NEWTOWN - The head of the Newtown Police Union said Thursday that the order for first responders to wait before entering Sandy Hook Elementary School last Dec. 14 was directed toward ambulance personnel, not police officers.
Union president Scott Ruszczyk said it’s “standard protocol not to send in unarmed people to a scene that is not secure.”
Questions about the police department’s response to the mass shooting surfaced after two sources told Hearst Connecticut Newspapers on Wednesday that 911 calls between the school and emergency dispatchers indicated someone at police headquarters ordered officers to “wait until you go into the building” where gunman Adam Lanza killed 26 people, 20 of them first-grade students.
Ruszczyk said he knows for a fact that the order was directed at medical personnel “because I spoke to the person who gave it.” Ruszczyk said the person was a Newtown sergeant who he declined to identify because he was not authorized to speak to that aspect of the investigation.
“I want to defend our union members. I know the quality of the people who were there,” he said.
Previously, a Newtown law enforcement source who was at the scene of the second-deadliest school shooting in the nation’s history said officers who had entered the building told dispatchers they had found bodies, but not to send the EMTs in because they had not yet located the gunman.