Guest writer

OPINION | PRESTON JONES: The responders

Anniversary of a terrorist attack


"A lot of people think we're robotic," said Robert Jauregui, one of the first law enforcement officers to arrive at the scene of the terrorist attack in San Bernardino, Calif., seven years ago today. He was speaking about the personal impact of that day, which left 14 dead and 22 wounded.

The San Bernardino attack was many massacres ago. The latest episodes, so far as I know, have taken place in Idaho, Virginia, and Colorado. Such news hardly makes an impression anymore. In part, that's the luxury that comes with knowing that someone else will respond.

This day seven years ago, Robert Jauregui was a responder. He was working for the San Bernardino school district and training a new officer, who also responded. John Holmes was a probation officer with San Bernardino County. He, too, was a responder.

As I watched the unfolding news from the comfort of my home in Siloam Springs, Robert and John and hundreds of others were in the mix.

Both John and Robert had recently received active-shooter training. When word first went out of a mass shooting, John assumed it was at a school. Soon they learned it had happened at a facility that served the developmentally disabled. Both thought they were heading into a gun fight. Robert said, "I told my trainee, 'Let's go. Let's go.'" He was concerned about being ambushed. "We didn't know the circumstances." Later in the day, he found a pipe bomb the terrorists, who sympathized with ISIS, had planted or thrown out of their car.

John said that what normally would be a 15-minute trek through traffic from his office to the Inland Regional Center in south San Bernardino was reduced to something like three minutes. "I didn't think about things," he said, "we were going to stop whatever the threat was."

But when John arrived, "it was just silent." A couple of casualties were lying on the ground. "We changed from an active shooter to a rescue situation."

Robert said, "They started bringing bodies out. Some people were deceased. Some were just barely hanging on. I had a lot of blood on my arms." In the first minutes, John's truck was the only vehicle of size on the scene. He put 14 or 15 people into the bed of the truck. "Six of them had gunshot wounds." Once a triage area was set up, the wounded were moved there. Soon the bodies John and Robert had seen were covered with a tarp. They kept the media away.

In the early stage of what became a long day, both say they really didn't think about anything. Training kicked in. They were aware that others were doing other things, but they focused on what was in front of them. At one point, an officer asked John how he was doing. John said he was fine. It didn't strike him until later that the officer who asked was caked with blood.

As time went on and Robert considered the bodies under the tarps, he wondered: "How many families are not gonna have a family member this Christmas?" He prayed for the dead and their loved ones. This is when he noted that people tend to think of peace officers as robots. But even after years of law enforcement work in a city as rough as San Bernardino, the scenes of Dec. 2, 2015, remain in their own category.

The critical work of the day ended with a shootout between the terrorist couple and law officials from myriad agencies. Robert was in the area. "If this is it for me," he said, "this is it for me." I asked John if he wanted to get to the terrorists to exact revenge. He said, "I don't remember having feelings one way or the other. It was just, 'My job's not finished yet.'"

I've known John since preschool. When I first saw the news I sent him an email, using the local term for San Bernardino. "Hey, man. Sad to see what happened in Berdoo. Did you get involved?" He wrote back: "I'm on scene. I'm safe. I will get a hold of u later." We've talked about it several times since.

John and Robert worry that the attack in San Bernardino will be forgotten--the event, the lives lost and damaged, the efforts of the responders. Not long after came a deadlier attack at a night club in Florida. And so on--a steady train to the most recent episodes.

We, the large majority who have no idea what it's like to work in law enforcement, absorb all this from screens, with breaks for snacks. And the fools among us claw at the frail line between chaos and order that police try to maintain.

Meantime, the responders respond.


Preston Jones lives in Siloam Springs. The interviews with John Holmes and Robert Jauregui can be found at "Stuff of Life": youtube.com/channel/UC88m0O9N0xvs2zU8d95Hu9w.


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