career Narcotics detective. I spent 10 years detached to The Drug Enforcement Administration Fort Lauderdale district office. Once I got promoted to a sergeant, I came back and supervised our narcotics unit, and really thought I was going to retire as a narcotics detective or a supervisor. And then I ended up getting promoted to a Lieutenant, Captain, Deputy Chief and eventually Chief.

Jon Becker: So set the set the the story for me here on the community of Coral Springs and kind of the surrounding area.

Clyde Parry: Well Coral Springs is a suburb of Fort Lauderdale. It's a bedroom community. We have about 130,000 residents. We are in the northwest section of Broward County. Parkland where the shooting occurred, is the city directly north of us. We share a border. The school Marjory Stoneman Douglas you may hear me refer to it as ‘MSD’ most of the country knows it is Parkland is so close to the City of Coral Springs that the juniors actually park in our city and then walk across the street to the school.

So the reason that we were right there is because quite frankly we're right there. So the two cities combined together probably make up 160/165,000 residents.

Parkland's Public Safety structure they contracted out for all their Public Safety needs. For their law enforcement, they chose the Broward Sheriff's Office, and they provided the law enforcement needs. The Coral Springs Parkland Fire Department provided the EMS and fire services for Parkland and Coral Springs.

Part of what makes this incident so unique is The Dispatch Center. We had our own Dispatch Center, at the time I think we staffed 28 people.

When you dial 911 from a cellular phone in Parkland that call typically ends up in the Coral Springs Peace App the Public Safety Answering Point. If you dial from a landline though it goes to the Broward County Regional system.

Several years back before this incident probably 15 years ago, they regionalized communications. So Broward County took over all of the communications for all the Public Safety in the county, with the exception of Coral Springs and Plantation. We were two holdouts, and just felt like it was in our best interest to go ahead and keep our own Public Safety Answering Point. So that made this unique in so much that when 911 calls came in they came into our dispatch center causing us then to have to relay them to the Broward County Dispatch Center. So there was a little bit to do with that. And obviously it had an effect on our ability to patcher the channels while the response was going on.

Jon Becker: Do you guys share common radio frequencies?

Clyde Parry: We do and and typically when we have an incident we can patch channels. But in order to patch channels, you have to have the capacity to take the load for instance, if you're bringing in Coral Springs you have to have the capacity to handle the load of Coral Springs.

About a year before the Parkland shooting we had the airport shooting in Fort Lauderdale and we discovered at that time that the Broward County radio system, when everybody went to the channels it got overloaded, and caused bonking and throttling, and that forces the radio system to just shut down. They discovered that about I'm going to say 13 months before the Parkland incident, and we're working on trying to get that problem figured out and then this incident happened and of course the same thing happened during the Parkland incident.

Jon Becker: So as far as the agencies go, I mean Broward county is a pretty big Sheriff's Department. Tell me about Coral Springs.

Clyde Parry: You're right the sheriff's office is a huge huge, I think 6,000 deputies. Coral Springs had 225 sworn officers at the time, six seasonal SROs; they play a part later because they responded to the incident. We have 100 civilians and like I said, I think at the time our Dispatch Center employed 28 people.

Jon Becker: What was the working relationship like prior to this between Coral Springs and Broward County?

Clyde Parry: Excellent. Like I said, I was a Narcotics detective. A lot of the people in the Broward shed-- there's nobody in my department that I don't think hadn't backed up a sheriff or been backed up by a sheriff or worked as a detective or in a specialized unit whether it be traffic or narcotics or street crimes with the sheriff's office. We had an excellent relationship with him. In fact the sheriff at the time, Scott Israel, was a personal friend of mine. I knew him when he was a narcotics detective in Fort Lauderdale. He went up through the ranks there. So we coached football together, and I actually coached with him when we coached his two sons. We had a fantastic relationship.

Jon Becker: Talk to me a little bit about the school, so it's a high school?

Clyde Parry: It's a high school, and it's a fairly good size high school. There's 17 buildings on campus they had at the time over 3000 students. I think it was 3277 students at the time. The shooting occurred in what became known as ‘The Freshman building’, it was the three story building on the northeast corner of the complex. It had 30 classrooms at the time. I believe there were 900 students, and 30 teachers assigned at the time of the shooting.

Jon Becker: And it's a three-story building?

Clyde Parry: It's a three-story building, in fact it was the only three-story building on campus.

Jon Becker: Got it. So let's kind of lay the foundation here for the timeline of the events. February schools in, full classes, kind of a normal school day.

Clyde Parry: Normal school day, except it was February 14th Valentines Day, sure there was a lot of thought towards that. Obviously a day of love turned into a day of violence.

Jon Becker: The community surrounding like Coral Springs and Parkland are both pretty affluent communities, aren't they?

Clyde Parry: Yeah but Parkland more so. At the time of the incident Parkland was the 15th safest city not in the county, not in the state but in the nation. 15th safest city in the nation. Medium home prices for Florida at that time. They weren't as expensive as they are today, obviously we're going back in time. 700,000 plus. Marjory Stoneman Douglas was built I believe in 1990. I think 35% of the student body lived in Coral Springs.  So it was a very affluent community, someplace where you wouldn't think this would occur. And I think that's an important point to drive home, is that these can happen anywhere. It was the 15th safest city in the nation at the time.

Jon Becker: Yeah that's a really important point. Why don't we walk through the event, because my thinking is we'll talk about the event and then we can kind of come back and go through lessons learned. Let's just walk through the timeline of the event. One other point I want to bring up, what is the law enforcement footprint on the campus on a normal daily basis?

Clyde Parry: So at the time, there was one SRD. We call them ‘School Resource Officers’ the sheriff's officer deputies obviously so they're SRDs. But there was one sworn SRD at the time, Scott Peterson he was school resource deputy of the year I think; either the year or two years prior to this he was well thought of and loved by everybody at the school. They had a staff of unarmed security consultants there. I think there were four of them and they obviously had your teachers, your principals, your assistant principals. But as far as the law enforcement personnel there was only one deputy assigned to that school.

Jon Becker: Got it, and he is working  on campus when this occurs.

Clyde Parry: Yes.

Jon Becker: How does the event go from-- well first how'd you start your day that day?

Clyde Parry: My day started like every other day. I actually was in a shirt and a tie. I was up in my office, and  just a regular day. At the time, I was the interim chief. I had been the acting Chief many times prior to that. Me, and the other Deputy Chiefs Shan Backer would alternate that back and forth. But our current chief of police at that time Tony Pestezy had announced his retirement, and he actually filled in for the city manager's office. So that's why I was the interim chief during this time period.

It was a regular day and everything was going fine, and just regular everyday mundane stuff. Then in my office I'm sitting there (I always have the radio on) and I heard one of our sergeants at the time Sergeant Bill Reid get on the radio, and he asked dispatch he said, “I just had one of the fire admin guys run by me and say there's an active shooter at Douglas. Is there any truth to that?” And the dispatcher got on the radio and said, “10-4, we're getting multiple calls. We can hear gunshots in the background. It has been confirmed there is an active shooter at that time.”

Obviously at that moment  I liken it so I got up and ran down the hallway and out to the parking lot. And I tell people it was like somebody took a stick and hit a beehive with our officers that were in the police department flooding out of the-- I can't believe we didn't crash a car but flooding out of the police building. We started driving up what in our city is called Coral Springs Drive outside our city, it's called Pine Island Road. That is the road that Marjory Stoneman Douglas MSD is located on.

I was in a car with the other Deputy Chief, and Captain George Sobron was in the back seat and we were passing cars as we were going. And as we drove out of the police department and up Pine Island Road I noticed when we got up to Sample that we had a red light yet the traffic was still going.

This is an important point that I always try and stress to people and I don't know why it stuck with me, but the light was red and I realized that we were still going. As I got up to and we approached the intersection I saw one of our Humane units had pulled her truck over blocking traffic, and walked out in the other lanes (it's a big six lane roadway) and was stopping cars so that we could go.

She knew that seconds mattered. She was never trained to do that. Her name's Monica Federwitz and she did an excellent job.

I tell people all the time, the thing we're missing when we do our training or we're thinking about our response to an incident like this is, we often overlook our civilian employees. She had an effect that day and she kept the roadways open, so that the officers could respond there quicker than they would if she hadn't blocked off the traffic.

Jon Becker: That's very smart. From the school's perspective, how does this event start?

Clyde Parry: The school's perspective seemed like a normal everyday situation. They had their rules that they followed. They keep the gate secure and they lock it but it was almost time for dismissal.

So the unarmed security guys went around and were unlocking the gates getting ready for the bell to ring, and  the shooter pulled up in an Uber car. And he got the Uber car and he walked through the East Gate going into the three-story building which is known as ‘The Freshman building 1200 building’. He walked in straight through the gate, walked right down the sidewalk, entered the door and he was carrying a rifle bag.

And one of the unarmed specialists by the name of Medina saw him, got on a school radio. He referred to him as a crazy boy because he had been a troubled student and  he said, “Hey, Crazy Boy's on campus and he's coming in he's got this bag”.

If you would see the bag that he was carrying it was a Cabella's rifle bag. So  pretty sure that it was a rifle, and he was later heard saying Medina when he walked in. As soon as he walked in shortly afterwards he heard ‘pop-pop-pop-pop’ and knew that that was going on.

Medina had contacted Deputy Peterson and Deputy Peterson went to the 1200 building, and the shooting was already taking place at that time.

