Oakland County, Mich., Sheriff Declines to Review Shooting

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(TNS) – The Oakland County Sheriff’s Office declined to participate in a third-party review of its department’s response to the 2021 Oxford High School attack as recently as January, county officials confirmed to The Detroit News.

The review, typically undertaken by an outside agency to learn from the actions taken by the coordinating police agency and its partners during a mass shooting incident, was sought and supported by Oakland County Executive David Coulter, his spokesman Bill Mullan said.

Hilarie Chambers, Oakland’s chief deputy county executive, told The News on Wednesday the decision by the sheriff’s office was disappointing. A so-called “after-action review” requires collaborative participation by everyone involved in the incident, she said.

“When one huge party declines to participate you can’t move forward,” Chambers said. “We were disappointed. We are still disappointed. We all have a responsibility to look at what we did. Sometimes it is uncomfortable.”

The interest in an after-action review takes on new significance after two fire chiefs told The Detroit News that their departments were not alerted to the emergency in a timely fashion and that original dispatch logs did not accurately reflect the response times.

The county’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Department began to coordinate the launch of the review by asking Guidepost Solutions to prepare a proposal in 2023, Chambers said. Guidepost is a consulting firm that was hired by Oxford Schools to investigate the school district’s response to the shooting.

Thom Hardesty, director of the county’s Emergency Management and Homeland Security Department, then began directly communicating with the sheriff’s department about a third-party review, Chambers said.

Four students were killed and seven others were injured on Nov. 30, 2021, after a student gunman opened fire on the sprawling Michigan school. Nearly 560 emergency personnel responded.

In a Nov. 27, 2023 email obtained by The News, Hardesty wrote to Guidepost Executive Vice President Bradley Dizik: “I am waiting to hear back from the Sheriff’s office, while they agreed awhile ago I need to make sure they would be on board. I will follow up with them this week.”

After several discussions with the sheriff’s office, Hardesty wrote in a Jan. 17 email: “Unfortunately the sheriff’s office has decided that they will not participate in an AAR (after-action review) at this time. As the sheriff’s office was the primary law enforcement agency responding and also the 911 center that handled the calls and dispatching of first responders we really couldn’t do much of an AAR without them.”

Guidepost spokeswoman Patricia Gambale declined comment on the emails and requests for a review by Oakland County.

Unlike most other high-profile U.S. mass school shootings in the past decade, including a more recent one at Michigan State University, there has never been a so-called After Action Review (AAR) of the attack on Oxford High School despite pressure from families of the victims to conduct one.

The sheriff’s office has denied declining to participate in the third-party review offered by the county executive’s office.

Maj. Christopher Wundrach, an executive commander for Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard, said last week the office and staff fully participated in the independent investigation undertaken by Guidepost Solutions.

That review and its report, however, were limited to investigating the school district’s role and response to the attack — not emergency responders.

“By January 2024, while we very much appreciated the offer of the executive’s office to find funding, the AAR (After Action Report) was complete,” Wundrach said in an email response to questions from The News. “To seek funding for an AAR at that point was redundant. The AAR analysis of the event was not only completed by then but had numerous updates and now has been taught at numerous forums around the country.”

Last month, Bouchard told The News he wanted to do his own review of the 2021 attack, but he failed to get funding from Oakland County for a staff position that would focus full-time on preparing timelines and other materials. The budget allocation needed for the three year-position would have been about $310,000.

He suggested he wanted a review similar to one conducted by an independent commission after a 2018 mass shooting at a high school in Parkland, Florida. Asked if his own department could have conducted such a review, Bouchard said his office performs internal after-action reviews of critical incidents almost daily, as is common practice within law enforcement ranks.

“I specifically wanted — the chairman of the Parkland commission is a friend of mine — and I saw their after (action) video and stuff, and that is what I said early on is, I would like to have an analysis of this like Parkland, and we have not been able to get anybody to fund it,” Bouchard told The News on July 11.

Bouchard’s spokesman, Steve Huber, said the sheriff’s office requested funding from the county commission for seven positions and received three that were specific to active assailant concerns following Oxford.

One position the office did not receive funding for would have been “specifically focused on creating an animated presentation with video embedded after-action summary of how the event unfolded,” Bouchard said.

That position was to focus full-time on timelines and an after-action template like Parkland had created.

“The position was intended to be internal, but whether that presentation was created internally or by someone else, there had to be funding, and we did not receive it from the board,” Bouchard said.

The county executive, working with the Board of Commissioners, made$3.2 million in funding available in 2022 for the Oxford community, the sheriff’s office and the prosecutor’s office, Mullan said. That money, however, was to aid in the prosecution of the accused Oxford High School shooter and to supply mental health services for those impacted by the tragedy.

Chambers said Bouchard or his office have never asked the county for funds to perform an after-action review. Rather, the sheriff department’s request for the position in question was for a videographer to create an animated re-enactment of the Oxford school attack — it was not discussed as part of an AAR, Chambers said.

“Money is not the issue. It never was the issue and never will be. It’s their lack of willingness to participate,” Chambers said. “It’s just not believable on the face of it that we wouldn’t set aside a million dollars. We have the money. The board would approve it next week.”

