LYNCHBURG, Va. – Following Monday’s tragic events in Louisville, two Lynchburg agencies are working to keep their community safe.
The shooting at a Louisville bank left five dead and eight injured.
T4Tactics, a Lynchburg-based group, holds active shooter training and threat assessments across the country.
It’s a tragedy like Louisville’s that Galbreath trains for.
“One day, hopefully, I’ll go out of business,” Galbreath said. “I won’t have the need to teach active shooter training, but right now it’s really busy.”
Galbreath said he has a couple of tips for prevention. To start, always keep an eye out for people acting unusually.
“Active shooters will be off their baseline a day or hours before an attack,” Galbreath said. “We saw that in Covenant School. We saw it at the recent UVA attack. We saw it at Chesapeake Wal-Mart. They were not acting themselves hours before the attack, so that’s a clue that people can watch for.”
Some of the victims, in this case, were members of law enforcement who rushed the shooter. Officer Nickolas Wilt, just graduated from training 10 days before the shooting.
“We pray and hope that they never happen, but we certainly need to be prepared in case they do,” Lynchburg Chief of Police Ryan Zuidema said.
Zuidema said his department regularly trains for a similar situation.
“It’s critical for our officers,” Zuidema said. “We want to make sure that they’re well trained and they’re well equipped to handle incidents like that. So we routinely train on active shooter-type situations, to make sure, we also try and educate our community on those types of events and what they can do to help prevent them. We have crime prevention specialists that come out and do security assessments on sites to make sure that we’re hardening those targets as much as we can.”
Galbreath said listening to your gut is another essential.
“God gave us the gift of the hairs on the back of our neck and when they stand up you better do something about it,” Galbreath said.