Category Archives: Active Shooter

RiskAlert Incident Report #473 – Hospital Admin Killed at Home

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RiskAlert  INCIDENT REPORT 473 – ACTIVE SHOOTER 12-27-2013

Oschner Hospital Administrator Shot to Death in his Home in Active Shooter Spree

Dateline:  December 27, 2013   pm

A Louisiana man attacked his former in-laws, his current wife, and the Administrator of a hospital
where he’d worked, killing three and wounding three others before killing himself, authorities said.

The shooter, Ben Freeman, 38, was found late Thursday night in his car along a highway,
dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head.

The shootings happened at four locations in two parishes about 45 miles southwest of New Orleans
on Thursday. The first report came about 6:40 p.m., when Lafourche Parish Councilman Louis Phillip
Gouaux, who was shot in the throat, called 911 from his home in Lockport, Houma, La.

The suspect, Ben Freeman, 38, was the ex-husband of Gouaux’s daughter Jeanne, Lafourche Parish
Sheriff’s Office spokesman Brennan Matherne said in a news release.

Gouaux’s wife, Susan “Pixie” Gouaux, was dead when deputies arrived.  Louis Phillip Gouaux and his
daughter, Andrea Gouaux, were injured and taken to Interim LSU Public Hospital in New Orleans.
Both were in critical but stable condition, Matherne said.

About 20 minutes later in Raceland, Ochsner St. Anne General Hospital Administrator Milton Bourgeois
was shot and killed at close range at his home.  His wife, Ann Bourgeois, was shot in the leg, and taken
to the New Orleans hospital, where she was listed in stable condition.  Raceland police said Bourgeois
was shot at close range and his wife was shot in the leg.

Houma,LA Shooter

 

Freeman had been employed at three area hospitals over the last few years, including Oschner St. Anne Hospital, where Lafourche Parish Sheriff Craig Webre said he had been a registered nurse before he was fired in 2011. All three hospitals were put on lockdown for a while Thursday.

Freeman’s wife, Denise Taylor Freeman, was found dead in the couple’s home in Houma in Terrebonne Parish. Matherne said her cause of death was not immediately known.

 

  RISKAlert is a publication of Risk & Security LLC at www.riskandsecurityllc.com.

Get Management’s Attention for Security – Shooter Kills the Hospital Administrator

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Every Security Officer I’ve ever met has mentioned how difficult it can be to get funding for additional security!  It is a never-ending mission, to get the budget for a security program that will truly protect an organization.

Hospitals are no exception.  They have suffered their own financial problems and because security is not seen as a ‘clinical’ or ‘patient care’ issue, it is easy to take money from security and put it somewhere else.

But there’s one sure way to get management’s attention for Security — having a security incident.  And if you don’t have one at your organization, high profile security incidents at other facilities will all grab management’s attention.

In my Risk-Pro Security Incident Report today, a shooter killed four, wounded three, and then killed himself.   What was unusual about this incident was that the shooter went to the Hospital Administrator’s house and shot the administrator dead, and then shot his wife who was taken to an area hospital.

AdministratorHome-Louisiana

 

 

 

Most executives and administrators think about security as sort of an abstract concept, that doesn’t directly affect them.  But it might, and by sending your management a copy of our Risk-Pro Incident Report, you’ll get their attention this time!

(Subscribe to the Risk-Pro Incident Report program by sending an email with the word SUBSCRIBE on it to info@riskandsecurityllc.com)

Joint Commission Reports on Shootings in Hospitals

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Some of the most horrific shootings we see occur in hospitals.  Because most people still think of hospitals as “places of refuge”,  it is always a big shock when some kind of violence or shooting occurs in a hospital, especially gun violence.

With so many active shooter incidents in the US in recent months, the Joint Commission recently released information about the number of shootings in hospitals, and found that,

They analyzed a total of 154 hospitals shootings, which took place between 2000 and 2011.  They found that 59% of the incidents took place inside the hospitals, and 41% took place outside on the hospital grounds.

