“We recognize the seriousness of this mistake, and we are reviewing this breakdown to ensure it does not happen again,” Austin police Chief Lisa Davis said Sept. 12.
What happened
Six-year Austin Police Department veteran Adam Reinhart was handling curfew enforcement in Zilker Park early Sept. 10 when he was shot by 30-year-old Brandon Thompson around 4:10 a.m.. Thompson’s female companion was also struck, and he fled into the woods while law enforcement units responded to pursue him.
Response and communications after the incident:
- 5:27 a.m.: “Shelter in place” message sent to Warn Central Texas emergency alert subscribers of the system within a “designated area”
- 6:30 a.m.: A follow-up message lifted the shelter in place and replaced it with an “avoid the area” alert signaling heavy police presence
- 8:31 a.m.: Another “avoid the area” message was sent
- 8:57 a.m.: A final alert advised a suspect was apprehended
“As a parent, I want you to know that I certainly understand the frustration, the concern that our community felt when those conflicting messages went out,” she said.
The impact
AISD officials were notified in the 6 a.m. hour about a shelter-in-place from community members in the area, said Cristina Nguyen, AISD director of communications and community engagement. The district notified families that the shelter-in-place was lifted after receiving notice at 6:43 a.m..
At 7 a.m., AISD police Chief Wayne Sneed received a call from APD that the shelter-in-place was still effective, Nguyen said. Around this time, buses had picked up students and were about to drop students off at campus, she said.
At 7:44 a.m., an AISD sergeant reported seeing the suspect near Barton Hills Elementary, which begins class at 7:40 a.m. Barton Hills was already in a “secure” status prior to APD receiving this call, according to APD information. After learning the suspect was near the campus, Barton Hills went into lockdown.
The district did not notify families that the shelter-in-place was still effective until 7:52 a.m., Nguyen said. Between receiving a call from APD at 7 a.m. and notifying families at 7:52 a.m., AISD’s "internal team needed to assess our operations and make a decision on how to operate with many families in transit,” she said.
“Ultimately, we should have made a decision and communicated quicker and we're working on tightening up protocols and improving systems to ensure this does not happen again,” Nguyen said.
Zooming in
Sneed agreed that law enforcement response could’ve been handled differently and said his department is working on tightening its processes. Specifically, he said district police regularly plan for on-campus responses but haven’t traditionally covered morning arrival, afternoon dismissal and lunchtime periods.
“AISD and the city of Austin will be working together to improve communications and plans for how any community incidents can impact our school operations and our campus communities,” he said. “We will introduce modified protocols to secure students at the campus and to tell our families to stay home if they haven’t already left.”
Sneed said there was an “increased presence” at Barton Hills during the hunt for Thompson, and that the logistics of busing students during the arrival period led to a focus on campus.
“What many of you may not realize, we run over 600 buses a day. When you’re talking about elementary school, elementary school buses leave the terminal at 5 a.m. There are kids already on the bus, already en route to schools at this particular point in time,” he said. “So the focus was obviously securing the campus as kids were arriving at the campus.”
Davis, addressing the changing public alert status, said APD is a “culture of learning” and declined to detail potential missteps by communications supervisors on Sept. 10. She said the department and AISD will be participating in further exercises to improve processes going forward.
“You talk about an incident that started out as an officer-involved shooting, and then to evolve into what it did is a very rare circumstance,” she said. “As we look forward, I’m excited to move into those tabletop exercises, to talk about what everyone’s roles and responsibilities are. I think that there is absolutely room for improvement, as has been shown, but we are both committed to that.”
Sneed also said he’d previously reached out to other local, state and federal first responder agencies about a week before the incident to schedule a joint meeting on critical incident response. He attributed that planning work to the school safety measure House Bill 33, or the “Uvalde Strong bill,” and said it’d been scheduled for Oct. 20. The Barton Hills incident “stepped up" AISDPD's timeline for the collaborative effort, he said.
