The Lockdown

Yesterday feels as though it can't have really happened. The short version of the story is that I was at a physical therapy appointment at the University of Colorado when a man wielding a machete burst in. Fortunately, everyone on my floor--and in the whole building, as it turns out--was able to lock themselves in until the police came and shot the man. Despite its fortunate outcome, it was a pretty unbelievable experience.

The Champions Center, where everything happened, is on the northeast corner of campus. My surgeon sees patients there a few times a week, and there are lots of facilities for athletes to get physical therapy and do all sorts of performance tests. The university's football program and athletics administrations are housed there, and there's a cafeteria for student athletes and a store to buy Buffs fan apparel. The building backs up against the football stadium. From the parking lot, one goes through glass doors to enter a vestibule with an elevator and access to a stairwell. (All of this description is important - read on!) There's really nothing else on the first floor. On the second floor is a waiting area and a reception desk (below). On one side of the elevator is a hallway, with exam rooms on either side, that opens up to the physical therapy area beyond. On the other side is a hallway that leads outside. I didn't know about this one until after the fact.

The elevator is along the blue wall to the right. Beyond that wall is a hallway, where the stairwell is. The man with the machete would have come in from there, on the right side of this photo, toward the reception desk.

I was there for my third week of physical therapy following a hip surgery in early September. The appointment started at 8:30. Usually, it takes about 45 minutes, and then I stay for another 20 to ride the stationary bike. After my session, which usually involves some "massage" and exercises, I crutched across the room to get on the bike. The physical therapy room is a very large space. There are about twelve therapy tables, lots of weight machines, racks of weights and lots of other equipment along the walls, with open space in the middle to leave room for exercises. I'd guess that it's at least 75 yards long, possibly even longer. Along one wall are two treadmills and two stationary bikes. The other end of the room opens into an area that I'd often seen therapists go into and out of. I'd never been back there.

(Random photo from the internet) On the left side of this picture, you can see one of the bikes against the window. The room extends behind the cameraman's back and is about four times as long as the section shown here.

I'd been on the bike for a few minutes and had written a few emails on my phone. I was about to untangle some earbuds so that I could listen to an audiobook when a sharp voice caught my attention. A blonde trainer, someone I'd seen before but never spoken to, was yelling, "Get off the bike!" Looking up, I noticed that everyone else was moving quickly to the opposite side of the large room. I was the only person left on my half of the room. She was looking at me, which confused me for a second because I didn't know who she was and wasn't sure she was talking to me - why would she be? But it was clear she did mean me because she made eye contact, then resumed shepherding everyone else. (Plus there was no one else there for her to talk to.) I heard the word "lockdown." Oh great, I thought, a drill. What a pain. I glanced down at the control panel on the bike. It had gone to sleep because I'd stopped pedaling and, figuring it would all be over pretty soon and I'd want to finish my allotted time, I pedaled a few more times to wake it up while I put my keys, phone, and earbuds into my pockets. The timer read 4:17. Satisfied that I could go now, I lowered myself off the seat carefully and reached for my crutches behind me.

As I started to make my way across the room, I saw that there was only one person left. He was an employee whose name, I learned later, was Tim. I crutched toward him, going more quickly than usual because I was a little embarrassed about being the only one who hadn't "evacuated" yet. As I approached him, Tim pointed down the hallway just behind us, toward the reception area. "There's a guy with a machete about this long" (he held his hands about 30 inches apart) "right out there," he said in a low voice, moving quickly beside me as we continued to cross the room. I felt an flush of something I can't identify now as heat or cold. I immediately started shaking. For some reason, I said, "You're kidding," and he said something along the lines of, "No, I'm not."

We were moving in the direction that everyone else had gone, when he held up his hand to stop me and looked back in the direction I'd come from. I got even more scared at that point. There is a bathroom off the PT room in that direction, and although I didn't really process the thought completely at the time, I somehow realized that he was worried that there wasn't time for us to get from where we were to where the others had gone and was considering hiding us in another place. This was a terrifying idea. Where was this guy? How close was he? Would he come running at us at any moment? "Where should I go?" I asked, instinctively looking to him for direction. He seemed to know what was going on and I didn't know the space or the protocol. He must have decided that we should make a break for it because we ended up following everyone else--I've never crutched so fast in my life--and ended up going into the area on the other side of the physical therapy room where I'd never been before. We joined a group of about twenty people in a room and closed the door.

