SWAT teams entered the school 47 minutes after the gunfire erupted.Īn exhaustive FBI review of the police response at Columbine led to a more rapid response strategy during active shooter situations, according to Gagliano. Within 13 minutes of the first 911 call, Klebold and Harris fatally shot 12 students and a teacher and wounded 23 other people before killing themselves with gunshot wounds to the head. Nearly two decades ago, a pair of Littleton, Colorado, students named Dylan Klebold, 17, and Eric Harris, 18, carried out a killing spree at Columbine that law enforcement experts called a watershed event in the response to active shooters. “Prior to Columbine, nobody understood what the term ‘active shooter’ meant.” “It changed everything,” said James Gagliano, a retired member of the FBI’s elite hostage rescue team. That’s how the April 1999 massacre at Columbine High School – where two young men killed 13 people – shaped the way law enforcement respond to active shooter incidents such as Wednesday’s deadly rampage in Parkland, Florida.