When the shooter walked into the east side of the school, he walked into the alcove where you'd be able to walk up to the second and third floor removed his gun from the rifle or his rifle from the gun bag and charged it.

And that time another student came in and he surprised him in the alcove there, and he looked at him and said  that student was Chris McKenna and he looked at Chris and he said, “You better get out of here it's about to get messy”. Chris ran out and found the one the offensive line football coach Aaron Feist and told him what was going on.

Shortly after he fled the school the shooter is seen going out to the hallway raising his gun and that's when killing started.

Jon Becker: So the student tells the football coach, the football coach leaves or what does he do?

Clyde Parry: Football coach,  and again you got to understand at the time there were a lot of policies in place, and they had what they call a ‘code red’ in place, A code red is supposed to be called in the event of an active shooter.

My understanding is that although they had that policy in place. There were so many false alarms because there were so many social media threats going on at the time and they had done this so many times that even though the policy says, “Hey if you have a reasonable belief that there's intimate danger call a code red”.

They were discouraging their employees from doing it. And I don't know this to be fact but what I had heard is  they said, “Unless you see the gun don't call it”.

So Aaron Feist gets this information from the student and he goes to the west side of the school and by the time, he gets to the west side of the school, he opens up the doorway to go into the school and at that point the shooter was on the west side he had already traversed from the East side to the west side killing 11 people.

When he got to where Aaron Feist was, Aaron I confronted him. We believe he grabbed the barrel of the gun of course it was hot, and he got shot in the chest and died right there.

Jon Becker: So let's kind of trace this shooter suspect's path, and we can kind of show this in the graphics he enters on the first floor of the Freshman building in what you described as the alcove where does he go?

Clyde Parry: So he's in the east side of the building and he goes immediately out of the stairwell area and he pops out. And he just starts shooting anybody that's in his line of sight. Through this incident he never entered a classroom. I think that's important to know what goes on.

Before this most of the time when one law enforcement officer showed up, a lot of these school shooters would shoot themselves. That's not an all-the-time issue. So we have to look at what's going on because they're evolving just as our training is evolving.

He enters the east side of the school, and he starts shooting people. He never enters a single classroom but he shoots in the classroom. So if he could see somebody through the doorway, he would shoot through the doorway and shoot at anybody he could see.

The school is aware and and  since then I think all schools since Columbine. All schools have been taught  to find a hard corner and get everybody huddled in there. But again a code red wasn't called immediately in this situation. I'm not sure if when Aaron Feist first got the information before he had a chance to confirm it, if he would have had enough time to even make a difference early on in the event.

So the shooter goes down, and he's shooting people in the hallway and he's shooting people in the doors. And again, it's just line of sight. If he saw you he shot, and he worked his way from east to west.

Chris Hixon was the assistant athletic director or the athletic director I believe for the school, and he came to investigate what it was and he was shot  at the end of the hallway. I'm being told that he didn't die immediately that he was kind of holding on to and waiting till help arrived.

The shooter went the whole way down to the west, then he confronted Aaron Feist walked up the stairwell went into the second floor, and by this time everybody had heard the shots, everybody on the second floor had heard the shots and they sheltered in place. So nobody was shot, nobody was injured, nobody was killed on the second floor.

At this time Deputy Peterson is outside the 1200 building and he's giving commands and he's putting radio transmissions out and the shooter is working his way then from west to east.

At one point, a couple of the bullets that he fired into a classroom were like the second to the last classroom before he would have reached the end of the hall on the east side. So he's coming from west to east, and he fired some rounds and they went through the windows there and Deputy Peterson's point of view his vantage point would have been in a place where he would have seen, and heard those shots fired we're surmising.

Jon Becker: Deputy Peterson is going to subsequently come under a great deal of criticism, and ultimately be charged with  negligence and child neglect. So it's obviously  a very relevant point. Not to indict him again, but what is he doing while the shooting is occurring by the known facts?

Clyde Parry: He's on a separate radio system. As I said Coral Springs and Plantation remain the two holdouts for the regionalized radio system. We're operating on our radio system. Our dispatchers are transferring calls that are relevant to BSO. BSO is getting calls. We're transmitting. At this stage we don't have anybody on campus when the shooting starts. One of the officers, our first officer that arrived there was was officer Tim Burton he was a school resource officer in an elementary school in the North End of Coral Springs and once his school was done letting out his responsibility was to go to the North Community Park where the Parkland, the MSD Juniors parked their cars. And his responsibility was to just monitor it, make sure that there's no problems, no fights, just make sure everything's orderly as the juniors are leaving the parking lot.

So once Billy Reid got on the radio, Tim Burton was in a position where he put himself 97 which in our lingo means ‘he's on scene right then’. He was at the parking lot where he was supposed to be. So he was right there. He ended up hooking up with Medina. Medina gave him a fantastic description of the shooter, told him the building and so Tim Burton put that out on our radio system back to Deputy Peterson.

He's putting stuff out on his radio system. At the time I couldn't hear it and I didn't know but obviously we did a lot of investigations and we poured over everything that occurred that day. I do know that he was putting out radio transmissions.

And it appeared to me that he reverted back to the training that we used to receive prior to Columbine which was to lock down a school and stay back. In fact a couple of his radio transmissions were  “Lock down the school gentlemen everybody stayed back at least 500 ft from the 12 and building”.

Radio: [Do not approach the 12 or 1300 building stay at least 500 ft away at this point)

[Stay away from 12 and 1300 building]

Clyde Parry: Early on he did say, “We have shots fired. It could be fireworks but I think it's shots fired in the 1200 building.” So he was putting that information out to the Broward sheriff's office.

So the other BSO deputies  and and again the radios for the Sheriff's Office were working fine right then because  there weren't that many users on that channel. Once word seeped out and it's amazing in the day of social media and phones, text messages, the word was out faster than you could ever imagine. So it would be natural for somebody  in the South End of the county to turn on Parkland's radio to hear what's going on and as that started to happen their radio system became overwhelmed and eventually shut down.

So Deputy Peterson's calling for the school to be locked down. He's telling them to stay at least 500 feet back.

What struck me as I was reviewing this is that that hasn't been training  for since Columbine and of course training is continuously evolving, but we've got to a point where I think the accepted practice in law enforcement today is you kill the killer. You go in immediately, if you're by yourself you go in and you're going to whatever stimulus you hear. Whether it's gunshots, whether it's screaming kids, you were going to find a killer and your job is to stop the killing by eliminating the killer.

In this situation Deputy Peterson parked himself outside the building and stayed in the same spot for approximately 45/46 minutes. It appeared to me that he was under stress and shock and look I'm not trying to judge him. Certainly I'm not happy with his response. I despise it. I tell everybody, I would all like to think that we would do the brave and courageous thing when we're under that certain situation but until you're outside that door and those shots are firing, I don't think everybody knows how they're going to act or react to that.

It appeared to me that he was under stress and shock and stress and shock is a funny thing. And that's where when you get into a situation where you're under tremendous stress and shock, it's important that  you have your basic training to fall back on. And if you fall back on your basic training, you will more than likely then act in the way that you were trained to act. And it just appeared as though his fall back was to the training that we had prior to Columbine, he was locking down a school asking people to stay back.

What was more shocking to me is he puts that out over the radio, and the dispatchers then repeat those commands. “Everybody stay back 500 ft from the 12 and 1300 building”. Now our dispatchers have been trained for these types of events. We put them through scenarios. We tell them what they're going to expect if we try and role play it out as best we can. I don't know if the sheriff's office did that with their dispatchers because if they did then the dispatchers may have known that that was not the proper response.

What's even more shocking is that it went over the radio. Peterson said it then the dispatcher repeated it and nobody overrode those commands. Nobody overrode that and said, “No run into the building”.

I feel confident in saying that had Peterson entered the stairwell that the shooter entered that he would have probably crossed his path as he was coming out of the second story on his way up to the third, and if he had done that and if successful he could have prevented anybody on the third story from from being killed or injured.

Jon Becker: So let's go back to the moveness suspect for a minute so he comes in he he shoots up the first floor he goes upstairs, by then the second floor has heard what's happening on the first floor they're locked down down he finds nobody to engage on the second floor then what does he do?

Clyde Parry: So as he's walking down he's shooting in the classrooms but everybody's in a hard corner.

Now on the third floor when the incident started on the first floor the smoke from the barrel of the rifle coupled with they have these drop ceilings and everybody knows about the drop ceilings, and the percussion from the gunshots in there caused all the dust and particles to go fall from the ceiling to the floor.

And it made it to where you couldn't see from one end of the hallway to the other end of the hallway. Initially we believed that he pulled the fire alarm but we don't believe that now. We believe that the smoke from the gun and those dust particles caused the fire alarm to go off. When the fire alarm went off kids did what they've been trained to do their whole life the third floor kids left their room.

And nobody panics anymore when when the fire alarm goes off they know it's just an alarm and they go out, most of them put earbuds in or headphones and they're talking and laughing and goofing off in the hallway. So all of that noise being made on the third floor I don't want to say it covered up the sound of the but it distracted from the sound of the gunshots.

So by the time the shooter got up to the the third floor they as he got closer to the end of the hallway on the second floor people were starting to realize oh wait a minute I'm hearing something, so they either got back into their rooms or fled down the west end stairwell and some of them were still out in the hallway as he entered the third floor. He started shooting people up on the third floor and killing and injuring.  I think he killed six others up there and injured another 10 people or so.