Of the 59% of incident that happened INSIDE the hospital, not surprisingly, about 30% took place in the Emergency Department, and 19% in the patient rooms.   We all remember the John Hopkins incident that occurred in a room where the shooter shot his mother’s doctor, and then locked the door and killed his mother and then committed suicide.

Of the 41% of incidents that took place outside, but on the hospital’s ground, 23% took place in the parking lot, which underscores how important it is to have a designated manager for the parking facilities.  We have seen stories about a man in Tennessee who had a meth lab IN HIS CAR in the hospital parking garage, and the poor baby tossed off the roof of a parking garage.

The 154 hospital shootings resulted in a total of 235  people who were Injured or who died in the incident.   The most common
victim was the perpetrator (shooter) and that accounted for 45% of the people injured or killed. 

Another 20% of the victims were the hospital employees, including physicians (3%) and nurses (5%).

hospitalhallway2-tiny
Another interesting highlight of the report, was that 50% of the shootings that took place in the
emergency departments were the result of the shooter taking the security officer’s gun!
The dramatic increase in Active Shooter incidents, including the Washington Navy Yard Shooting, the LAX
shooting and the Sparks middle school shooting all illustrate that the trend is moving toward more incidents per year, and more people dead or injured in each incident.
For example, from 2000 to 2004, there was, on average, only 3.8 active shooter incidents per year.  Then,
from 2005 – 2010, the average number of incidents per year increased to 11 incidents a year, and from
2011 to 2013, it jumped again to an average of 17 incidents per year, which is over a 300% increase from 2000.The statistics clearly show the trend of increasing gun violence in our society, and until society can find a way to reverse
the trend, hospitals will be looking at the possibilities to stop the violence at the door to their emergency department.

 

Source for hospital shooting data:   Hospital-Based Shootings in the United States: 2000 to 2011 by Gabor D. Kelen, MD, Christina L. Catlett, MD, Joshua G. Kubit, MD, Yu-Hsiang Hsieh, PhD

 

The LAX Shooting and the Active Shooter Threat

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With the 3rd Active Shooter incident in less than 45 days, you are probably wondering what is happening here?  Why are we having so many active shooters?

There are not any easy answers, but one thing is certain, all the shooters in the Navy Yard Shooting, the Sparks Middle School shooting, and the LAX Shooter all suffered from psychological problems.

In the LAX shooting, the shooter ‘s parent had tried to contact the police because of a suicide text they had received, but it was already too late.

Police red tape being what it is – thorough, the urgency was lost and the incident was already in process before anything had been done.

BUT NOTE: The text was a HELP ME.  And it was noticed, but not followed up in time.

All these shooters had major mental issues, that people had noticed, and
that people had remarked on, and that people had worried about.

We don’t know where all the guns in the incidents were purchased, or just picked up at home and taken to the scene.

BUT we know that most of the active shooters had mental issues, which means that the screenings must be approved, and more help available for these individuals, before they can kill or hurt others.

 

New Active Shooter App Announced on October 20, 2013

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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

New Active Shooter app released to reduce likelihood of an Active Shooter Incident.

Active Shooter incidents have increased both in the number of incidents, as well as the number of people killed and injured in the last five years.  As an aspect of  workplace violence, the active shooter has become is a serious recognized occupational hazard, ranking among the top four causes of death in workplaces during the past 15 years. More than 3,000 people died from workplace homicide between 2006 and 2010, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). Additional BLS data indicate that an average of more than 15,000 injuries were annually during this time.

The latest figures show that high-risk organizations like hospitals, schools, malls, universities, military installations and even hair salons have experienced an active shooter incident and are likely to have a dramatically increased risk for experiencing an active shooter incident in the future.

Risk & Security LLC has released a new web-based app, Active Shooter Risk-Pro©, which offers an easy to use risk assessment program that assesses your organizational risk of an active shooter incident, as well as recommending solutions to prevent an incident from occuring in the future.

In additional to using the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Guidelines on Active Shooter Response, the OSHA standard 3148 (Guidelines for Preventing Workplace Violence for Health Care, the FBI and Secret Service Guidelines on Active Shooter Incidents, and the new OSHA Inspection Directive, Enforcement Procedures for Investigating or Inspecting Incidents of Workplace Violence, from September, 2011, are both included in the new, easy-to-use application.

