In the aftermath of the inadvertent shooting of Trooper David Kedra on September 30, 2014 at the Pennsylvania State Patrol Academy in Montgomery County, PA, Corporal Richard Schroeter was arrested on February 10, 2015 and charged with Reckless Endangerment after a grand jury was asked to consider charges of Homicide, Involuntary Manslaughter and Reckless Endangering.
While it is without question that one life was lost and others irretrievably and tragically altered as a result of this incident, the circumstances surrounding this situation go to the heart of other training tragedies where lives were lost during training incidents. What makes this situation different from many of the previous incidents was that the Trooper who inadvertently killed the other Trooper has now been criminally charged.
The RBTA has been noticing for some time now that such incidents have been deemed as “accidents”, where both the person who was killed and the person who fired the lethal shot have been deemed victims. Failure to follow Best Practices with regards to safety during any training situation can end in a tragedy such as we have seen in this incident. Our hearts go out to all who are suffering as a result of this preventable incident and we call on everyone in the training and operational community to redouble their efforts to ensure that the preventable is, indeed, prevented.
Trainers are no longer being afforded the cover of “it was a tragic accident”, and the criminal justice system is now turning its eye towards meting out criminal punishments to those who were, at one time, provided insulation from such prosecution in the wake of incidents like this. While this particular situation occurred at a firearms training complex with conventional firearms, other inadvertent shootings continue to occur during dynamic simulation training around the country and the world.
Preparation for dangerous situations requires realistic and effective training methodologies, and in many situations trainees are pitted against role players where firearms are pointed and fired at each other utilizing specialized training munitions. Any type of training involving actual firearms requires highly trained training staff and must employ training methodologies that conform to Best Practices standards.
We here at the RBTA hope and pray that we do not see other such tragedies in the future, but fear that haphazard training standards or the non-adherence to well established safety protocols will, unfortunately, lead to similar tragedies in the future. Oft times, at the hands of VERY experienced trainers.
To quote Lawrence Gonzales in his book Deep Survival – Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why in the aftermath of a tragedy on Mt. Hood during a climbing accident:
“The climbers on Mount Hood were set up for disaster not by their inexperience, but by their experience. It was the quality of their thinking, the idea that they knew, coupled with hidden characteristics of a system that they had so often used. The system was capable of displaying one type of behavior for a long time and then suddenly changing its behavior completely. While such large-scale collapses are inevitable, the involvement of those particular climbers in the event was not. Such accidents [will] happen. But they don’t have to happen to you and me.”
Gonzales understood that in any high-risk endeavor, there will be tragedies. Some accidental. Some foreseeable. Some unforeseeable. In fact in his book he posits that tragedies are inevitable – they are an integral part of any high risk endeavor. But, he says, that given the proper systems and attention to detail, they don’t have to happen to you and me.
Let us learn from this most recent tragedy and allow it to serve as a somber reminder that we are living in a dangerous world and must train in a realistic manner to adequately respond. As trainers, we have a solemn obligation to those in our care to establish effective safety protocols and to follow them ritualistically. The consequences on either side of the tragedy are far to onerous to do otherwise.