This post includes (mostly) previously unpublished information sourced from persons who directly witnessed the CSPD’s SWAT operations, Planned Parenthood security cam feeds, and a police scanner, during last Friday’s attack on the Colorado Springs Planned Parenthood office. It is not intended to be a comprehensive account of the event, but rather, it relates information that the CSPD has, for reasons of its own, been reluctant to relate to the media.
I was in Colorado Springs during the attack on the Planned Parenthood clinic and over the weekend, but I am not the original source of any of the information related here. Although I am personally convinced that the information is accurate, I cannot independently vouch for its accuracy; nor will I reveal the names of the sources. If and when details are released by for-attribution eyewitnesses, readers will be able to judge for themselves.
The 2 civilians killed, Ke’Arre Stewart and Jennifer Markovsky, were shot in the parking lot. Garrett Swasey, the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs PD officer who was killed, was shot inside the lobby of the building as he attempted to apprehend the shooter. According to media accounts, Swasey had responded to CSPD officers’ call for backup. The shooter became trapped in the outer area of the building thanks to Planned Parenthood security measures and swift reactions by PP staff. This PP, like most PP’s, is built like a fortress, with multiple levels of security. Staff are trained to retreat behind an electronically locked door when the alarm sounds. The shooter fired his weapon as he entered the lobby. The alarm went off, and PP staff reacted with amazing swiftness to protect themselves and their patients, quickly evacuating themselves and others present behind electronically secured doors. I was told that the shooter managed to advance one room beyond the lobby, but was unable to advance beyond that point because of the electronically secured doors. Once police arrived, the shooter found himself trapped between them and the locked doors. A senior PP staffer, who by pure luck happened to have been out of the office when the assault began, received notice within minutes and quickly returned to the site, where the staffer provided the police with information regarding the building layout, entry and egress routes, and security features. This gave the police critical information that they needed to plan and execute the rescue of trapped civilians and ultimately the apprehension of the shooter without further civilian casualties. The police were able to monitor the shooter via PP security video feeds. This fact has come out in media reports. It does not seem to square with a statement made by a CSPD spokesperson during the event to the effect that the police had lost sight of the shooter. According to my source, the senior PP staffer and the police watched the shooter on monitors receiving the feeds during the event, so I believe the media report is accurate. I have no further information to reconcile the possibly conflicting media and CSPD accounts; but I would speculate that either the shooter temporarily found an area where he was not visible to the cameras, or perhaps one or more cameras was damaged in gunfire exchanges. For whatever reason, the shooter did not intentionally disable the cameras. The police were also able to use the PP security feeds to monitor PP staff and patients as they huddled behind desks or furniture in locked rooms beyond the lobby. The senior PP staffer drew maps and helped police determine the locations and identities of those they could see on the monitors. This allowed the police to know where trapped civilians were located and which might be endangered should the police try to enter via various alternative routes that were being considered. The shooter was armed with an AK-47 or derivative. (The AK-47 is a commonly available assault rifle originally manufactured by the Soviet Union, but licensed to many countries and now available around the world.) A CSPD armored vehicle moves towards the clinic. The shooter literally had multiple bags or satchels of ammunition with him. The shooter mostly stayed prone and occasionally fired out the windows. The shooter shot a law enforcement officer, who had been standing behind a vehicle, in the foot. (Plainly, the shooter was very proficient with his weapon.) The shooter had propane tanks with him, some of which he had placed in the parking lot, presumably intending to explode them with bullets. One reason the CSPD took as long as they did to apprehend the shooter was because they spent a lot of time looking at the video feeds trying to determine whether the objects with the shooter were explosives. The CSPD SWAT team unsuccessfully attempted a frontal assault, resulting in one officer getting shot. This was the shootout described by the CSPD during one of the brief pressers during the event. The SWAT team crashed through the front doors in an armored vehicle and attempted to enter the lobby in force. The shooter wounded one of the officers as he exited the vehicle, and the team retreated. This picture shows the clinic entrance after CSPD had twice rammed through with armored vehicles. The police crashed an armored vehicle into the lobby a second time, and were able to evacuate several trapped civilians in this attempt. I don’t have any more specifics on how the police accomplished this after the first armored car assault failed. I speculate that they used the monitors to locate him, and positioned the vehicle in such a way that it would block the shooter’s fire from the location he was in at the time. By the time of the final arrest, CSPD had evacuated 21 of 24 civilians inside the building. Some were rescued via exit doors the police were able to access thanks to the senior PP staffer, some via the armored car. This shot appears to show a rescuee exiting a CSPD armored vehicle. At the time the police made the arrest, a PP staffer was still inside the building in a locked room that the police could not reach. Two civilians spent the entire time hiding in a bathroom stall that the shooter had access to. At one point the shooter entered the bathroom but did not check the stalls. CSPD felt it could not simply shoot through the building at the shooter because of the danger to civilians hiding in the building behind him. The police infiltrated the building behind the shooter for the final arrest, using a security card provided by a PP staffer. The police then had the drop on the shooter and called to him to surrender. (Apparently) recognizing that his position was no longer defensible, the shooter surrendered.My takeaways:
The main reason the death toll was not higher was because the shooter could not advance further into the building. The unnamed PP staffer is a hero and deserves to be recognized. That person may never be publicly recognized, though, due to security concerns. The shooter was very well-trained and/or combat experienced. The shooter responded rationally to the tactical situation. When police attacked frontally, he responded with lethal accuracy. He kept them at bay by firing outside the windows. He kept out of sight of snipers. And most tellingly, when the police outflanked him, he recognized the jig was up and surrendered. I suggest taking with a grain of salt the claims that he was not “all there.” He may have been a fanatic, but he was certainly able to make rational risk assessments. Either the shooter did not anticipate that PP staff would react swiftly to secure themselves and the patients, OR the shooter did not know that the PP building was a hard target. I suspect there’s a good chance that the shooter was not affiliated with a forced-birth group, but was a sympathizer who had been inflamed by the altered PP videos that have been so much in the news (and so rarely called out as having been altered). CSPD had ample reason to give the shooter a chance to surrender. He had already shot five officers, killing one. The police could not risk blasting away like the French police in their raid on the Paris terror co-conspirators, because of the risk to civilians still inside.Despite the apparent contrast between the live apprehension of this shooter and police murders of unarmed black civilians, it was best for all concerned that the shooter was taken alive. With a live perp facing trial, nobody will be able to credibly claim he was something he was not. That won’t stop the Wingnutry from making wild claims to deflect blame from their own, but most of their bullshit will be directly debunked by the existence of a live person against whom actual evidence will ultimately be presented.