The program has been tested on some of the largest organizations in the US, and runs on a laptop, PC or tablet, and even on a smartphone!.  Active Shooter Risk-Pro©  is built to be affordable and simple to use.

The web 2.0 program, includes newly compiled, updated threat databases, new active shooter incident analysis metrics, and automated web-surveys based on the DHS Guidelines..

The new program gives human services and security professionals a quick and easy way to conduct a active shooter, or general workplace violence that will recommend that will pass an audit!

The Risk-Pro©  model has been used for easy software applications by the Department of Defense and over hundreds of organizations, hospitals, and local, state and federal government agencies.

About Risk & Security  LLC

Risk & Security  LLC is a security risk assessment and risk analysis company with over 30 years of combined expertise in security risk assessment. It develops specialized programs and applications which are easy to use, affordable and which help organizations assess their risk, the likelihood of becoing a target, and which recommend cost-effective solutions.

Risk & Security offers full service consulting on critical risk assessments including HIPAA Risk Analysis, Facilities Security Assessments, Hospital Security Assessments, Workplace Violence, Active Shooter Incident Assessment, Environment of Care and more.  Risk & Security partners with security companies around the world to provide state-of-the-art security expertise to analyze risk and recommend cost-effective security controls justified by return on investment metrics.

The team of risk and security experts is led Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, who has created more than 40 software programs, and conducted more than 200 specialized security risk assessments in a variety of environments, including companies in the United States and around the world, including in Abu Dhabi, Hong Kong, Japan, South Africa and Qatar.

Contact Information:

Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton, CHS III

Email:  caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

Phone:  301-346-9055

Twitter:  www.twitter.com/riskalert

 

DOD-OIG Report on Security Weaknesses at the Navy Yard

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The recently released 56-page report by the Department of Defense, Office of the Inspector General found that the Navy Access Control System did not adequately control the risks to the Washington DC Navy Yard and other sites under their control.

NCACS did not effectively mitigate access control risks associated with contractor installation access. This occurred because Commander,
Navy Installations Command (CNJC) officials attempted to reduce access control costs.

As a result, 52 convicted felons received routine, unauthorized installation access, placing military personnel, dependents, civilians, and
installations at an increased security risk.

Additionally, the CNIC N3 Antiterrorism office (N3AT) misrepresented NCACS costs. This occurred because CNIC N3AT did not perform
a comprehensive business case analysis and issued policy that prevented transparent cost accounting of NCACS. As a result, the Navy
cannot account for actual NCACS costs, and DoD Components located on Navy installations may be inadvertently absorbing NCACS costs
.
Furthermore, CNIC N3AT officials and the Naval District Washington Chief Information Officer circumvented competitive contracting
requirements to implement NCACS. This occurred because CNIC N3AT did not have contracting authority. As a result, CNIC N3AT
spent over $1.1 million in disallowable costs and lacked oversight of, and diminished legal recourse against, the NCACS service provider.

You can read the entire report at:  http://www.dodig.mil/pubs/documents/DODIG-2013-134.pdf

 

Courtesy Caroline Ramsey-Hamilton at Risk and Security LLC

caroline@riskandsecurityllc.com

 

 

 

 

Planning an Active Shooter Drill, Why Once is Not Enough

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Almost every day I get a note that a hospital or corporate facility is planning to have an Active Shooter Drill.  That is always good news because it is a critical part of preparedness that protects not only against an active shooter incident, but also prepares the staff for other emergencies, but it may not be enough.

I’ve found that to be really effective, drills need to be supplemented with short training sessions, and also awareness programs that teach staff to be on their toes, or “situationally aware”.   Security awareness training doesn’t have to be a full time job and it doesn’t have to be expensive.

One of the best ways to create an on-going security awareness program is to make a 12-month calendar, with an activity for each month, or better yet, every two weeks.   Here’s a list of activities I use:

1.  Start with a one page newsletter.  You can have the marketing department help, or use WordPress to design your
own newsletter and email it out to all the staff.  Whether your staff is 100 people or 6000 people, it’s a great way to promote the security program.