An after-action review of the Feb. 13, 2023, attack at Michigan State University was undertaken less than two months later when the university hired a Columbus, Ohio-based risk management consulting firm, Security Risk Management Consultants, for a “thorough review of the response and follow-up actions taken by the institution and other outside agencies.” The report was published in October. The company declined to comment on the report or answer questions about cooperation from agencies.

There is no federal or state law requiring an after-action review of a mass shooting. Elected officials and elected bodies in other states have initiated them.

In one recent school shooting case, the Justice Department initiated its own review. A Justice Department official told The News that requests for after-action reviews are done by governments or jurisdictions, not typically by private citizens.

Critical examinations of emergency responses were done for the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, by the U.S. Justice Department. Attorney General Merrick B. Garland announced the review shortly after the tragedy on May 24, 2022.

After-action reviews were also done in Parkland, Florida, by the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School Public Safety Commission, created by the Florida Legislature, and in Newtown, Connecticut, by the Sandy Hook Advisory Commission, created by Gov. Dannel Malloy.

The Justice Department’s Community Oriented Policing Services office has not received a request for an after-action review involving Oxford, a Justice Department spokesman told The News.

But Steve St. Juliana, father of Oxford victim Hana St. Juliana, told The News he asked the Justice Department in 2022 to formally investigate the police and emergency response to the attack. St. Juliana said he has not received a response.

Victims’ families also asked the state Board of Education for an independent investigation funded by the Michigan Legislature, including the emergency response. Bob Wheaton, a spokesman for the Michigan Department of Education, said the request was sent to all state legislators on June 12. No legislator responded with a specific statement or answer, Wheaton said.

“While the state Legislature has already responded to the tragedy in Oxford with school safety legislation and funding, the department will continue to advocate for further measures called upon by the State Board of Education,” Wheaton said. “Those measures include requesting an independent review of the Oxford shootings funded by the Legislature and paying for additional school safety and mental health initiatives. The department has discussed the State Board of Education requests with key legislators.”

School security expert Kenneth Trump said calls for after-action reviews have increased with school shootings, mostly from parents who want to verify the responses by law enforcement and other agencies to violent crimes inside schools.

The goal of the reviews, security experts say, is to identify failures and successes, evaluate key lessons for ongoing training and develop programs governments can use to improve outcomes in future incidents.

Trump says parents deserve a review.

“Parents want as many eyes as possible looking at it independently to see what worked well and if something went wrong,” said Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services, a Cleveland-based national consulting firm. “They have suffered major losses and major trauma. At a minimum, they deserve a fully authentic and transparent explanation and investigations.”

The independent report into the Oxford attack by Guidepost Solutions, an investigations, regulatory compliance, monitoring and security consulting firm, was initiated by the Oxford school board to examine the actions of the district in connection with the shooting, and not the response by police — other than the school resource officer — or EMS.

Families of the slain students — Hana St. Juliana, Madisyn Baldwin, Tate Myre and Justin Shilling — have tried to get more information about the attack but say they have run into roadblocks.

Those families and parents of other children who survived met with Bouchard in early July and received for the first time the Sheriff’s Department’s official police report on the attack — 31 months after the shooting. The 739-page document was the family’s first opportunity to review what police had collected in interviews and as evidence in the attack.

Evidence collected by police in the mass shooting had been restricted while criminal trials and cases involving the killer and his parents played out for nearly two years after the attack. All criminal cases have been completed — the killer was sentenced to life without parole in December— while his parents, who had separate trials on four involuntary manslaughter charges, were sentenced in April to 10 to 15 years in prison.

In June, the State Board of Education said it asked the Michigan Legislature to mandate and fund an independent review of the 2021 Oxford High School attack. The request carried no legal authority. It came after parents of Oxford shooting victims requested it.

The victims’ parents also have asked for Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel to open an investigation into the responses to the shooting. Nessel’s office has maintained that her office cannot launch its own investigation — which it has said the school board rejected two separate offers for in 2021 and 2022 — without the school board’s permission unless there’s probable cause to believe a crime was committed.

Steve St. Juliana, who is suing the Michigan State Police over claims it failed to aggressively intervene and prevent the shooting, says it is time for the Justice Department to step in.

“It almost has to be the feds. The State Police, I don’t trust them either. All of them involved — including state law enforcement — have done questionable things. … The sheriff’s office is denying it, and we get conflicting information,” St. Juliana said.

Oakland Township Fire Chief Paul Strelchuk says an after-action review should be done to provide a clear picture of the response and offer possible lessons to first responders. Strelchuk’s crew was among the dozens of local departments on the scene that day.

Strelchuk says he read the after-action review of the emergency response to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde and believes all first responders learned from it.

“I believe with any major incident, an after-action study should be done so we can do a better job at the next major incident. This day and age, if you look at any video footage of any major incident, you will see police and fire are always working together,” Strelchuk said. “After-action reports can help us do a better job.

“There is nothing but something to gain from that. It’s not to point fingers. It’s so we can do our best.”