Breaking down the best way to respond to an active shooter situation at Elon University.
During an active shooter situation, law enforcement experts suggest three responses: run, hide, fight. Eric Tellefsen, who has been in law enforcement for the last 34 years, helped develop North Carolina’s active shooter response training which police departments still use today. Elon News Network worked with Tellefesen to analyze different locations across campus to understand the best response to an on-campus shooting. View the images below for the full 360 experience.
In this simulation, a gunman has entered the Moseley Student Center, a two-story building at the heart of Elon’s campus. Moseley Center includes the mail center, a dining hall, a market, a coffee shop, office spaces, a kitchen, a student hangout and department headquarters. Click here to view the full floor plan.
In this simulation, a gunman has entered the Carol Grotnes Belk Library, which has had more than 100,000 visitors since the start of the school year. The three-story building includes 43 study rooms and for most days of the week it is open 24 hours. A 16,000 square foot extension to the library was opened in Sept. 2018. Click here to view the full floor plan.
In this simulation, a gunman has entered the 100,000-square foot LaRose Student Center. This building is the newest addition to the Historic Neighborhood, which is home to more than 620 students — 96% of them freshmen. The center opened this September and was built to provide a central gathering space for students, faculty and staff.
In this simulation, a gunman enters McEwen Dining Hall the most recently renovated on-campus dining location, which also includes two retail options: Pei Wei and Village Juice Co. The two-story building finished renovations last year and is Historic Neighborhood’s main dining hall. Click here to view the full floor plan.
In this simulation, a shooter is at the site of one of Elon University’s most well-known traditions — College Coffee — which is hosted on Phi Beta Kappa Commons. The weekly Tuesday morning event brings together university administrators, faculty, staff and students to celebrate the start of the week with pastries and coffee.
In this simulation, a gunman has entered Sankey Hall, the newest addition to the business school. The first floor of the 30,000 square foot building is home to multiple glassed classrooms that are common around campus. Sankey holds facilities such as the Center for Creativity, the Family Professional Sales Center, Design Thinking Center and Financial Education Center. Click here to view the full floor plan.
As mass shootings continue to plague the country, Elon University prepares for the worse case scenerio
Memories of the worst school shooting in U.S. history resurface every semester in the mind of Cara Lucia — who, in 2007, was a doctoral student at Virginia Tech University when a gunman killed 32 people.
More than a decade later, Lucia is now teaching sport management at Elon University. Each semester, she spends two to three classes teaching her students what to do if an active shooter came to campus.
“I always tell my students, ‘I’m not trying to make you live from a place of fear.’ This is about us being aware and protecting ourselves and the people of our community,” Lucia said.
During Planning Week— an annual event before the school year where faculty and staff plan for the upcoming year — the university sponsored two voluntary active shooter training sessions for faculty.
Eric Tellefsen, who has been in law enforcement for the past 34 years and helped develop North Carolina’s active shooter response training guide, led the training and focused on the "run, hide, fight” response protocol.
“The more times these things have occurred, the more we realized that lives can be saved when the individual people that are there know what to do,” Tellefsen said.
Tellefsen spent the majority of his law enforcement career with the North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, where he was a member of a Special Weapons and Tactics Team for 18 years. He broke down law enforcement’s systematic response to an active shooter situation.
The top priority for first responders is to neutralize the gunman. The first law enforcement department to respond to an active shooting at Elon would be the university’s Campus Safety and Police, which is headquartered in Oaks Neighborhood.
According to Joel Thomas, the community liaison sergeant for campus police, the department employs 12 community service officers and 21 police officers, which is more than the number of officers in the town of Elon and Gibsonville police departments. There are usually three to five police officers on campus at all times.
In the event of a shooting on campus, every law enforcement and emergency service department in the surrounding counties would be called in for assistance. Debbie Hatfield, an emergency management coordinator for Alamance County, said she would expect the town of Elon and Burlington police departments to respond more quickly.
At the end of October, Hatfield helped organize an inter-agency active shooter training in Alamance Community College. The simulation brought together 25 local law enforcement and emergency service departments, including five officers from campus police.
“The greatest thing about these trainings is that all of these different agencies work together under one unified command,” Hatfield said. “When we do these trainings together, each department learns to work with others, making the team stronger. These trainings will save lives if an active shooter situation ever takes place in the county.”
The county’s next interagency simulation is planned for 2020, although the date has not been set.
In preparation for the start of the school year, Elon University's campus police have been training officers and faculty for an active shooter situation.
Blank shots rang out on the campus of Alamance Community College as Elon University campus police participated in an active shooter training.
For more than two decades the number of active permits in North Carolina has grown from fewer than 22,000 in 1997 to more than 654,000 in October 2019.