Jon Becker: Okay. Some kids that are evacuating the building, some that are going back into classrooms he's now moving through the third floor. Deputy Peterson is still outside putting out radio traffic. When in this process do other law enforcement resources begin to arrive?

Clyde Parry: The sheriff's office at one point had nine deputies on scene while shots were still being fired. Some of them got there for the last volley. Some of them got there  before that. So the Sheriff's Office got there and of course the main gate that they came in was locked.  Peterson was calling for the roads to be blocked off so some of those deputies were stopping traffic and blocking offroads one Deputy put out that he heard shots fired by the football field.

We believe that the shooter's eventual plan, well we know I mean there's a video of what his plan was and he wanted to get into the Teachers Lounge area and set up a sniper's perch and shoot students in the courtyard as they were running away and presumably Law Enforcement Officers as they were responding. But we live in Florida and we have hurricanes and the school was built  in the '90s, so it had hurricane glass. When you shoot hurricane glass a projectile will go through it but it will just spider the window, it won't shatter the window and the window won't fall out.

So it's our belief that he became frustrated after he tried to set up the sniper's perch up there and that threw a monkey wrench into his plans. So at that point he kind of panicked and dropped his weapon. He had a tac vest not a bulletproof vest but just an attack vest so that he could hold extra magazines and he dropped that and then ran down the third floor stairwell and fled like all the other students at the time.

Jon Becker: So he drops his gun, takes off his gear and just leaves the building.

Clyde Parry: Yep.

Jon Becker: So look from a timeline of an event first shots fired to when he exits the building what's the timeline?

Clyde Parry: The entire shooting portion was I believe somewhere around 6 minutes less than seven. So obviously these events happen very quickly. So it's important to have somebody on scene that intervenes right away in this case we had like I said at 1 point nine deputies that were on scene while the shooting was still going on.

So when he finally drops his stuff he filters in with the other kids runs runs across and there's a big shopping center Walmart's there. He ends up going and buying a drink  and then he ends up in a McDonald's and he sits down with a kid named John Wolford.  He didn't know John. John was a big kid and he sat with him and he said, “Hey, can you give me a ride out of here?” And John's like “I'm a freshman I don't have a driver's license I'm not 16 yet”. And so he's like oh he goes, “Well my mom's coming but  she's not going to give you a ride”.

Little did he know at that time that he had just shot John's sister Maddie and she luckily was one of the survivors and is presumably doing as good as she can right now someone had told me that. This event inspired her to become a trauma nurse, but I mean could you imagine if he actually gave the shooter a ride out of there after he shot his sister.

Jon Becker: Yeah even sitting down with him makes my stomach turn.

Clyde Parry: Yeah so he walks away from the McDonald's area. And  of course by that time we've got a description.  Medina knows who he is but couldn't remember his name initially. Like I said he had a nickname for him he called him “Crazy Boy”. Eventually  we got his name and that was bowled out and it was boloed out on our radio which then was patched with Coconut Creek and Margate.

Our fire guys were working the scene, our cops at that point are working the scene. Mike Leonard, a Coconut Creek police officer who used to work for Coral Springs before he got hired by Coconut Creek was familiar with the area and floated and saw somebody that matched the description held him at gunpoint and he was taken into custody a little over an hour after the incident.

Jon Becker: And taken into custody uneventfully right?

Clyde Parry: Yeah well yeah I mean he went right down and was held at gunpoint by Officer Leonard, one of our sergeants went over and cuffed them and it was pretty uneventful.

Jon Becker: Okay. So why don't we go back now so the shooting takes roughly six minutes. You've got  somewhere around nine Broward officers and the SRD Peterson on scene. When does the first Coral Springs officer show up?

Clyde Parry: He showed up  like I said almost immediately when we heard because he was in the parking lot. So he shows up and he engages Peterson he says, “Hey where's he at?” Peterson for whatever reason maybe he believed this said, “I don't know he might be out in a parking lot”.

So our officer Tim Burton starts scanning the parking lot looking and of course it's a school. It's filled with cars of teachers and students and  faculty and so he starts doing that.

By then all of our officers are arriving like I said once that went out and is a point of contention. Here in Florida we have Mutual Aid and how Mutual Aid supposed to work is you're supposed to if you have an incident  say I'm the chief of Coral Springs and I'm having an incident and I would like Margate to respond I invite them in and invoke Mutual Aid and they can come in and assist us with the incident.

In this incident,  I always said we have to look at things that we could do better whether they make us look good make us look bad. In this incident. I wish that the very first phone call that came into our Dispatch Center I wish our Dispatch Center would have asked the the shift supervisor advised him what was going on we wouldn't even had to wait and see if they were have said, “Echo1 we have an active shooter at at Douglas, do you want us to respond?” Everybody would have responded. We wouldn't even had to wait for the incident. So that's something that we made afterwards.

Our dispatchers were doing what they were trained. They were doing what the loss is they were doing everything that they should have been doing but that is something something that I think needed to change. And I think that's something going forward that anybody who's within Striking Distance of a major incident like this needs to be going there.

So our officers went there with, the first group of our officers that got there during the investigation conducted by the Margory Stoneman Douglas commission they called them the Mazy group Nick Mazy was the one of the first officers there  along with Scott Meyers and a lot of our other officers. They ran and and and again there were nine including Deputy Peterson BSO guys there.

It got contentious afterwards, there were a lot of remarks and look incidents like these very difficult. There's a lot of Monday morning quarterbacking  again with Peterson he'll he'll answer it's between him and the Lord,  he'll answer someday you'll have his time to atone for this but I'm not going to judge him. I wasn't in his shoes. I would like to think I would have handled it differently, and I'd like to think that other officers would have handled it differently.

I do believe that the difference between the Sheriff's Office and ours is that it appeared to me that when our officers ran by and let me backup for a second. Training is everything. I say it all the time training is everything.

About six months before this incident we had a training session set up where we did this exact incident. We have a shoot house we're fortunate in Coral Springs to have our own range we have a shoot house where we can shoot simunitions and we had our dispatcher out there dispatch to call our officer had to drive up to to the range, and it was time to which puts a stress level on the officer's training. Had to get his AR unbuckled from the secure rack above the head in the car. He had to get out of the car. He had to sprint to the target which was our simunition house.

He came across a kid that was bleeding out and then he had to make the decision: do I stop and help control the bleeding or do I run past.

So this exact scenario played out  6 months later at Douglas so that day our officers ran past the BSO guys. I think the BSO guys were just waiting for somebody to yell charge it. It appeared as though nobody took command, and then Peterson's commands were “Stay back. Don't go in.” So  a lot of confusion on that part when our guys ran to the door BSO guys did join in and that's something that a lot of people are like “Oh those BSO guys never came in that”, nothing could be further from the truth.

I will tell you that there's many brave, good, fabulous, great men and women of the sheriff's office. I don't want to come off and sound disparaging to them at all. I mean the facts are the facts. For a period of time there were nine deputies there that didn't enter but once our guys ran past several of them joined in and assisted immediately with the search.

Jon Becker: So they enter the building now you've got a contingent of how many people well at that point?

Clyde Parry: We've got the Mazi group and I think he had probably six to eight officers there they came in on the West Side one of those officers was Scott Meyers he's a sniper on our SWAT team. Nick Mazi is a SWAT operator; he actually is the SWAT Commander for our department right now. They ran to the door. Scott Meyers said, “Look, I had a 308 rifle and my AR-15 in my trunk and the thought of going to the trunk and retrieving that would have taken too long I felt like seconds mattered.

So I ran with just my handgun knowing that having a rifle would be a thousand times more effective and better to engage a shooter than my handgun.” But he made the conscious effort that seconds mattered.

There's a still photo as they were entering the west side of the school on the first floor and you can see that he's pointing up to where the shooter tried to set up the sniper's perch in the teachers Lounge area because he saw those bullet holes up there so obviously that was a concern.

They entered in the west side. I believe at that point they found Chris Hixon who almost eerily gave a smile like “Okay you're here” and then died. At that point our second group led by Brad Mock and the Margory Stoneman and Douglas commission called them the mock group entered from the East side well as I said.

There was still some smoke in the hallway and dust particles that were still in the air which caused obviously a dangerous situation and you have law enforcement on each end of the school Blue on Blue situation. But ironically, mock was our SWAT Commander at that time. He's now a deputy chief and when you reach the rank of deputy chief you have to step down as the SWAT Commander. That's when Mazy assumed control of it. They grew up together. They've been friends forever. I will tell you that one could start a sentence and the other could complete the sentence with almost person. And having that kind of response and those kind quality officers made my job so much easier.  People said, “Oh you, you, you”, not me it's the men and women of my department.  They, not me, made this go as smoothly as that portion of it did.

Once they got in and they realized it they started talking Mazy's group transitioned up the stairway and then started clearing from west to east the second floor, while Mock group cleared east to west on the first floor to avoid any kind of a Blue on Blue situation.

Jon Becker: Smart and they obviously are immediately finding victims at least in the first floor second floor they're not going to find any, right?

Clyde Parry: Right, on the second floor they don't find any and then on the first floor  there's a lot of decisions that need to be made.And I don't think that you can plan all of that out. We have bodies in the hallway. We have bodies in classrooms. We have terrified freshman students in the classroom. Do you shelter in place? Do you evacuate?

