Sean Lawler, founder of the 360 Resilience Group and special agent of the U.S. Department of Justice, speaks during a workshop at the National Student Safety & Security Conference at Ballys, Thursday, April 22, 2021.
Friday, April 23, 2021 | 2 a.m.
The school administrators avoid uttering the killer’s name.
That fateful day in 2017, hauling a backpack and wearing sunglasses, the gunman — a former student — walked into Aztec High School in northern New Mexico and unleashed six minutes of terror.
Previous training, including active-shooter drills, kept the death toll at two. This week, the superintendent and the director of operations, whose watch the shooting fell on, spoke at the National Student Safety & Security Conference and Workshop, at Bally’s, to share their lessons of that Dec. 7, 2017.
“You’ll never hear us talk about him,” said Kirk Carpenter, the superintendent of the Aztec Municipal School District, about the 21-year-old man who gunned down students Casey Jordan Marquez and Francisco “Paco” Fernandez.
William Atchison then fired randomly in a hallway before turning the gun on himself. He fired the gun so many times that smoke from the gunshot blasts triggered a fire alarm.
Had a dean not quickly called for staff and students to stay in their locked-down classroom, and instead poured out into the hallways, the incident “would have been a different story,” said Grant Banash, the school district’s director of operations.
The four-day conference was geared toward high school and university administrators and teachers, as well as first responders. It featured discussions on post-pandemic school planning, teenage suicide, substance abuse, and unpredictable threats, such as active shooters.
Although the way every emergency unfolds is unique, simulations and training greatly aid the way those experiencing them act, the speakers said.
In another presentation, Sean Lawler, special agent with the Department of Justice and founder of the 360 Resilience Group, spoke about how 75% of people in a critical incident freeze, how 15% react emotionally, and how about 10%, mostly those who have experienced something similar or have trained for it, act “calm and collected.”
As protectors to students, it’s pivotal for teachers to maintain that calm, and it’s accomplished through training, Lawler said.
Engrossed, Lawler took notes as Carpenter and Banash presented the facts and lessons of the New Mexico shooting.
Atchinson had been suspended from the school for referencing the Columbine High School massacre. Four years later, he was investigated by the FBI after he searched online how to obtain a “cheap” rifle for a school shooting, according to the presentation.
The next year he walked into a local gun store, accompanied by his father, and purchased a handgun with no problem.
The following year, he arrived at Aztec High School after the 8:04 a.m. tardy bell. When Fernandez “surprised” him while he was preparing for the shooting inside a bathroom, he shot him. He killed Marquez outside the bathroom.
Some preparations for such an incident worked, some did not, the presenters said.
Some of the issues included a traffic jam caused by multiple agencies, parents and journalists rushing to the school on rural roads. Also, officials didn’t quickly communicate with other schools after the lockdowns were issued, which caused students to be unnecessarily locked in classrooms for hours.
Additionally, law enforcement had no immediate access to maps and encountered locked doors on campus, using custodians to guide them as they cleared the school. Banash now keeps maps from the Aztec schools in his phone, and that law enforcement now carry universal keys.
A large emphasis in the presentation was placed on how students are cared for in the immediate aftermath of an incident, and on how crucial detailed reunification plans are. The presenters recommended grouping students with their class with whom they are familiar, rather than in alphabetical order as they had placed them.
It’s also key that the students are accounted for.
At Aztec High, they had to account for the students who didn’t show up to school that day, or those who arrived late and were in the parking lot when the shooting began. Carpenter said that bus drivers, who when they heard about the shooting sprung into action, recorded video of the students they were transporting to the reunification center.
There are different challenges when students return to campus, including pausing fire alarm drills after a student had thrown herself onto the floor and bawled, Carpenter said. They also asked a nearby construction crew to use hammers instead of nail guns.
Therapy dogs have been comforting, Carpenter said. “For the last two or three years since our incident, if there’s been another shooting across this country, those dogs are on our campus.”
After the shooting, administrators made sure to invite first responders to school for an event so that students could see them in a different light than they did that tragic day. “It’s never back to normal, it’s a forward normal.”
“We wanted to be better, we were closer, we were stronger,” Carpenter said. “And I’ve never in all my life been to a more powerful, powerful assembly than that.”
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
