Learning a lesson in survival
By Len Cannon / 11 News
11 News captures a group of Pearland High School students running for their lives.
It’s only a drill, but is a lesson in survival.
“It was definitely like a fight or flight, and in this case it was like bam, run out that door, because I didn’t want to die,” student Courtney O’Connor said.
In the first drill, the kids bolt from the cafeteria when a gunman walks in.
All of them rush into the first classroom they see.
“I felt like if they knew what they were doing, if we all had the same instinct, then it had to be right,” student Kelly Kegley said
Their instincts turned out to be wrong, and a second gunman walks in on them.
Game over: 16 students and one teacher dead.
“The main objective is to live, the objective is to be safe — that’s all that matters,” Bob Stuber said.
Stuber, a former cop and creator of Safe Escape, runs drills like this across the country. Then he evaluates.
“Not one of you went to an exit,” Stuber told the students. “I know you haven’t been taught that, but getting out of here is a whole lot safer than being in here”
So find an exit. But if you are trapped in a class, Stuber says if possible, create one.
Don’t try to hide in a bathroom: there is usually no window and no way out. But if it is your only choice, get creative.
“One of the options you have is take the soap and rub it in front of the door, if gunman comes in and hits the soap, he’s going down,” Stuber said.
If you are running down a hallway, grab a fire extinguisher: “Take it, fire it off and now you have created this big cloud,” Stuber said. “The gunman, he is on this end, he can’t see it, so now you are relatively safe to run toward that exit.”
After a classroom session, we watch how the kids react during the second drill.
They immediately start looking for the exits, and most of them make it out the front door.
“We were running and running, and we thought, ‘should we cross the street? No we are going to hide in the pipes,’” student Danielle Matthews said.
Those large pipes provided what Stuber calls concealment and cover.
“I think the majority of us just saw the first real cover we could and just dove for it, so it seemed to work,” student Sarah Purtee said. “And it helped that it was made of metal.”
Game over.
“This time almost all of you except for two ended up living, you got out of here safely, and the first time through everybody wound up getting shot,” Stuber said.
It is just a drill, but by rehearsing a crisis, Stuber hopes kids will make better choices, if they are ever confronted with a real one.
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