Our training dictates that we run to the stimulus. If we hear shots screaming whatever we are going to kill the killer. that's what our training dictates and those guys in my mind would have done just that. When they got in there was no stimulus. So then you're thinking okay where is he? Is it a hostage situation? Is he out of the school? Where are we at? We're not hearing screaming. We're not hearing gunshots but we don't know where he's at.

So you have to assume not only he's there but you have the plus one rule. Even though our Dispatch Center is getting calls saying there's a shooter you always have to assume that there's more than a shooter. There's always another thing that you have to. Until you've cleared everything and you don't have anybody else you have to to consider that.

So because there was no stimulus they started to take ground and started to treat the students that were injured because of our training about a couple years, maybe four years before this incident occurred, we started to really focus in and hone in on stop the bleed.

Statistics show that if you're able to stop the bleed you can save somebody's life. And most people die because they simply bleed out. So we transitioned into taking ground holding ground and evacuating people, students as we took classrooms. Of course we had to carry out many of the injured who were shot and unable to walk for themselves and they were treated.

I think that day we did seven chest seals, five tourniquets, we used combat gauze and stuffed it in bullet wounds and did everything we could to stop the bleeding and get the victims out to our fire guys who were staging. We have SWAT Medics that were with us. It was a good effort at that time of trying to save as many lives as we could.

Jon Becker: So we have a total of 34 victims, 17 that ultimately end up dead and 17 that will survive the event.

Clyde Parry: Yes.

Jon Becker: And how many of the 34 were transported or evacuated?

Clyde Parry: We transported 18. One was dead. It's an interesting phenomena and talking with our SWAT Commander Brad Mock afterwards he was saying that as they walk by people some were obviously dead but you still check for vitals. You want to feel a pulse.  We're all human beings.  You want to feel a pulse. You want that to be there and they walked past one of the victims and two people said, “No”. And then the third one said, “No, I think I got a pulse”. They transported that person but it's believed that that person was already deceased before being transported.

17 were transported. The doctors from the hospitals later  praised us and said, “Look, the care given the trauma care given the chest seals, the tourniquet and the combat gauze played a significant role in saving life”.

It wasn't until a long time later I spoke about this event to different law enforcement groups in the past, and it never dawned on me. One day I'm watching my presentation, I'm doing the presentation I'm watching a video and the shooter said his goal was 20. I had never caught that before.

That day and we're talking years after I can't tell you look you have 17 dead people. You can't feel good when you have young children who had their whole lives ahead of them. You can't feel good about the family members, and the parents that I've met. There just are no words to how you feel, not that I could ever feel their pain but certainly I empathize with their pain.

It is very difficult to do that but that day that I was caught Ray he wanted to kill 20 and I know he didn't reach a goal I actually felt good that day. There weren't many days that I talked about this incident where I ever felt good.

Jon Becker: Yeah, it's terrible any day that 17 kids died but it could have been 18, 19 or 20 without intervention and medical treatment and transport. So I mean there is something to feel good about there.

Clyde Parry: Yeah for sure. At the end of the day for the first hour, we didn't know that he was in custody, and we were taking ground and trying to treat as many people as we could. Officers were blood soaked transporting. It's funny immediately after the incident there was a lot of finger pointing obviously the news media was there.

As word was getting out about  law enforcement not making an immediate entry into the school which of course has been our training there there was a lot of sharp and harsh criticism. We had investigations being done by Marjory Stoneman Douglas commission was impanel by the governor to investigate this incident.

We had FDLE investigating, the Broward Sheriff's Office investigating it, and the Police Foundation. There were a lot of parallel investigations going on all at one time, and  there was a lot of criticism that was going on over the response.

As the facts were coming out,  I remember we were being hosted by the 1013 club which is retired New York City police officers (they have a chapter in the city over from our Sam Margate, Florida) and they want to present us with a plaque. I was there with my deputy chief at the time and  now the current chief of police  Brad Mckee. Mike Leonard was there and he was the guy from Coconut Creek, the officer who  found the shooter and he had a medal that he got.

I remember looking at Brad saying, “I got to get around to this. There were a lot of brave and courageous things done by many of our officers that day and we hadn't taken the time to recognize any of them”. Again part of that is when there's 17 people dead  it doesn't feel like a victory. It doesn't feel good.

I knew at some point. I had to recognize those that rushed in there not knowing where the shooter was going into harm's way, being willing to put their lives on the line and then finding victims and treating victims, and transporting victims, and saving those lives.

There were so many good things done that day that I said to him during this presentation by the 13 Club, “We got to get around to doing that”. We eventually did and when we did it (I choose my words carefully), and I wanted to make sure that all of the family members knew what their loved one had done, and what their first responder had done. About halfway through my initial speech, I almost quit and said, “Guys just come up and get your get your  get your medal”.

I remember locking eyes with one of the dispatchers and I just pushed forward. It really was a turning point for our department and a very emotional day for not just the officers and the dispatchers and firefighters that were there but for their family members and the community as a whole.

Jon Becker: So I want to transition to a kind of lessons learned but just to give context, like this is going to be an international firestorm of media and lawsuits and prosecution. And like it is this is going to blow up into a giant shit show. When did that start? How long after the Ivent did you guys start to get the feeling that this was going to explode?

Clyde Parry: immediately. When I say immediately well I guess I'll explain. So after the suspects are in custody we still have 17 buildings to clear. It's tremendous. It's a huge campus. It's tremendous. Again, we have one person in custody. We always got to think well what fair was another so we've got  kids that we need to evacuate. We've got this while that's going on every politician is connected to Parkland.

Jon Becker: Yeah, the State of Florida, the United States like anybody that can get some TV time.

Clyde Parry: Well look at the cynic, and I would say that and I'd agree with you. I do think a lot of our commissioners want to help. They just don't know what to do. So they're showing up. Our state senators are sending their people who are on the ground in the city to show up on their behalf as they're traveling there, our US senators, our congressmen are doing the same thing.

So people that work for them are showing up from so and so’s office “We're here to provide assistance in any way we can”. And each person that shows up is okay, what can I do, what's going on. You find yourself in a situation where I don't have time to brief everybody individually on what's going on.

So that day early on (again not my jurisdiction and I'll have to go back and I gotta go into a a prior incident that will will lay the groundwork for this) we had a social media post at at Taravella High School about a year before that a year maybe a year and a few months before that. It was a picture of a student holding a gun. He says he's at Taravella High School. You could clearly see he was at the school that's one of the other high schools in our city, probably the biggest high school in our city. You could tell that he's in there and that there's a gun and it goes over social media.

At that time I was the acting chief. We responded to that incident and  my responsibility as the acting chief set up a command post and run the operation from there, a unified command you get with the fire department. Because it's a law enforcement event that makes the police chief the person or the highest ranking person in charge from law enforcement it's theirs, supplemented by the highest ranking person from the fire department. And you're supposed to run the situation from there. I will tell you that I did none of that. I was in the school clearing room after room after room. I will tell you that I did a horrible job that day. Part of it was lack of knowledge. Part of it was because my son was in that school.

It was almost like until I cleared the hallway from each room from the west side of the school to the east side of the school. And until I got to the gymnasium, and got in there and saw my son and I couldn't think of anything else. So that comes to play and that's one of the lessons learned is you're going to have officers who have loved ones in the school and we had many in Parkland when that occurred. We had major incidents, and we always debrief them.

I would tell everybody, you have to debrief every incident. What cops typically do is you have an incident, maybe it doesn't go perfect, maybe there thing. There's always something you could have done better-- always. And you're going and and  afterwards yeah things could have been better but the bad guys in jail, you got them and the incident's okay and next thing  you're high-fiving each other, and you just move on to the next thing because it all turned out all right at the end.

I'm telling you, the ends don't justify the means. You have to debrief every incident and go back and say, “Okay let's walk through this, what could we have done better?” And then you have to know what you could have done better, and make sure that you do it better.

In that situation we ended up in a situation where our training Sergeant Carla Miller came into my office and she goes, “Are we going to debrief this incident?” And this is the Taravella incident and I said, “Yeah Carla we debrief them all”. She goes, “Well I'm going to tell you right now, I don't have something. I don't have anything good to say about you.”

In some departments a sergeant wouldn't go to a deputy chief and basically say, “You suck today dude”. And she was adamant, “I'm not going to have anything good to say about you”. I said, “Carla, you shouldn't. I shit the bed today. I didn't do my job.” I always tell law enforcement leaders around a thing if you can't look yourself in the mirror and you can't admit that you made mistakes. You're not going to get any better and you're a poor leader. You need to be able to do that. You need to be able to look at that and more importantly examine what was done and then fix those things.

Now fast forward to the day of Parkland. Again, we get there. I'm dressed in a shirt and tie, I have my ankle gun on me, and rather than set up a command post I was outside building one with a bunch of people in a stack getting ready to make entry into the building. Start searching for this guy. And my deputy chief next to me Sean Backer grabs me and says, “Hey, we're screwing up we got to start a command post. He was wrong, not that my jurisdiction's. Command post was supposed to be set up by the Broward County Sheriff's Office, but no command post had been set up yet.

So when he did that I was like almost frustrated that we're getting ready to make entry into a school, and now I got to go. So I grabbed the highest ranking BSO Deputy I could find was a lieutenant, and we ran back across the campus out the Pine Island Road, and I said, “Hey, we got to get Captain Jordan here”.