There, I learned that Tim, who I assume is a physical therapist because of his clothes, had encountered the man near the reception desk. No one else on the second floor seemed to have seen him. (I learned why later.) The man had brandished the machete and said something along the lines of, "You don't want none of this." At that, Tim must have turned to go down the hall and into the PT room, which is where he waited, unbelievably, to help me get to safety. He didn't seem to have seen which way the man went, and we didn't know where he was.

After a short time in that room, the staff moved us out into the hallway. We started to go toward a door marked "Exit," but then, abruptly, someone decided we shouldn't and we were moved, instead, to another room. It was large room, situated between the hallway and the MRI equipment. A few other people had joined us, one of whom was a man in his sixties who had come out of the therapy pool. He was drenched and wearing only a speedo and goggles. After a while, someone tossed him a hospital gown from a pile on a table, but he still shivered as he dripped on the floor. One of the employees thought to ask if anyone had a pacemaker, which, fortunately, no one did. Apparently you don't want to be near an MRI machine if you have one.

I was dismayed that we were still inside the building. After the shootings in Paris, I read about ways to increase your odds of survival during a terrorist attack. The best thing to do is to get out of the area as quickly as possible. Barricading in a safe place was second on the list, and fighting back--unimaginable--was the third. One thing I read over and over again is that one should always look for secondary exits. If the attacker comes through the main entrance (as ours did), it's best to know another way to get out. I made a habit of doing this scan for a while, but I had no idea how to get out of this rabbit warren of exam rooms, imaging equipment, and hallways. And anyway, it was too late now.

In retrospect, the staff must have moved us to that room for several reasons. One is that the door, unlike many other doors in the building, locked from the inside. Another is that I imagine the walls and door were especially sturdy and possibly reinforced because of the magnetic power of the MRI machine. We stood inside, waiting. Some people cracked jokes, which annoyed me. There were several calls to turn cell phones off so that they wouldn't make noise and alert the man to our presence. (I had done this several minutes before. At least three phones rang during the time that we were in the room, however.)

Trapped in the room, we had no idea what was happening outside, though an authoritative woman who seemed to be in charge assured everyone that the police were there. One guy was determined to find information online and was combing through news websites, which, of course, provided nothing helpful since the event had started only minutes before. He said that he had a police scanner app on his phone but that it wasn't working. Every now and then, there was a knock at the door. The authoritative woman asked each person on the other side to identify themselves, then opened the door to let people in when she recognized their voices. One woman who came in was a doctor. Another was my friend Matt, who works there. I later learned that he and a colleague had locked themselves in a bathroom at first, then poked their heads out to see a policeman with a drawn gun inching down the hallway. He told them that the hall was clear and told them, I assume, to join us. I was very glad to see him, and he checked in with me periodically during the rest of the ordeal.

Later, when I told Ed this part of the story, he was surprised to hear that we opened the door for anyone. He's right; I'd completely forgotten that I learned during school lockdown trainings that you're never supposed to open a door during a lockdown no matter who is on the other side. The attacker could be holding a gun to the person's head, having ordered them to request entry to the room and act as though nothing is amiss. You just never know what's happening on the other side of the door and so it's best to just leave it closed, hard as that might be.

I finally texted Ed, "We are in lockdown. There's a man with a machete on the floor. They don't know where he is. The police are here. I'm in a room with Matt." I heard my phone vibrate several times but I ignored it; I wanted to be alert and not miss anything important. I learned later that Ed, who was at the dog park, tried to call me and then immediately drove toward CU. The parking lot for the Champions Center was blocked off by now, of course, so he parked as close as he could and ran along a bike path until he was denied entry by a security guard who'd been instructed not to let anyone pass. I hadn't answered his call or replied to his texts, which had made him pretty nervous, but there wasn't anything he could do.

