Mass shooting scenario part of normal training in Spokane County, sheriff says

Authorities said Sunday they don’t know why a man shot five people dead at a Macy’s makeup counter at a mall north of Seattle over the weekend.

The 20-year-old suspect, Arcan Cetin, was described by high school friends and neighbors as a troubled person who made vulgar comments toward women.

Authorities were investigating his background and possible motive, and they searched an Oak Harbor, Washington, apartment where Cetin lived as well as his car. He is expected to face first-degree murder charges when he appears Monday in court.

A man and four women, including a teenager who had beaten cancer and an elderly woman and her daughter, died in Friday night’s shooting.

The rampage is the kind of unimaginable tragedy that has become a training storyline for police and other emergency responders in Spokane County.

It was just three years ago that county officials staged a mass shooting exercise at Spokane Valley Mall. That drill, funded with a Homeland Security grant, forced police, fire and ambulance crews to confront two active shooters and 53 victims who needed to be rushed to hospitals. The massive scenario involved 420 people representing 44 organizations.

It’s a grim task to conceive such horror and chaos, but one that communities are taking on in an age when real mass shootings occur regularly across the U.S.

“You live in a community that has been involved in the training for this for a very, very long time, and we continually train on it. We are prepared,” Spokane County Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said Sunday.

The Sheriff’s Office has trained how to handle active shooter situations since 1999, Knezovich said. That was the year of the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, and one year after five young men walked into a Tacoma restaurant and fired nearly 60 bullets, killing five people and wounding another five in a gang-related attack.

The Sheriff’s Office helps Eastern Washington University prepare for an active shooter in an exercise held almost every year, and deputies involved in the community-oriented policing effort work with area businesses that want to know how to respond to such a threat, Knezovich said.

Police procedures have evolved in response to some of the higher-profile shootings around the U.S.

“As a profession we always identify things that could be done better,” Knezovich said.

One such change grew out of the 2012 shooting inside a movie theater in Aurora, Colorado, that left 12 people dead and 70 injured.

“After Aurora the firefighters changed their philosophy, because it used to be fire would always stage outside until it’s totally safe to go in,” the sheriff said. “Now firefighters are being trained to respond with SWAT and actually enter the building with SWAT in order to rescue people from the very beginning.”

Another major shift in training followed Columbine, where two shooters killed 12 students and a teacher. Instead of waiting for a SWAT team, the first officers and deputies responding to an active shooting began to try to neutralize the threat immediately to save lives, Knezovich said.

“Columbine was truly one of the things that changed that dynamic,” he said.

The rapid confrontation approach played out at the Valley Mall in the June 2013 exercise. In that drill, a gunman opened fire on shoppers on the ground level, killing and wounding many and sending many others running and screaming for the exits or hiding places within stores.

Within minutes, Spokane Valley police officers arrived and entered the mall with weapons drawn to find and disarm the gunman. After they eliminated the threat, however, a second gunman on the upper level opened fire, hitting more patrons. A second wave of officers contained that shooter in an office after he took a hostage.

Preventing mass shootings may seem unlikely if not impossible, but often someone will have some indication the assailant is ready to lash out, Knezovich said.

“You’ll always hear that there was something that somebody knew that could have tipped off law enforcement or the authorities,” he said. “Always report it. Give us a chance to at least check it out. If it’s nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s something, then you’ve saved multiple lives.”

Deputy City Editor Scott Maben contributed to the story.