By that time they were experiencing radio issues. Radio issues at the school in Parkland were tough. Anyway, it was a dead zone for their radios even on the best day and he had ran out of his office and left his cell phone. So we had no way to contact her but it was clear at that time that no command post or unified command structure was set.

So I called for one with the help of Captain Sobron and McNally from the fire department came and we started a command post. That I guess is the good thing is okay now we're getting a unified command setup.

The bad thing is that because it came much later the fire department had already set up their triage area and their command post, and it was too close to the problem. It is too close to building 12. They had  already set up their trauma areas, and it took a tremendous amount of time to get that set up. When I say a tremendous amount of time obviously quickly, but for the incident seconds matter.

They didn't want to pick it up and carry it away, so they just ended up  pulling fire apparatus up to block any stray bullets that may come their way, so that they could continue to treat the victims as if we were pulling them out.

I guess what I would say about incident command is, it's so necessary I was trained on it. I will say that the fire guys live it every day, cops don't, we suck at it, we're awful at incident command.

When I went through IC 100, 200, 300 and so on I was a narcotics detective and I was like “What am I even doing in here? I'm a Narcotics detective. Why am I listening to this?”

That day February 14th, 2018 I damn well wished I paid attention a little bit better than I did.

So that is something that I think is a big takeaway is to take ICS training seriously. It's a good foundation, it works. It helps you organize everything and these events are just too big and too massive that without some kind of organized structure they'll go sideways on you.

I would tell everybody to take the ICS training seriously, make sure  whose responsibility it is to set it up and get that set up and if nobody does somebody, the next guy has to and in this incident.

Again, it wasn't my jurisdiction but for the first first hour for the first two hours it was my scene  because  we set up the incident command, and we set up a tactical command post and  at that point Deputy Chief Mckien and Brad Mock were running that and  just just we were working the scene. So although not not our jurisdiction at the time it was our scene early on.

Jon Becker: Clyde, let's dig a little deeper into the kind of lessons learned here. Why don't we start with self-deployment? Any event like this  you end up with a lot of self- deployment. We talked about the politicians who are self-deploying. But what did you guys face as far as law enforcement or fire or parents or others that were self- deploying into your scene?

Clyde Parry: We talked about the importance of debriefing prior incidents. We had an incident where one of our officers was shot five times responding to an armed robbery going after a suspect who barricaded himself in the bushes and concealed himself, shot one of our guys five times.

We had just started using a ‘quick clot’ and that probably saved that officer's life. He's in charge of our homicide unit today but that definitely saved it.

We learned during that incident Coral Springs again being a desirable community we had law enforcement officers from everywhere. I told you that for 10 years I was assigned to the DEA task force. When we'd get a new DEA agent that would move in, they'd always send them over to me and most of them would live in our city.

So  that incident with our officer that was shot and almost died showed us that “Look we're going to have people showing up from every law enforcement entity around, and they're going to show up. They're going to be in plain clothes.

Now fast forward to Parkland right away David Nunes was an FBI agent that came up as a great guy. He introduced himself to me and said, “Hey, I'm here to do anything I can to support you. I'm going to stick in your pocket, and I'm gonna help you through this”.

So he was probably one of the first officers from another agency that  my attention was drawn to.

Sean Vizner from Sunrise showed up. He's like “Hey, I'm the SWAT Commander where you need me?”

So those were I guess good self- deployments.  They came, they checked in with me they came to the command post checked in with me.

Early on I would say that you have to practice this and I talked a little bit about the importance of civilian employees. We have traffic accident investigators, and we have Animal Control Officers. You can use them to block offroads and set a perimeter around the incident and my suggestion would be do that. Use them if they're not people with guns.

If you try and tell an officer “Okay I want you to block off Pine Island and Wise Road when there's an active killer in a school”, they're not going there, they're going to the school. You can use your civilian people to do that.

I would suggest you have a check-in location where you stop everybody there and then you send them to one centralized location either Command Post or a Tactical Command Post where they can get checked in and receive assignments that way  who's on campus and who isn't.

During MSD we had guys show up one one guy in particular, a Margate officer showed up wearing a pair of shorts and a t-shirt and got a vest on he's carrying an AR 15. Later we found out that he had a kid in a school. What do you do with a guy like that? I mean, it's probably not a good idea to have him in there. From my own account as I told you when I went to Taravella at that time. You're not thinking straight. When you're personally involved with your son or daughter in a school. So probably somebody I wouldn't recommend having go into the school, but you still need to set up a location.

We had ATF, DEA, FBI. Miramar's SWAT team was practicing. I believe at our range they were having training at our range so they deployed. So before  we were overwhelmed with. Well-intended people, well-intended Law Enforcement Officers come, they park our cars anyway before  it, we don't have an Ingress or an egress from the scene. Cars are all over the place. It just becomes a mess.

Then parents like I said. It's an amazing word that seeps out and it just goes. My wife at the time received her phone blowing up and people were calling her and they're like “What's going on at the school? What's going on at the school?” She's like “I don't know”. They're like “Well your husband's the chief”. She's like “Well he's busy right now. He's not calling me.”

This occurred around or 11 o'clock at night. I didn't get home till the wee hours of the morning. Didn't even cross my mind to call because you're busy, so there's so many things.

I would recommend that you have what I call a Chief's Checklist and you have a checklist and you think it out and write it down and it's a checkbox, and there are certain things that you may not need. The bomb squad, okay this isn't a bomb squad event we don't need the bomb squad but I'd have it on there so at least it's a reminder in case you do. Drones become very important, how do you search the roof of a school three-story building? It's a lot easier to get a drone up and get eyes on it than not. So have a list of those things and do it.

In this instant  the word seeped out so fast and ironically as everybody knows it was February 14th 2018. It was Valentine's Day. It also happened to be Ash Wednesday. There is one picture that just sends a chill up and down my spine every time I see, it's a scared parent and she has the ashes on her forehead and the sign of a cross. You can tell horribly scared, horribly shaken.

One of the things that we did that I wish I could go back and change was as you're evacuating students and bringing them out again you don't know is one of them the shooter. You don't know what you don't know.

So you try and be as safe as possible. You tell them to drop our backpacks. We put them all in a pile right outside the school.

I wish we would have thought to say to everybody, “Take your iPhone, take your phone with you and  send a message to your parents, one message just to your loved ones saying hey, I'm okay.”

We took them to a park where then we separated who are witnesses and who aren't. When we dropped all the backpacks there some of them had iPhones in, and  parents are hearing about this shooting and word seeping out, social media makes it go faster than you can control it, it's going to get out there everybody knows people. Parents are showing up. The scene's overwhelming. Some parents are using the find “My iPhone app” and they see that their phone is at the school and it hasn't moved for hours and they're horrified they believe that their kids are victims.

That wasn't the case in many of the instances, it was just that we had packed or packed all the backpacks up in one area. I wish we would have thought that out ahead of time. I would tell everybody that that if you're going to do that make sure they take our phone with them just so that  you don't terrify unnecessarily all of these witnesses.

Our scene was overwhelming and  we had a perimeter that was good enough for the school and good enough for the area. Obviously we got a crime scene we need to protect but there are things that could have been done that would have made that easier. One, social media got the word out that there was a shooting there. We could have used social media get the word out to direct the parents to a family reunification center.

Early on we set up a family reunification Center. We set it up at a hotel in the North End of Coral Springs Marriott Hotel and we could have used social media to tell the parents to go there instead of going to the scene. That maybe would have helped stop some of the car traffic that was there, some of the people that we had to hold back.

You're using a lot of manpower to maintain the scene, and you could have sent them elsewhere. So something like that would have been good.

I would have used our public information officers and our social media people, and some departments don't have the luxury of that. Some departments only have one person that does that. And most of the time, I warn departments a lot of smaller departments it's the chief that's the social media guy. Well the chief is busy he's not going to be the social media guy so that's a bad move. Have somebody that you can spare do the Social Media stuff, and have them get together with the surrounding agencies.

My thought is our plan afterwards and one of the changes we made is  our social media people would link up, and they'd have training with Margate and Coconut Creek, and all of those other social media people, so that if you have an incident like that you have enough people to divide them up. I would put the politicians they want to be close. We had a command bus BSO eventually brought theirs out their bus was better than ours, ours was old at the time we've since replaced it with newer technology and in a better bus.

I would use that older bus and that's what we eventually did was house the politicians and school board members in that area there so that we could provide updates, so that they know what's going on in our time frame. If you had a PIO or a social media director or somebody savvy with that you can assign it there.

The only thing I would caution about that is you have to have one unified message so you have to have a Clearing House of where this message is going to go through. In my mind it would be if the events in Coral Springs, it would be Coral springs' PIO who is in charge and that person would obviously vet everything and put out the message to all the other assistants from all the other departments. And I think that probably is a common sense approach to this.

I would also put somebody up in dispatch and immediately start putting out, “Yes we are working a scene. Do not go there. If you've identified the family reunification area, put that out.”

After this incident  we strategically picked places in our city that we would use as a family reunification center: one in the south end of the city, one in the north end of the city, one in the central area and one out east. We entered into agreements with the management, got blueprints and marked it out “Okay if this happened, this is where we do it we'd set it up here. This is where we'd make death notifications” because even that you have to lay it out.

At MSD there were a lot of times where  the families were all gathered in one large room and they'd call somebody out, and you would hear a death curdling scream. And the other families then knew the fate of that person's loved one.

