Page 66 - Security Today, June 2018

COVER STORY
SECURING CHANGE
Parkland Shooting survivor attends ISC West with goal of bringing campus security solutions back to campus with him
By Sydny Shepard
“You never think it is going to happen to you.”
That was the first thing Jake Glacer said to me
when we sat down to talk at ISC West. Glacer, a 16-year-old junior at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was in Building 1200 when a student who had been previously banned from the campus returned with a semi-automatic rifle and opened fire into five classrooms, includ-
ing Glacer’s classroom: Room 1213.
The teenager told a horrifying and visceral story about how he and his classmates ducked bullets and piled themselves into a small cor- ner of the room not visible through the win-
dow of the door.
“It was just a normal day,” Glacer recalled
hesitantly. “We were sitting in class taking notes and then six to eight shots went off. We all ran to a corner of the room, and then we realized that we were visible from the door so we ran to the other corner of the room where you can’t be seen from the door, but not everybody could fit in the corner.”
Despite the students’ best efforts to find safety in their classroom, four students would suffer gunshot wounds. Among the seventeen lost was a student from Glacer’s classroom.
“We didn’t try to leave,” Glacer said. “I didn’t have any idea of what was happening. No one had any idea of what was happening. Some people thought it was a drill, and I had to tell a girl in my class that this was real. This is really happening, there is no way this is a drill.”
Twenty-four minutes passed before police came to the classroom, reached through the door’s broken window, unlocked it and instructed students to run. The students made their escape while police carried the wounded of Room 1213 behind them. During those long 24 minutes, Glacer texted his mother, “I love you. Tell Dad I love him, too.” He wasn’t sure he would see them again.
Glacer would later reconnect with his mother and father, Dana and Noel Glacer, about a mile from the high school after run- ning from his campus with other fleeing stu- dents, finding safety across the street.
INITIATING CHANGE
In the weeks after the shooting, Glacer con-
tinued to be dumbfounded by what had hap- pened at his own school. He remembered tell- ing his father months before the incident that he wanted to attend the next trade show he had in Las Vegas. After the incident, he became more eager to participate.
“I never really thought I would go,” Glacer said of ISC West. “But after everything hap- pened I had a real reason to come.”
The next event Noel Glacer, CEO and founder of Security Division at Recruit
Group, was planning to attend in Las Vegas happened to be the largest security trade show in the United States, with campus secu- rity products, solutions and services in nearly every foot of the room. Glacer describes the show as eye-opening.
“We currently have lanyards and clear back- packs that were donated to us, but that is noth- ing compared to the solutions I have seen here [at ISC West],” Glacer said. “I have just seen so much, like cameras and solutions for doors.”
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CAMPUS SECURITY & LIFE SAFETY