Tuesday morning, a man entered the Southaven Walmart Supercenter and opened fire on two of his co-workers. Two employees were killed, and a Southaven police officer was shot, saved by his bulletproof vest.
The alleged shooter was eventually shot twice by police and was receiving treatment at Regional One Medical Center in Memphis as of the end of day Tuesday.
I watched live news feeds from Memphis as the events in my hometown unfolded, and I checked in with my sister, Stephanie, who is a captain at the DeSoto County Sheriff’s Department. As the director of the DeSoto County Juvenile Detention Center, she wasn’t on the scene, and I was relieved when I received her reply.
However, many other officers – some I have known most of my life – responded to the scene outfitted in tactical gear and carrying assault rifles. None of them knew what they would encounter inside the store, but they went in with the sole intention of stopping the gunman and saving the innocent people still inside the store. It is what they were trained to do, and that training proved to be a key element in preventing further tragedy.
Speaking to Stephanie late Tuesday evening, I was flooded with an absolute panic that something like this could occur in Southaven, at a store I frequented often when I lived there and is still a popular shopping spot for members of my family. My first reaction was that this kind of thing only happened in other places like neighboring Memphis, but not Southaven. And never Carroll and Montgomery counties.
But Tuesday’s shooting was proof of my naiveté.
What happened in Southaven can happen anywhere. That is the sad and very frightening truth – something every community should realize and make the necessary preparations.
As the former editor of the Southaven Press, one of my favorite things to cover for the paper was training classes at the Southaven Police Department. To then Chief Tom Long and the leadership at the police department, training was so important, they employed a fulltime training officer. I covered everything from K-9 training to offensive shooting to SWAT, and as an almost kid sister to many of the officers, they allowed me to take part in small ways.
I always knew there was a possibility that all of that advanced training would at some time be put to use, after all, I was working at the paper on September 11, 2001. However, I can only remember two major instances that the SWAT team was deployed to a scene, a hostage situation involving a man holding his estranged wife captive and a man suffering from mental illness who was shooting a rifle at his neighbors through an open window. In both situations, the gunmen opened fire on the police officers, and the gunmen were both killed by officers. At the time, I saw these events as isolated, but that was just a few years after the Columbine shooting and before Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook, the Orlando club shooting, or the Charleston church shooting.
However, the Southaven Police Department trained for the possibility that Southaven could face its own mass shooting, and that commitment to training saved countless lives. Tuesday afternoon, Chief of Police Macon Moore told media outlets that just two weeks before, the Southaven Police Department and the Southaven Fire Department trained for a possible active shooter. “There is no doubt that training [officers and fire fighters] received two weeks ago saved lives today,” Moore said. A couple of years ago, I covered active shooter training for the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department and all law enforcement in Carroll County. Held at J.Z. George High School, the training was held as a live drill, with teachers, coaches, and some students taking part in the training.
No live ammunition was used, but the simulation was so realistic, my heart was racing as those involved went through the motions of finding “gunmen” in the large school while the chaos of the scene erupted. “Victims” were crying, people on the outside of the building were trying to get in, and random shots rang through the halls. But I watched the officers in action, and they remained focused and diligent as they sought the location of the “gunmen.” The “threat” was found and eliminated, and then officers began the task of clearing the building.
No detail was missed. According to Winona Chief of Police Tommy Bibbs and Sheriff Bubba Nix, Montgomery County’s law enforcement will have active shooter training before the start of school. That type of live training is what saves lives, and I applaud the Carroll County Sheriff’s Department, the Winona Police Department, and the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department for making it a priority. I know it is hard not to feel insulated from the evils of the world in our small, close-knit communities, but evil can happen anywhere.
I would have never imagined something like this happening in my hometown, but it did. And it can happen here. I don’t want to live in fear of the “what ifs,” but I do want to be prepared if the “what ifs” become reality. It is the world we live in. Pray for Southaven, its first responders, and its citizens as they try to make sense out of this tragedy.