We did the best we could that day under those circumstances. But by having that pre-planned and have it designed, that's there. The only thing I would say is that has to be renewed every year. You have to assign somebody to that and have them go around managers change these locations. We used hotels - we used that. We have a gym in the South End of the city that is really big and could definitely support a reunification area, but you got to make sure that you're still current that they know what's going on.

Too many times we come up with a great idea. This is  the funny thing about cops. We were great at coming up with ideas a lot of good ideas get thrown under man staff table-- we suck at implementing them.

When we do our debriefings we identify things that that need to be fixed. If you don't go out immediately and fix those things then you're wasting your time doing a debriefing. You definitely need to do it it's good to identify your shortcomings but once you identify them identify them that's the small end of it. Fixing it is the big part.

Jon Becker: So I mean just to give a sense of scale, how many kids do you end up-- I mean how long does it take you to clear all the buildings and lock down the site?

Clyde Parry: Hours until we were satisfied that we've cleared everything. Again by that time BSO SWAT teams there. BSO has a fabulous SWAT team they those guys are are second to none. I would tell you that our SWAT guys and of course, I'm prejudice but I think they would say this or a close second.  They trust our guys and we trust them there are a lot of times when BSO swats going out of town they ask us to cover different portions of their jurisdiction. So there's a lot of respect there between it. They worked together. They cleared it.

Marking the the rooms one of the problems that we had is in the 12000 building, in the school had a problem with kids vaping in the bathroom. So to solve their problem-- and it sounded like a great idea at the time. I'm not knocking a school. Okay our problem is we have kids vaping in the bathroom. We can't put monitors in the bathrooms all day long we're there. We don't have the manpower. How do we fix this?

What they decided to do was lock the bathrooms on the first floor, and lock the bathrooms on the third floor so that if somebody needed to use the bathroom they go to the second floor. Makes sense? When you're thinking about that. But now we have this incident you had kids that were trying to take shelter in the bathrooms but the bathrooms are locked that's a problem. You have law enforcement clearing a school and as you know we can't walk past a locked door. If we walk past a locked door who's to say that the shooter isn't in there and locked it.

So now we either have to destroy the lock, pry it open , do something to get in there post somebody outside there to hold that door. Now you're losing manpower as you're progressing down and clearing each room.

On that day in particular we're clearing rooms but we're also losing manpower because cops are picking up wounded kids and carrying them out. We commandeered golf carts and anything we could use to transport them to the triage areas. So  you got a whole lot going on and you're losing more and more manpower when you have to drop somebody off at a locked door where you have somebody carrying a kid out and two people carrying  a wounded child out.  So it becomes taxing on your manpower. Couple other things too hurricane glass.

I think I talked about that a little bit earlier but on our asp our collapsible batons we had purchased a cap that has porcelain tips on the bottom so that you can shatter a window. I will tell you this: if you think about the kids on the inside, you can't get in because you want to clear it now you're shattering the window. What do you think those kids are thinking on the inside?

One of the other incidents that happened at Taravera the day that I did a horrible job, is some of the kids in one of the building down there were picking up scissors, and chairs and as officers were coming in if they weren't in. Like I say a lot of people self- dispatch  and and show up to the scene maybe they don't have their police gear on.

I mean picture this headline: “Officer mistakenly shoots student while clearing a building because the student was scared to death and was going to attack you with a fire extinguisher or a knife, a pair of scissors  to use as a knife”. There's no winner from that so you need to figure that out.

At MSD they had code words yet nobody knew the code words. So one of the teachers got with one of our officers. One of our officers says he's at a door and he's saying, “Hey Coral Springs police let me in”. They're saying, “No we're not letting you in because they're trained not to let you in.” He said he could hear more and more chairs being slid against the door. He's like “I was going to FaceTime him but I have my phone in my car because I ran as fast as I could”.

He took his ID out and slid it under the door and then they're questioning him about information that's on his ID. What's your ID number? What's the Police Department address? Eventually one of the teachers from the other classroom that he cleared said, “Hey, we have a code word and they gave the code word.

Well my suggestion for that lesson learned is the schools in your jurisdiction should/must provide a code word to your dispatch center that they have on file that they can give you so that we can  enter the school.

In a perfect world we would have the ability to have a key fob that would get you in all the doors. The doors they all lock behind you.

What we did in the short term after MSD is we put noxboxes outside all the schools but typically what we've done is we put a set of keys in there-- a set of keys. You got to have 10 maybe more.  So we put 10 or more. We would put maps in there of the school layout of the school when you walk into a school.

One of the best maps you'll see is the evacuation map for a fire drill that gives you perfectly out of the school. Take that map and use it  you you should have that in your command book all your command officers, your sergeants, your shift lieutenants, your captains, your  Deputy Chiefs anybody in your command structure should have a binder in their car that has a laminated layout of all the schools so that you you have that readily available to you.

In our case we kept that in our Command bus so I had one of those available to me at the time. But it was on a regular piece of paper. And it gets awfully small when you have 30 classrooms in a piece of paper there.

At MSD they had a state-of-the-art camera system. State-of-the-art beautiful camera. The school district didn't trust us with the access to the camera.

You got to remember the time and frame it was the anti- police, the defund the police, a lot of bad feelings between the police and a lot of the communities.

I remember George Sobram was the captain in charge of our SRO. He was frustrated as hell. He's saying to me, “They don't want to cooperate. I'm trying to get access to the cameras before MSD”, and they're like “Well we don't want you watching the cameras and catching our students doing something wrong”.

We're flabbergasted saying, “Oh, if you have one of your students doing something illegal in your school wouldn't you want them removed?” And that just wasn't the case. We weren't good partners with each other and that became very clear. Afterwards, that was one of the things that we went out to correct is we needed to be trusted partners with our school not the enemy and that was something that needed to change.

If you would have had access to the cameras. Now I caution that if you have access to the cameras we didn't have a real-time crime Center before MSD, we did one afterwards corrective measure based on that incident in there. We had access to the school cameras.  Now you have to practice. I used to go out and walk in and say okay pull up the cameras and  the operator in the real time crime center would say, “All right. Hold on I'd pull out their folder and they get it and say, “Okay step one is this and you log on this way”. There's no time for that. They need to know how to access those cameras and then just like the radio system in the Sheriff's Office, if you overload access to those cameras they'll freeze. They'll shut down.

So you need to know how many people there. Can you watch the current cameras while rewinding another feed to try and find the killer?  You need to know those things and you need to know that before an incident occurs.

On that day of our incident we didn't have access to the cameras-- no law enforcement people did. We had the school security people relaying to us what they saw on the camera and we were saying, “Is this real, is this current right now?” They're saying “Yes”. But it wasn't that. They rewind the cameras 20 minutes to find a shooter. So we're clearing the building and they're saying, “He's coming from the third floor down to the second floor”. Our guys are positioning up saying, “Okay where's he at?” And they're saying, “No we see him. He's coming down.” They're there saying, “No he's not. Where's he at now?”

Put this in the context and I think I've said it is, we believe strongly in stop the bleed. We believe strongly in controlling bleeding and saving lives. If you got somebody that's bleeding out on a third floor but you're stuck on a second floor because you're being told that the shooter is coming from the third floor to the second floor, and those seconds are being wasted there what kind of position does that put you in? So all of those things need to be worked out ahead of time.

The last thing I'd say about cameras is, make sure they're marked properly so that somebody who's looking at the camera will be able to relay where that camera is actually located.  When we first got access to the cameras after this incident, we had to fight with the school board even after this incident to get access to the cameras and when we did  they'd be like okay, “Mrs Jones classroom”. What's that mean? I don't know where Mrs. Jones' classroom is.  You need a descriptor. You need to say, third floor northwest corner.

There has to be a way so that when they're pulling that up they can relay the information intelligently and efficiently to the troops on the ground.

Jon Becker: Clyde, we've talked about kind of incident deployment let's talk about like I described it earlier as a shit storm that was headed your way. There are a lot of post-incident fallout here that I think we can kind of walk through. Where do you think we should start, maybe dealing with families and kind of what happened when you had to deal with families?

Clyde Parry: The families of the victims: hardest thing how do you look at somebody and not feel their pain?  It really is. Most people just want to know “Did my child suffer?” Probably the most common question I think a lot of people got is, “Did my child suffer?” In a lot of instances they didn't. You could say with certainty that probably wasn't the case. That was there.

If you have 17 families and when we say 17 we're just talking about the people who actually were attached to people who died in the incident. There were 17 other shot but let's not forget, it's not just the people who were were obviously the ones were impacted the most or people who lost somebody-- they died, the people who were shot that still carry a bullet from the shooter with them and the horrible images there they're impacted, but the people that we evacuated.

When we were evacuating when we were taking ground on evacuating the school, and we're running them out, Brad Mark made the decision to move the bodies over to the side. There's shell casings all over the floor, there's blood all over the floor, dead classmates.

We're trying to escort the kids out of the school. Of course they're running past now what they see are their dead classmates, and those are images that they will never get out of their head that they will never erase. Those folks are victims also.  I mean everybody's a victim here in this whole community.

I tell this story often  I coached football, or at the time I was coaching football in the city and we had one lady that came and she was the kind of person that you could tell when she walked in the room the room lit up just the mood of the room got better, always an outgoing very friendly going person. After this incident my wife had run into her at the public shopping center and she said, “Oh, my God, I thought she had cancer because she just looked so bad”. She lived next door to somebody who was killed, and it affected her in a horrific way.