2.  Send out very short emails highlighting news items about security incidents at other companies, especially ones in your industry, for example, hospitals.  If there’s a terrible incident at another hospital, cut and paste the story and email it to everyone.  In fact, if you’re an IAHSS or ASIS member, their publications have great stories about different security situations.

3.  Use seasonal reminders.  Now that it’s late October and daylight savings time is almost over, send an email reminding staff how to stay alert when they leave the facility after dark and head for their car.  How to use the escort service, if that’s available, or how to use your keys as a weapon in a potential incident.

4.  Buy posters to put in the cafeteria, or in the elevators that serve as reminders about the concept of staying alert and aware of your surroundings at all time.

I have interviewed more than 8000 staff members in the last 10 years, and they welcome these reminders and feel more secure just because you are keeping awareness up.   Remember, it also reminds everyone that there is a Security Department, and that is working every day to keep them safe.

The Department of Homeland Security also provides free brochures and charts you can print out and give to employees, or you can email them for the staff member to print out and put in their purse.  There are wallet sized cards, and lots of other great information you can use in your own active shooter awareness program.

Check out the preliminary OIG Report, which was leaked to Time Magazine on their swampland.com site at

Read more: http://swampland.time.com/2013/09/16/exclusive-navy-yard-dropped-its-guard-pentagon-inspector-general-says/#ixzz2f6qWCshc

 

 

What’s Your Active Shooter Risk? How to Assess the Threat!

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Just the idea of an Active Shooter in your organization, whether you’re a military base, like Fort Hood, and the Washington Navy Yard, or a school like Sandy Hook, a beauty shop, a cracker factory in Philadelphia, a retail mall, a movie theatre, a grocery store parking lot, or a hundred other places, is a terrifying thought.

I lived about 3 miles from one of the shooting sites, a gas station, used by the Beltway Snipers back in October, 2002.  They killed ten people, totally at random, and critically injured three others.   Both of the snipers were sentenced, and John Muhammad was killed by lethal injection in 2009.

If you lived in the DC area, do you remember how scary it was just to pump gas into your car,  people were huddled against the side of their cars in the gas stations, and hidden by their shopping carts at the local Home Depots.

The fear of the Active Shooter comes from the seeming randomness of the action, which means there’s no way to prevent it, unless you give up, stay home, and hide under the bed all day.

But there are things you can do.  Instead of thinking of an Active Shooter incident as a totally unique situation, it’s really a form a Workplace Violence, Gas Station Violence, Parking Lot Violence and other related forms of random violence.   In fact, the Department of Homeland Security has identified quite a few steps you can take to keep yourself safer if you are in the vicinity of an active shooter (http://www.dhs.gov/active-shooter-preparedness).

Most of the shooters are mentally ill.  Normal individuals do not enjoy planning and killing strangers, and it is usually a last ditch effort, with the suicide of the shooter as the grand finale.   Their actions can sometimes be identified early, and the police can be alerted, or the Human Resources group at work, or even the local Sheriff can intervene before it gets to the actual shooting.

Signs that someone is having trouble negotiating their life, especially if that someone is a gun fanatic, with their living room full of AK-47 assault weapons and hollow point bullets, is not hard to spot, because these individuals often leave lots of warning signs, like:

  • Irrational Posts on Facebook or inappropriate tweets.
  • Threats made against friends and family.
  • A dropoff in personal hygiene, as the person gets more obsessed.
  • Problems negotiating their personal life.
  • Demonstrating signs of isolation and groundless paranoia

Organizations can protect themselves from an potential active shooter through a combination of specific controls that include elements like access control, continuous monitoring of cameras, employee awareness and training programs, clear cut evaluation routes, regular active shooter drills, and hardening of facilities, to name a few.

One of the best preventive measures is to conduct an Active Shooter Risk Assessment, which is similar to other security analyses, except that it is focused on a particular set of threats related to an Active Shooter Incident.   As part of my annual Threat Trend Reports, I’ll be releasing a new set of threat data about the Active Shooter, to help organizations calculate their risk of
having such an incident.   For example, did you know that the number of active shooter incidents has jumped from 1 in 2002
to 21 incidents in 2010?

