Casualty Estimate Aided EMS Response to Minneapolis Shooting at Church

MINNEAPOLIS — EMS officials credited an initial, accurate estimate by Minneapolis police of about 20 gunshot victims at Annunciation Church for an emergency response that loaded all of the people needing hospital attention into ambulances in about 25 minutes.

The 17 hospitalized individuals are all expected to survive, officials said. Two children died at the church.

“You know, even with the bridge collapse, they said, ‘Send us everything you’ve got!'” said Tyler Lupkes, special operations battalion chief for Hennepin EMS. “But here we have firm numbers.”

Police officers brought the injured out to the front of the church, where paramedics assessed them and loaded them sometimes two or three at a time into ambulances. Critical cases were routed to HCMC in Minneapolis while children with noncritical injuries went to Children’s Minnesota and noncritical adults went to North Memorial in Robbinsdale.

Ambulances reached the scene within minutes after the call at 8:33 a.m., but had to wait about a minute for police to confirm that their wasn’t an imminent threat.

“If you become a victim, you’re not helping anybody else,” Lupkes said.

HCMC was alerted and activated its trauma response around 8:46 a.m., sending alerts for orthopedic surgeons and others to hustle to the emergency room to assist the five doctors staffing the ER. Messages from a Zipit emergency messaging system made the scope of the tragedy clear to Dr. Thomas Wyatt, Hennepin’s chairman of emergency medicine.

“6 year old, gunshot wound, 5 minute ETA.”

“9 year old gunshot wound, 7 minute ETA.”

The count quickly exceeded the number of fully equipped emergency stabilization rooms, so ER workers grabbed black bags packed with breathing tubes and other equipment to ready other rooms for trauma care. Wyatt handled triage duties as the children were wheeled from the ambulance entrance on South Seventh Street into the hospital. Four patients needed surgery.

Memorial Blood Centers rushed 252 units of blood, platelets and plasma to Hennepin Healthcare and the other hospitals that received patients to make sure they had enough.

Some children hadn’t been identified when they arrived at the hospital, so a psychologist asked them their names, if possible, or wrote up descriptions of the children to send back to the emergency scene so families could be notified.

Wyatt said the emergency occurred in the daytime when the hospital was fully staffed, and one day after the hospital had already responded to another mass shooting.

“That’s why you have to have experts in penetrating trauma like we are here at our level one trauma center,” he said. “Unfortunately, we’ve gotten very good at managing those injuries because we see a lot of gunshots wounds.”

By afternoon, hospital and EMS workers were processing the emotions from the day.

“All these incidents are horrible,” Wyatt said. “When they involve children, it raises it to another level for everyone involved ... We’ll be dealing with some pretty heavy emotions in the coming days.”

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