Nobody was left untouched. There are no no people that weren't touched by this in some way especially. Even though we're talking Broward County, 1.9 million people, you're talking Coral Springs Parkland 160,000 plus.

Everybody knew somebody that was directly affected by this incident, or somebody that was-- as I'm saying this I'm thinking I'm up in the command staff room. Remember I become the chief of police I think 7 days after this I'm sworn in.  I was the intern chief and I knew I was going to become the chief. I felt very strong about my chances. You have so many things that you want to accomplish when you're a brand new chief, “Oh I've got this list”. They all went to the back burner.

My first year and a half every day it was something about this incident-- and rightfully so it was  obviously the major incident. A worldwide event-- we had cameras from all over School news media, the year anniversary, the five year anniversary. It never stopped. And one day I'm up in the Command Staff office and one of the guys on my command staff comes in and tells me that  we had a suicide. We were actually talking Sydney Iello and Calvin Desir two young people who died by suicide after this event. It's believed that this event strongly  made that happen.

Of course, I don't know what was in these young people's head at the time when they did this. I remember him telling me that, and I'm thinking “This asshole's in jail and he's still killing people”. It's not something that goes away. It's something that just stays with you.

I was scared to death of losing any of my officers, any of my civilian people, my dispatchers. This was a tragedy and I didn't want to follow up this tragedy with any more tragedies.

My heart goes out to  the parents of those young people who died by suicide. Again nobody was left unscathed by this. Luckily knock on wood . I mean we haven't lost anybody. We put a lot of effort into  caring for each other after the event. I hope that had a meaningful action for the outcome and  it's just these events are so big. There's just so many things to go over and so many things to cover.

Jon Becker: Let's push on that for just a little bit.  Now you've been through this you're you're obviously. Everybody in your department is affected by this either directly or indirectly or through their families or their family's friends. If you had some time with a chief who's walking into this situation, what would you tell him about kind of caring for your own people and making sure that you're dealing with what is going to be long-term fallout for them?

Clyde Parry: Well the first thing I would say is have a plan ahead of time for dealing with the aftermath. We had a cism team that was set up that was  critical incident stress management teams. And we have other agencies that help us when we need it, we help them. If an agency loses an officer our agency may go down and provide counseling and somebody to talk to and somebody to bounce things off of. I would also say have your professionals.

The one thing our fire department, the chief of the fire department, was Frank Babac at the time (he's actually the city manager for Coral Springs right now) he had a good grasp on this and has pushed the mental health aspects and that helped us through this. We had a plan in place. Each person's different. Individuals they're all different. There's no one cookie cutter system that fits everybody.

Somebody may need to go to counseling for years and to help  get through it. Some people may not want to go to counseling at all. I've read studies where they say forcing somebody to go to counseling when they don't want to, can be as harmful as not going at all.

I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist. I'm just a guy and I'm just trying to do the best I can to care for my people.

Confidentiality is important. Our officers that were assigned to people, if they were told, “Yeah, I thought about hurting myself “that never got to me.  I hope nobody felt that way. I'd be foolish to think that that's the case but we have it to the point where our guys have been trained, and they would not tell me at all and shouldn't because if you have a crack in the system, if word gets out then the whole thing breaks down. The whole key is getting help to people who need it.

After this incident we mandated that anybody that was in the 1200 building went for a defusing/debriefing and we felt that was one the mandate. Then we asked, “Hey, anybody else that wants to go can go”. You got to remember that these cops are going home to their wives and they're dumping all this on their wives-- well; that affects the whole family.

One instance one of my one of my sergeants was actually helping coach baseball good friend of mine.  I know his family and we've coached together. He was actually there getting the field ready for baseball the day of this incident. His wife was his assistant athletic director and his son was in the school. He came across one of the kids that was wounded and started treating him. It was a traumatic experience for their whole family. He had a younger son that although he wasn't at the school he sees everything that his family is going through and it affects him as well.

We had a family counseling set up. We waved all co-pays for any kind of appointments that you wanted to make or with professionals. We had professionals that we vetted ahead of time that worked with law enforcement. I think that's important. If you can find people that have worked with law enforcement, and worked through some of these things, those people are so hard to find and so valuable. And luckily we had a stable of them. They're so willing to help that's the one thing.

After this incident everybody was willing to help, everybody wanted to help. In fact, it got to the point where everybody wanted to help so much that you were overwhelmed by all the ideas and help that they wanted to give you. It was almost as hard to juggle as everything else. You got to have that plan in place and you got to care for each other and you got to look out for each other, and you got to watch for the signs that say, “Hey this person's not handling this right”. A change in their behavior, a change in their routine. Somebody who maybe is had never drank before is now excessively drinking.  All those types of triggers, and you've got to look after each other and make sure it's there.

Having said all that, I felt like we had a good plan. I felt like we did it. About two years after this incident (and I might be wrong, it might be longer than two years) one of our victim advocates came to my office, and she was retiring. Whenever somebody was leaving our department I always tried to talk to them, and give them time.

I was talking with her and she said to me, “We had a debriefing for the police only”. Cops are funny. They don't want to talk in front of people, and they won't talk in front of people. We picked one session and we said, “This one's for cops only and only cops”. And we put that out.

Well this victim advocate didn't know that session was for cops only and was about to go to the session and she was told, “No, this one's for cops only”. And she said, “Oh I said oh okay”. I put on a happy face and I turned around and I got my car and she said, “I sat in my car” and she goes “I thought all the time I was here for you and now the time I need somebody you turn me away” and she sat in her car and cried. What do you say? I'm hearing about this. This is years later she's ready to retire and she's saying this and I mean what do you do?

I got up and I gave her a hug and I said, “Look, I'm sorry. I'm sorry that the best laid plans, the best you can plan all this stuff out and I promise you, you're still going to miss something. You're going to miss something. All you can do when you miss something is make it right. Do the best you can.

I couldn't make that up to her. She needed help at that time and we turned her away and that is something that we'll have to live with.

I tell that story, so that hopefully the next guy that's in my shoes won't go through what I went through. Please take note of that, and make sure that you have a plan that encompasses everybody because everybody's important, everybody's worth saving.

Jon Becker: I want to just kind of hit two more topics, the first one, I mean as this thing begins to spiral up, you guys become the focus of every politician in the United States and news media and every agency in the area comes under fire.

Talk to me about dealing with the glare of that bright spotlight that shines on the agency and everybody around it.

Clyde Parry: We've heard a lot about fake news. We've heard a lot about misinformation, disinformation. Even the best laid plans get twisted. You all know the telephone game where you start out  one end of the room and the story always changes. There are a lot of facts and things that that get made up get turned into to issue.

We can't get past the fact that upon this initial incident occurring some of the Sheriff's officers didn't enter the school. And that rubbed a lot of my guys the wrong way, and I get it but again until you're standing in those shoes you just don't know.

What made things go out of control after this incident is you have every politician in the world showing up and then they're showing up and and they're taking Jets, they're trying to get here.  They want to be there for the press conference. Afterwards,  the sheriff called a press conference. FDLE was there. I think the FBI was there. Some senators were there.

The one person that wasn't there was our chief and again our chief had already announced his retirement said he was going. I was the interim chief because he was covering a role of the city manager but he still was  the head of our agency and nobody from Coral Springs was on that stage that day. When our guys saw that it miffed them. They were upset they're like, “We ran past these guys and ran into the school and they didn't even invite you to the press conference”.

I guess I'd warn you about that to make sure  what happened that day was everybody's role.

Later that day one of the majors that I was very good friends with  had worked narcotics with years ago, one of my guys came up to him. He was a major in charge of that area, and they told him hey your guys  crapped a bed that day and we're starting to go through that and I don't know how much stuff got up initially to the Sheriff Israel. I don't think that the Sheriff Israel knew all of these facts at the time, again those majors weren't there. The sheriff wasn't there  until later on they're doing their jobs and this is in the northwest corner of the county. They got there as quick as they could.

I would try to get up to speed as best you can. I know it's important to get out in front of the press but I would try to get up there and get up to speed.

What happened with us afterwards is it became clear that it was getting out to the press that the Sheriff's Office guys, some of those guys didn't make entry into the school, and that was causing a lot of animosity. The sheriffs started to become under fire. Broward County Florida the sheriff's is an elected official and re-elections matter to politicians. With me, I'm in an appointed position as a chief of police, so I don't have to worry about that and I'm glad that it's that way. Now the sheriff finds himself in a bad political position where his department's coming under fire.

They're talking about what happened here. One of the things that they started to say is “Well Coral Springs withheld all the information they were getting from the 911 calls”.

I talked about how some of the calls came into TPDSP. Some of them went to the county  the the cellular phones which were the majority of the calls came to our Dispatch Center and landlines went to the county and we relayed pertinent calls that they went but we didn't relay all of the calls.

Some of the calls that we get  would be from a terrified mother saying, “Oh my God, my daughter just called me and said there's a shooter and we'd say, “Okay what building”. I don't know or they'd say the Freshman building. Well the Freshman building didn't mean anything to our dispatchers. We didn't know where that was. At one point we said, “Where is she hiding that doesn't tell us where she's at?” Those calls aren't pertinent; there's no actionable intelligence in those calls. You wouldn't transfer those because you're just wasting a resource. You're wasting time transferring it. You're wasting time for the Sheriff's Office to interview those people that don't have pertinent information. So  that became a focal point and that just started bad feelings between us.