The last person who came into the room, another employee, said urgently that shots had been fired on the fourth floor. I figured the police were the ones doing the shooting; no one had seen the man with a gun. That was two floors away, but we all sat on the floor anyway to be as low as possible, just in case. I went toward the back of the room where the space and turned into a short hallway that ended in a doorway, figuring that the extra walls would provide more protection against bullets. Even the joking ceased (thank goodness) while everyone strained to listen. Someone suggested that we move the table in front of the door to make it harder to get open, but it was pointed out that the door was already locked.

Finally, one of the front desk employees, looking at his phone, said that the police had the man in custody. Several other people, also on their phones, repeated this. I texted Ed an update. We stayed seated and relatively quiet. Eventually, the authoritative woman announced that the suspect was definitely in custody--it turned out that he'd actually been killed--and the the upper floors had been given the all-clear, but that we would wait until police arrived. We all agreed with this, and we sat for a few minutes more. Then, someone with authority to make decisions decided that we would open the door. We ventured out, then someone in front decided that was a bad idea after all and we trooped back into the room again. The man with the malfunctioning police scanner app had found an article on the Daily Camera's website (our local paper) and he read it aloud. It said that police had shot the man in a stairwell between the fourth and fifth floors and that no one else had been hurt. It was a short article with little other information. Several minutes later, we were back out. We waited near an administrative desk for a while, then, finally, it was announced that we were allowed to go back into the PT room but that no one could leave the floor or the building until the police had been through.

It was good to get back into that open, sunlit room. I finally called Ed, who told me that he still couldn't get very close to the building. I told him that he should probably just go home; I didn't know how long we were going to be kept there and the emergency seemed to be over. Staff members clustered together, and patients typed or talked into cell phones. I went back to the Daily Camera article to see if there was any new information and was astonished to see that the only person quoted so far in the story was Ed! He told me later that he'd been stopped by a reporter when he tried to get to the Champions Center and that the reporter wanted to talk to me and had given Ed his card. Eventually, I decided I might as well finish my time on the stationary bike. I crutched back to where I'd been when all this had started and my physical therapist followed me to help adjust the seat. She said that she, too, had assumed this was a drill because they were due for one.

I have no idea what kind of gun this is, but it's what most of the policemen who came to check out our floor were carrying when they came through. It was a pretty dramatic sight.

From my seat on the bike, I looked over my shoulder into the bit of the parking lot I could see through the window. It was choked with emergency vehicles and beribboned with police tape. A few minutes later, heavily armed policemen walked through the floor to make sure everything was clear. They were careful about going around corners, pointing their guns into blind spots before they went around themselves, and sort of wished they'd done this kind of sweep before letting us out of that room. It seemed that the danger was past, but geez... I finished biking and sat around some more. At last, we were told that we were allowed to leave but that we would leave as a group. A few more minutes passed and then we walked together out of the PT room, through the waiting area, past the stairwell where the suspect had died two floors up, and out a back entrance that I didn't know existed. Another hallway I had not investigated. It smelled, inexplicably, like french fries. I expressed surprise to the student receptionist who was walking next to me and she shrugged. "Maybe that's what gunpowder smells like," she said.

I took this on the way out of the Champions Center. It's tough to appreciate how many emergency vehicles there were because most of the ones in the frame are in the shadow to the right. They extended about 150 yards along the entryway all the way to the street. On the left of the screen, just behind the red tape, is poor Hester, who had to spend the night in the parking lot. Happily, she was unscathed.

One of the trainers helped me get under a ribbon of police tape. Once in front of the building, I had more waiting to do, however, because the police wanted to collect everyone's contact information and find out whether we had heard or seen anything. I was glad I hadn't because those who had were told to go down the hill to board one of two buses that was waiting to take them to the station for further questioning. Even people who had simply heard the gunshots but nothing more had to go. I waited in line for about ten minutes before being interviewed by a bald, beefy plainclothes cop who actually wrote my information down in one of those flippable notebooks detectives use on TV. My car was parked behind a line of tape and I was told I couldn't drive it out (I don't know how I'd have gotten past all the police vans and squad cars anyway) or even get my wallet out of the console. I crutched down the hill to the nearest intersection where Ed picked me a up a few minutes later.

Once home, I called the reporter, figuring that by then he'd have interviewed quite a few other people with more solid information and would no longer be interested in my statement. On the contrary, he said he hadn't talked to anyone inside the building and was eager to interview me. He asked me a few questions and I could hear him typing furiously in the background as I answered them.

