Lt. Mike Madden was the first officer to arrive at the Inland Regional Center in San Bernardino on Wednesday, and at a press conference Thursday night he called the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in the U.S. since Newtown a "tragedy I've never experienced in my career."
A 24-year veteran of the San Bernardino Police Department, Madden shared the horror he saw when he entered the building with three other officers. "It was immediately evident that victims were clearly deceased outside of the conference room," he said. "It was surreal. It was unspeakable, the carnage we were seeing, the number of people injured and unfortunately already dead, and the pure panic on the faces of those individuals still needing to be safe."
It was chaos inside, Madden said, with fire alarms and sprinklers going off, and people "obviously injured and in great amounts of pain, that was evident in the moans and wails we were hearing in the room." Madden said although it was a "difficult choice to make," the officers had to move past people in need of assistance in order to get further into the building. "When we entered, there was fresh gunpowder and the smell of gunpowder in the air, leading me to believe the shooters were still there," he said.
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Officers found about 50 people in a back hallway, too scared to leave. "They did not want to come to us," he said. "They were fearful. They were in a hallway, and it heightened my concern that potentially the suspects were in there, holding them hostage and waiting for us to enter. We had to tell them several times to come to us, and once the first person took motion that opened the floodgates and everyone wanted to get away as quickly as possible." Inside the conference room, where the Department of Public Health was holding a training and holiday luncheon, Madden saw a Christmas tree and tables set up. "It just seemed so senseless," he said. "Here are people going into holiday festivities, and now they're dealing with this."
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