I remember afterwards we used to always have Sheriff's deputies having lunch in our city because the restaurants were in our city. Parkland was a residential community, not very many places to eat. And  if we'd see them out, we sit down we'd talk to them maybe maybe sit and have lunch with them. Afterwards it got to the point where the feelings were so bad we weren't even talking to each other.

I remember saying to my deputy chief at the time Brad Mckee I said, “We got to fix this. We got to stop this. First of all the Sheriff's Office is filled with courageous brave well-intended fantastic deputies, some of the finest Law Enforcement Officers I ever met. On top of that they're a huge agency with much more resources than than my department had. We need to work together.”

It was a challenge afterwards trying to repair those bad feelings and the animosity and trying to get it back to normal. I think we're there. I hope we're there  because we look like we all got to work together we're one big law enforcement community.

Jon Becker: So looking back at the event now six years later what other remedial measures did you implement in the department? What did you change in the kind of long-term fallout of this where looking back on what changed after the event?

Clyde Parry: Well obviously we need to become trusted partners with our school district. That is something one of the things  the radio system does again, and this does not fall on a sheriff. Broward County has a separate system Orcat controls the radios. The sheriff doesn't control the radios. In other words, anything that's living breathing I.E dispatchers Sheriff hires them that's who the sheriff is in charge of, but the radios the radio communications the computers the CAD system that's all controlled by a different part of the county.

They were saying, “We got to fix this radio system.”

We weren't able to patch our radios together. What I learned is that  on top of the bonking and throttling they didn't have the bandwidth, I guess for lack of a better word to take on the load of patching us there.

I later heard that they didn't even have our frequency there. They were mad that we didn't join their regional system. They didn't have our system there. So you can't patch what you don't have. So when you have that you have two different operations being run,  the Broward Sheriff's operation, the Coral Springs operation.

At one point when their radio system crashed they were having runners run up the to the third floor to relay a message, then run back down to give the answer. That's no way to operate. So we needed to fix that.

I wish I could say we came up with a hub solution that would allow us to communicate with with each other. We're six plus years after and that still hasn't been worked out. That is one of the things probably that I'm most upset about.

When I retired in 2022 I wanted to have all this done. We made a lot of changes, and I'll go into those. But the one thing we weren't able to change is the radio thing. There's too many I guess bureaucrats in a way in my mind it's my opinion, my opinion alone. I stand by my opinion. I had many arguments about this. I wanted to fix this. I never wanted to look at another parent that lost their kid to violence like this, and say that we had a radio issue. To me that's unacceptable, that's just garbage. That still hasn't been fixed.

I know  Brad Mcken is working tirelessly to continue to carry on the fight that we started together. I hope that he's making inroads. I hope that he gets that fixed.

As far as other things  I said we didn't have a real-time crime center before this incident. We put in an alert software in our Charter School that's camera systems. You can remotely lock doors, unlock doors, speak over to the speaker you can. Anything that you can do if you dream it you can do it through this system.

Andy Pollock  started a foundation that helped us pay. His daughter Meadow was one of the victims, and he started this and did that. So many of the parents started their own foundations and are doing tremendous work. Gina Montalo's family doing a great job.  Alex Shacker doing his family. Those folks are doing a great job. So much is being done so there's a lot of positives.

This alert system that we put in, Good Morning America did a piece on it and then it got scrubbed because of covid, but it eventually aired. Anybody that would be interested in getting stay the-art technology that's a platform. There's many more out there. I'm not advocating for one. I'm just saying the one that we did that is something the real-time crime center can see, and know when somebody's coming in. The cameras can follow that person going from camera to camera. You can select them. There's so much artificial intelligence coming that it's moving so fast. Locking in the cameras into our real time crime center has been great.

Probably one of the things that I think was necessary that we did is, we started a threat management team. If you get some disturbed kid who's making threats. I don't think you can arrest your way out of these problems. There's got to be more more than just that. Certainly arrest is one thing. I wish that in this incident there were times where the shooter in Parkland could have been arrested I believe. Maybe successfully prosecuted. Most people don't know this but he did purchase his AR-15. If he had a felony conviction, he wouldn't have been able to do that.

The threat assessment unit that we started a threat management unit looks at all of the threat management, they go out and builds a rapport with their parents.

Parents of these kids are frustrated.

The one thing that all these shootings or shooters have in common is somebody knows that this is going to happen to a close friend or a family member, they suspect that, they know it. No parent wants to believe that their child is capable of such a horrible thing but deep down inside, I think they know that there's something wrong.

If you can build a rapport with them and maybe get them help and get them counseling and =point them in the right direction and if that doesn't work, then lock them up. Do whatever can be done to mitigate it. We're never going to stop these. They're here and they're not going away.

At the time of Parkland it was the third deadliest school shooting. We are now four. Yavaldi had passed us. As I watched that unfold I was sickened by the lessons that we learned that were well documented, well out there and the failures that Yavaldi. How do we as a law enforcement Community keep making these same mistakes? It can't continue to happen.

I think about the Nashville shooting. The shooter in that case has a manifesto that has yet to be released-- yet to be released and it's important.

I'm retired. I'm just a normal ordinary guy but I'm somebody that because of what we've been through, has a keen interest in this. I would like to know what motivated this person in Nashville to do their shooting. I think it's important if we're going to try and mitigate these.

Threat assessment teams are important, and withholding information from them is maddening to me. I think it's liable, but again my opinion.

Jon Becker: In this case, we always avoid talking about the manifesto or the motivation of a shooter and we never mention their names. But like in this case, it's worth at least kind of double clicking on the fact that this kid had dozens of contacts with law enforcement.

I mean, there were numerous people that had alerted the Sheriff's Office to the fact that this kid was a threat and  had made threats and had this traumatic past.

Hindsight is always 2020. It's very easy for us to look at these things and go, “Oh well  if you had followed these 15 breadcrumbs, you would have found it”. But when you look at the number of contacts here it is really hard to think that this kind of slipped through the cracks. I think that the threat assessment unit is an opportunity to kind of coordinate that information and make sure that at least somebody's seriously looking at a kid like this before this happens.

Clyde Parry: A year before this incident the shooter in this case posted a video that was brought to the attention of the Sheriff's Office, and didn't feel like they were taking it seriously.  In the day of social media threats, we all get them.

In my department we made it a priority. If somebody put a threat out on social media more than likely within an hour a few hours we were sitting in that living room talking with the parents and determining is this a kid just being stupid being a kid, or is there something more there.

Look, we're all busy, budgets get cut. I feel horrible for agencies around there that they can't. I mean especially since the Defund the Police movement. If you look at what's going on in the country law enforcement (when I say “we” I'm not talking about Coral Springs, I'm talking about law enforcement general) can't hire enough officers to serve the serve their cities. Now you get these  social media threats, do you take an officer off the street? Do you take somebody to follow up with them? I mean, we always did but we were fortunate that we always had the manpower to do that, and I recognize that other people don't.

In this instance, this shooter made two social media threats (at least two that we're aware of), one saying he wanted to be a professional school shooter, another one saying that he was going to kill a bunch of people.

This lady that reported the BSO didn't feel satisfied, she ended up calling the FBI. Somehow they got the tips line from the Atlanta field division. The FBI agent that that filtered call  took it found the other threat that he made, but never forwarded down to the Miami Field office for follow up.

The FBI settled a lawsuit 128 million roughly to the families because of that failure. It hurts us all; it takes money out of our budgets. Obviously, money's not going to bring back anybody that lost somebody here, but we need to follow them up. We need to have a threat assessment unit. The threat management team is probably the best thing that you can do. They build rapports with probation and parole, the family members, close people.

Most shooters tell somebody they're going to do this. They know, somebody knows and  if we can contain it and stop it or prevent it. We're never going to get rid of them all but  the ones that we can. Let's try and do everything we can. I think it's our job.

Jon Becker: I only got one more question for you. What is your most profound memory of this event?

Clyde Parry: Oh God. There's so many. I don't know what I'm gonna say, it has nothing to do with the event. I mean it does but it doesn't.

After this event I remember driving home and I heard a song on the radio and I don't know who sings it but the chorus of the song is a country song and it says, “I believe most people are good. Mothers should qualify for sainthood. I believe most people are good.” I didn't pay attention. I mean obviously the day of the incident, there's so much going on. You're not even thinking straight. I was exhausted. I was actually sick as a dog also that day. About a month later, I'm driving down the road and that song came on and it was like a punch in the stomach and brought me to tears.

You're sitting there. When I'm driving home the first time I heard it, and I'm thinking how horrible the world is and how we got to this point, and how are-- what's the hope for America, what's the hope for our country? What's the hope for anybody? How can we as a people make this happen? We're awful. Humanity is just out the window. That second time, like I said a month later, I heard that song, and I thought you're right, as horrible as this is, as horrible as I felt, as horrible as it can be, you can't lose it. Most people are good.

When covid came, the Hoyers and Montaldos were in our lobby. Two families who lost their kids that day were in our lobby giving us n95 masks, and hand sanitizer. These are people that have every reason to hate the world, and everything about it and here they are helping us during the pandemic. You can't lose sight of that.  Most people are good. There are good people out there, and too many times you have an incident like this and it's hard  to sift through it and believe that but there are.

Jon Becker: Claude thanks so much man, this has really been enlightening and I appreciate you coming out.

Clyde Parry: Thank you.