By Chief Joel F. Shults, Ed.D.
I have no insider information on the Nashville RV bomber case, but when I heard the initial reports my first thoughts were that this was an attack on responding police officers. As initially reported, the police responded to a shots fired call. That would have attracted a number of police officers to the scene. The announcement to evacuate could have been to move innocent civilians but, as evidenced by the Metropolitan Nashville Police officers’ actions at the scene, would not have halted the police response. Boom. Dead cops. But fate had other plans. Officer Wells had been busy evacuating area residents when he decided to move toward the RV but “I literally hear God tell me to turn around”, and as he moved to check on a fellow officer, a blast of orange flame pushed him forward.
Whether the bomber’s intent was to hurt police officers, the tactic is one of which police officers are very aware. In 1997 an explosion at a Planned Parenthood facility in Atlanta, GA attracted first responders as well as reporters. One hour later, a second explosion injured 6, including investigators. Secondary devices are a real risk to responders who may be distracted by an initial incident and are attempting rescues. The proliferation of IEDs (improvised explosive devices) encountered by our troops in the war against terror on foreign soil has inspired and instructed our own domestic terrorists.
In 2018 an FBI agent was hit with shotgun pellets while searching a property in Oregon. The owner had rigged a hot tub to roll toward a gate when a tripwire was activated and had left animal traps randomly around the residence that had a fortified front door. The agents were able to discover all of the traps but did not notice a fishing line attached to shotgun shells fitted into a wheelchair. Other devices included spike strips in the driveway and a rat trap designed to fire a shotgun round when someone tried to open the door to a detached garage.
During the 2017 Las Vegas music festival mass shooting, the sniper used surveillance cameras to alert him to police when they began to arrive. The 2012 theater shooter in Aurora, Colorado anticipated being captured or killed and left behind a complex set of explosives to greet the inevitable police search of his apartment. The 1999 attack at Columbine High School in Colorado included 95 explosive devices, many of which were left behind after the shooters’ deaths. The U.S. Forest Service warns of marijuana grow sites protected by sophisticated monitoring and detection systems or by deadly booby traps such as explosives triggered by tripwires. A Michigan officer was injured when jumping a fence into a drug dealer’s yard and landed on a plywood board designed to collapse into a pit with upturned three-inch screws.
A special bulletin issued in 2004 by the FBI warned that “these devices may be hidden in everyday objects such as vehicles, briefcases, flower pots or garbage cans, or can be sequential suicide attacks in the same locations, and are generally detonated less than one hour after the initial attack, targeting first responders as well as the general population.” Even the second plane crashing into the south tower of the World Trade Center during the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attack may have been timed to kill some of the hundreds of first responders arriving at the first crash scene of the north tower.
More recently a June raid on a residence of a right-wing trio planning to engage in violence during this summer’s protests in Las Vegas found materials for bombs and booby traps. One of the conspirators confessed to “surveying law enforcement” as part of their plot, apparently as an attempt to either harm or at least distract the police.
Before his conviction in 2011, a perpetrator named Nicolas Smit assaulted law enforcement in California in a series of IED attacks. They included the introduction of natural gas into a police building, a firearm attached to a gate at a gang intervention unit office, and a car bomb attached to a police vehicle, among others. In 1992 a Florida Trooper on a car stop was killed by an IED disguised as a wrapped gift.
The cruelty of IEDs aimed at first responders is not just that they may cause death, but that they can cause permanent disability, keeping these heroes out of the action at the scene and, perhaps, forever out of the career they loved. When first responders are seen running toward trouble, they never know whether the event is over or if it is the first phase of a plan to continue injuring and killing. But still, they go forward.