ActiveShooterIncidentsbyYear

 

 

 

 

 

 
Locations have changed, too, and we found that

About 25% of active shooter incidents occur in schools,
About 25% in retail locations, and
About 37% in workplaces.

In future blogs, we’ll be looking at each element of the active shooter incident, and providing more information to keep
your organization safe.

 

 

Capitol Hill Security Incident Scares Congress- Could it Happen To You?

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The Capitol Hill Security Chase and Shooting yesterday gave a bad scare to everyone – including Senators, Congresspeople, tourists, furloughed federal employees and staff who still have their jobs.

The atmosphere on Capitol Hill was already so toxic that almost everyone jumped to the (incorrect) conclusion that it was
a disgruntled voter, and so there was shock when:

1.  It was a young WOMAN
2.  There was a 1 year old child in the back seat
3.  The driver of the car was not armed and mentally ill, (probably schizophrenic).

Where are you going today on a beautiful Fall Friday?  Almost anywhere you’re planning to go has had a
major security incident in the past three years…. whether it is:

A school
A movie theatre
A mall
A hospital
The office
A public building
A hair salon

And if a security incident did happen where you were, are you confident you’d know what to do?

That brief incident at the Capitol showed how in literally one minute, the situation goes from what
passes for normal at the Capitol, to total chaos, fear and terror.   The situation was handled correctly.

The communications systems were in place to send out a quick “Shelter In Place” order, and to keep
people updated.   The poor tourists and staff who were walking in the area were laying on the ground,
hiding behind trees, and had no idea what was going on – so they probably experienced the greatest fear.

The Capitol Hill police, the first responders, were probably not expecting to have the driver be a woman
with no political agenda, if you see a car trying to rush a barracide, the logical assumption is that they
have an explosive device and are trying to get closer to the target, but that was no true in this case.

So before you venture out for the weekend, keep these tips in mind, write them down and keep them in your purse or wallet.

1.  Be Situationally Aware – note where you at all times, how close a door is, or an alternate route for
your car when you’re in traffic.

2.  Spend 30 minutes deciding how you would react in an emergency shooter situation, and make a plan,
like deciding to use your car keys as a weapon, or keeping pepper spray in your purse.

3.  Remember to turn the sound off on your cell phone, if you’re caught in a developing security incident.

4.  If police are on the scene, follow their directions quickly and exactly.

5.  Have a local emergency number pre-set in your phone so you can call for help.

As they find out more about the Capitol Hill incident, this will probably be catalogued as an isolated incident,
which took place at a very inappropriate time, and a very inappropriate place, but it’s another wake up
for everyone.

Everything can change in a New York minute — be ready, just in case it changes for you!

 

 

Has it Been Only Two Weeks since the Navy Yard Shootings?

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When i wrote my blog about the Shootings at the Washington Navy Yard on September 16th, I got some nasty notes about “Why did you have to write about this so soon after it happened?”

Well – I guess the fact that after about 15 days, no one can even remember the incident (8 people shot to death); the name of the shooter (Aaron Alexis), or much of the details.  It seems that people have decided that it was a mentally distributed person, so couldn’t have been prevented.  This is completely wrong.

One of the issues that security directors have is how to make their organization aware of the active shooter threat without terrifying them.  How do you get a large group of people out of the “It can’t happen here” mindset?   One of the main ways to bring an issue back home is by using the incident as a security awareness notice.

Write a “Lessons Learned” email and send it to everyone in the organization.  Follow it up with a purse and wallet card with reminders on what to do when faced with an Active Shooter situation.

NavyYard-smallKeep everyone informed on what happens after the incident – how the injured are doing, and more importantly, what changes the organization has made to ensure that it won’t happen again.

Try doing a simple threat-risk assessment to illustrate to management what the chances of having an active shooter incident actually are, based on the industry, the region, and the number of problems/complaints that employees have expressed in the past.

Don’t let anyone forget that this can happen to any organization, no matter how well funded, or how secure they think they are.  Remember, if it could happen in a DOD military facility – it could happen to YOU!