Security guard recalls Red Lake shooting horror
A rookie security guard who survived the Minnesota school shooting rampage described a frenzied scramble to get pupils out of harm’s way – and said a fellow guard saved lives by sacrificing his own.
In an interview with The Associated Press, LeeAnn Grant said security guard Derrick Brun, 28, ignored her pleas to run and rose from his desk to confront teenage gunman Jeff Weise.
“Derrick saved my life,” 20-year-old Grant said. “I know he bought me time by confronting Jeff, for me to even get that much farther away with the students.
“Derrick’s my hero. He didn’t even look scared. He didn’t look worried. He knew what he was going to do.”
Grant said she and Brun were working at the doors of Red Lake High School on Monday. Three of the four doors were locked; the open door funnelled students through a metal detector.
She described Weise stepping out of his grandfather’s police truck – taken after the 16-year-old had killed the man and his companion, according to authorities – and sending two shotgun blasts into the air.
Just four years older than Weise, she had known him for years and recognised the 6ft, 17-stone student at once. His black trenchcoat billowed open and Grant saw more guns on the boy’s belt.
She had no gun, no bulletproof vest and a little girl and a little boy at home. She had just begun working as a security guard in August.
Outside, the gunman tried one door, then another.
“He looked right at me. I made eye contact with him,” Grant said. The boy quickly found the open door.
“He walked in and fired another shot and I was telling Derrick, ‘Come on, let’s go. Let’s go, Derrick. Run. We need to save these kids, we need to do something.’ And I radioed in … ‘There’s a guy coming in the school and he’s shooting and he has a gun’.”
“Derrick just sat there at his desk. … He just kept staring at Jeff. I kept hollering for him to come with me. He wouldn’t come, he just stayed there.”
The noise drew students toward the front doors. Some thought there was a fight and they wanted to see, Grant said.
“I start yelling at them, ‘Run! There’s a guy with a gun here! Just run!’ And then I took off to try to protect them,” she said. “I turned back a little bit, and you could see Derrick kind of getting up, going right toward Jeff. And then I heard two shots again.”
Other witness accounts indicate that was when Brun was killed. “I just ran,” Grant said.
There was no refuge. Like most schools after Columbine in 1999, Red Lake High School had a system for securing the school in case of violence. Alerted to trouble, its teachers locked the classroom doors, as they were trained.
Still, Grant tried to open some doors to get in and hide. Other students did the same. None opened. Grant’s keys were back by the front door.
“I told them, ‘Never stop running. Don’t look back no matter what’.”
Grant ran, too, with bullets striking the wall as she went. A boy running a little ahead of Grant fell.
“He got shot and went down, and then I was going to stop and grab him, but all those other students stopped and I told them to run. And then, by that time, Jeff was pretty much right by us again and I just ducked and took off again.”
She said the gunman eventually turned down another hall, and Grant and the students made it out of the building.
Yesterday, TheSmokingGun.com reported that Weise posted a computer animation on a multimedia website last October that shows a person shooting four people. The animation is titled “Target Practice”, created by “Regret”, which The Smoking Gun said was an alias Weise used.
The 30-second video was posted with a brief biography and photograph of Weise. It depicts a person using an automatic rifle to shoot two people in the head, a third in the chest, blowing up a squad car with a grenade, and then shooting what appears to be a Ku Klux Klan member.
The animated gunman then puts the barrel of a handgun in his mouth and pulls the trigger.
The Smoking Gun is owned by Court TV, and specialises in court and government documents involving celebrities and other high-profile cases.
