West High School- Anchorage, AK
Anchorage Police reported 39 year-old Kalepo Timoteo and an adult female entered the school just before 8am, demanding to see his children. A verbal altercation ensued as the two left, the woman said Timoteo had a gun. School Resource Officers overheard and followed them out of the school. It was at that point he pulled the gun on the officers. They were able to verbally de-escalate the situation. ALICE trainer Shawn Slezak says, “you cannot have a single response like lockdown because lockdown cannot encompass everyone within that facility base on location and skill level. ALICE, which stands for Alert Lockdown Inform Counter Evacuate, has been training people worldwide to handle the threat of an active shooter for over a decade. In Alaska they have worked with Valdez, Juneau and the Mat-Su Valley. Slezak adds, “we need to take lockdown to the new level where its not just locking the door. We need to train how to barricade the door, fortify it the best we possibly can and then use that time that’s given – because its only a time barrier – proactively to heighten survivability. That may be jumping out of a window, to look for other avenues of evacuation out of that room, or prepare to counter. If you have no options available to you and the gunman is in the room with you, we train counter measures. To create distractions through movement, throwing objects. It’s very easy to counter a gunman.” Read more