Pieces of the story began to fall into place in the hours that followed, some from the newspaper but mostly from Matt. Apparently the man with the machete had been in the parking lot writing "sinner" on cars. (I'm not sure what he was writing with.) A patient who had arrived for an appointment saw him and confronted him about it, and the man brandished the machete at him. The patient fled into the nearest building, which was the Champions Center, and ran up the stairs to the second floor since the Champion Center doesn't have any personnel or facilities on the first floor - just empty space in front of the elevator. He yelled that someone should call 911 because there was a man in the parking lot with a machete. One of the students at the front desk called, but the line just rang. Another used her cell phone to call and was able to get through. Meanwhile, the staff was gathering all the people in the waiting area and moving them toward the back of the floor. The man must have followed the patient, because he showed up on the second floor but no one was there to see him except Tim. After the confrontation, Tim must have come down the hallway back to the PT room, which is where I saw him and he helped me get back to where everyone else was. I don't know if the man with the machete was right down the hall from as I crutched across the PT room or whether he'd gone back toward the stairwell to try other floors. There's every reason to think that he didn't wait around, but it's also entirely possible that if I'd turned my head to the right to look down the hallway as I passed it I'd have seen him at the other end. I'm very glad I didn't.

Someone (it hasn't been disclosed who) heard him muttering about "finding sinners" and quoting the Ten Commandments. The only information released about him is that he was white and may have been an ex-Marine. It doesn't appear that he was targeting a specific person or the Champions Center; if I had to guess, I'd say that he started where he did is because the building is right on the edge of campus, and that the only reason he came into that particular building and not any of the others he might have entered is that he was following the patient who confronted him in the parking lot. Who knows where he would have gone or what would have happened if no one had confronted him there? He could easily have wandered elsewhere and I wouldn't have been involved in this at all.

The 911 call was placed at 9:15. By 9:28, the man was dead. I was astonished to learn that the entire event lasted less than 15 minutes (though, of course, we weren't allowed to leave for another hour).

The Daily Camera article, which has continued to evolve, still quotes both Ed and me, as well as one of my MRI roommates who I suspect was the guy who was searching the internet for information. I'm not sure how they found him to interview him, but they were probably glad they did because they got some colorful stuff. He told the reporter that he was relieved the guy had only a machete because he was confident he could handle a machete blow and still defend his son, who was also in the room. I, too, was glad he had a machete instead of a gun, though I felt, and still feel, much less cavalier about the effects of a machete blow. Luckily, no one had to learn firsthand how that would have turned out.

People who experience these kinds of events often say that the whole thing was surreal. I feel differently. While it was happening, it was very, very real. I was keenly aware that this was the first time I'd been in such a potentially dangerous situation and was interested in sort of a detached way to note that I didn't freeze, as some people do. I tried to be very aware of my surroundings and responses and to remember the things I'd learned about surviving a situation like this. Some things I was pleased about, like my instinct to look for an exit, to turn off my phone's ringer, and shelter in the most protected part of the room. Others I'm ashamed to admit I didn't think of. It didn't occur to me to barricade the door (even though it was locked, I still should have thought of it), to sit down when we heard that there were shots (though I did go toward a more protected area), or to protest when the door was opened again and again. I thought about Orlando and wondered if this was how people hiding in the bathroom must have felt in the minutes before the shooter came in. My mind felt pretty clear, surprisingly, and the only time I got teary was when I texted Ed. Oddly, though, parts of my memory are really fuzzy only about 24 hours later. I can't remember exactly what was said to me when the room was being evacuated, and I can't picture the first room we hid in at all. I don't think I'd recognize it if I were to go back there again.

It's difficult to believe that all of that actually happened to me, of all people. This stuff happens in other places and I can accept that without stretching my credibility in the least, but the "surreal" part of this kicks in when I remind myself that I was there this time. I retrieved my car (which, to my relief, did not have "sinner" scratched into the paint) this morning and everything is completely normal again. The surreal feeling didn't happen during the actual event, but it settled in nearly the moment I got home. I'll never know how close I was to actually being hurt by this guy, but I think we are all profoundly lucky that things happened the way they did.