Incident Report: St. Louis Planned Campus Attack

 St. Louis, MO | October 24, 2022

As students sat down for morning classes at 9:11 a.m., a former student with a semi-auto rifle and 600 rounds of ammo loaded in magazines broke the window of a locked side door. His gun was visible from the time he got out of his vehicle and entered the school.

He was familiar with the layout of the campus and immediately walked up the stairway to the third floor and began shooting at students in the hallway.

He shot six students and staff—two fatally—before barricading inside a third-floor classroom where he was eventually killed by police. Students jumped from the third-story windows to avoid being trapped in a classroom with the shooter.

More than 200 rounds were fired inside the school and the school remained closed for three months after the shooting.

On that fateful day, when chaos and fear threatened to consume the hallways of Central Visual and Performing Arts High School, heroes emerged,” said Chief Robert Tracy.

Most school campuses have comprehensive CCTV networks. Within 3–5 seconds, ZeroEyes visual AI gun detection technology can provide images and location of a firearm on camera to police and campus officials. With this information, emergency alerts sent to students and staff can have specific details and actions to take.

At CVPA, if cameras were mounted on the exterior of the building, an alert could be sent to clear the hallways and lock interior doors inside the school. Without early detection and situational awareness, students and staff were out in the hallway when the shooter walked out of the stairwell onto the third floor.

CVPA is part of a two-school campus that spans multiple historic buildings with “chopped up” layouts from renovations. Early detection could also provide police and school officials with images and the exact locations of the shooter so that the first arriving officers would know exactly where to go.

After three months of remote learning, when students finally returned to the campus, ZeroEyes can provide the peace of mind that if a gun is visible again on campus, police can respond even more swiftly.

Each stage of a mass shooting or active shooter incident has its own set of risks and vulnerabilities, therefore requiring different types of solutions.

Some of the most common solutions that leaders look to for active shooter prevention include metal detectors, door locks, or barricades. These measures can be helpful, but it’s critical to understand that they do not address all five stages of a mass shooting. In fact, most security measures, like the examples aforementioned, only address the Active Stage of a mass shooting—and in some cases, could even potentially put the people they are trying to protect at greater risk.

Read more about the five stages of a mass shooting here.

ZeroEyes delivers a proactive, human-verified, visual gun detection and situational awareness solution that integrates into existing digital security cameras.

Providing situational awareness can reduce response times… ultimately saving lives.