Facing a Critical Incident: A First Responder’s Experience During the 1989 Louisville Mass Shooting

Jim Woosley [00:00:00]:
As I was sitting down to relax and enjoy the coffee and the paper, a run comes up over the radio about a shooting at six and Broadway.

Jennifer [00:00:09]:
Welcome back to when the Call Hits Home. This is Jennifer and I'm excited again to meet with my number one hero here, my dad. We enjoyed talking our last episode and so I just wanted to continue and talk some more. So you want to introduce yourself again. Who are you?

Jim Woosley [00:00:27]:
Oh, I'm still Jim Woosley and also Jennifer's father.

Jennifer [00:00:33]:
Awesome. So we wanted to talk a little bit about a critical incident and an experience you had as a first responder, role responder with a critical incident and then just talk a little bit and have some conversations about that. So would you mind sharing kind of. I don't want to say your first critical incident, but obviously maybe one of the. Would you say the biggest one in your career?

Jim Woosley [00:00:59]:
It. Yeah, probably the biggest one. The one that stands out the most. Yeah.

Jennifer [00:01:06]:
So tell us a little bit about just the story in terms of that experience.

Jim Woosley [00:01:11]:
What happened was it was a workplace incident where there was a mass shooting and this girl employee went in with numerous weapons. And I'm not remember now, they killed like nine or 11. There was 18 or 19 wounded. And I'm not saying it's the first, but it's one of the first mass killings in the States. It's one of the first. And this was in the late 80s.

Jennifer [00:01:41]:
It was September 14, 1989. Okay, so, yeah, so it was last. So tell us just about your day that day. What happened?

Jim Woosley [00:01:50]:
Well, at the time I was a. A uniformed sergeant in the downtown Louisville district and it was a routine day. And I went like, I started most of my days and went to McDonald's to get my coffee and read the newspaper. And as I was sitting down to relax and enjoy the coffee and the paper, a run comes up over the radio about a shooting at 6 and Broadway. Well, it's 9 o' clock in the morning. So my immediate thought, well, it's a domestic shooting and we don't have many shootings that time of day and it's domestic shooting. So I get up to head out to my car to head that way and there's another sergeant there and he says he's going. So I'm thinking, well, there's no need for two sergeants there.

Jim Woosley [00:02:34]:
We'll get to each other's way. So I go back to sit down to drink my coffee and the run comes out to kind of update on it. And it's obvious it's more than just a simple Shooting more than just domestic shooting. So. So I'm about six or seven blocks away. It's. It's rush hour. Shortly after in the downtown area, traffic's pretty heavy, and I might make my way there.

Jim Woosley [00:02:57]:
And it's a building that I'd never been in before. It was at the part of the Courier Journal, which, if you're not familiar, that was or still is our local newspaper. And behind it was State Ramirez and Stan Romero was the company in the building where they printed the paper. It was attached to the newspaper building where the. Where the riders and editors and whatnot worked. So I head and get to the parking lot, and by this time there's several off several cars coming up. And I go open the truck in my car and I have a shotgun, the truck of a car, and I get the shotgun out and I see somebody else with a shotgun. Well, I said, well, we're going in an office building.

Jim Woosley [00:03:37]:
We don't need two shotguns in close quarters. So I put the shotgun back, and I had a bulletproof vest in there, and I put that on over my uniform. And I go to the scene. And like I said, we're surrounded. And I'm on the east side of the building, and the interest is on the west side, the business interest. So I go around to the east side and the EMS pulls up and I'm getting on the radio and I said, where can the EMS get in? How can they get in? How can they get in safely when we don't get a response? So I go get the first EMS people and we go in a little area and in the office area is on the second floor. It's a little unusual. They have an elevator that goes up to the second floor.

Jim Woosley [00:04:15]:
And you get on the elevator and you get off. That's where the reception and the offices are of the. Which I didn't know at the time. So we, me and the two man's people get the elevator. And I remember getting in the elevator and smelling gun, smoke, gunpowder. You can tell there's been shots fired. And, you know, it's got that. That scent to it.

Jim Woosley [00:04:34]:
We get up and the Eldore's coming up, and I get on the radio and I tell them, don't shoot. We're coming out of the elevator. I got ems. Don't shoot. And we step out of the elevator and we have to step over two bodies. They're laying right there in front of the elevator. Two women are shot and they're. They're bleeding there.

Jim Woosley [00:04:50]:
There's two officers in there already. So me and EMS get off. The EMS goes to the one girl, lady, and they start fooling with her and working with her and, and I, I check around a little bit and I go talk to this other girl and I say talk when she's shot. And I'm trying to do little first aid and trying to secure us because we still got an active shooter going on. And I end up talking to her for, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 minutes. And the other lady the EMS worked on, she passed away and they leave her. And there's other people shot on this floor, plus there's several floors. It's a, like I said, penny press.

Jim Woosley [00:05:30]:
And it's, it's an industrial building, which is huge, and, and we know nothing about as far as the layout. So I'm, I've stayed with this lady and she says, man, she's hurting and all, she's really in pain and I'm lying to her. I said, well, that's good, man. You, pain, you're feeling things, that's really, that's a good sign. It's good to be, be hurt because that means, you know, you, your, your senses are good, your, you're feeling pain that, that your body's reacting well and it's just coming, it's coming out this deep, dark, real thick blood. And we're there. I don't know how long we're there, but seemed like eternity. And other people are coming in, they're chasing through the building.

Jim Woosley [00:06:08]:
And the guy's got. Found out this later, he's got a duffel bag full of weapons in an ammunition and he's dragging it and shooting, dragging and going. He's going up and downstairs. He gets the point. In my opinion, duffel bag got too heavy for him to carry. So he lays it down, he takes some weapons, goes in a break room and he kills two or three in the break room and wounds two or three more. And that the police, I said, we, not me personally, but the police, we got between him and his duffel bag when he come back to get more weapons. Amnesia.

Jim Woosley [00:06:42]:
He saw that things wasn't going good, so he took his own life then. But meantime, I'm talking to this girl and holding her hand and say, you're doing good, you're doing great. Everything's going to be all good. And I'm not a ems. When I first started on the police department, for about a year we were ems. We drove station wagons, hit two man cars and we did that for about a year and then they Created ems and, and we got out of that business. And I was thankful for it. I, I love EMS because they do so much better job than we.

Jim Woosley [00:07:15]:
The end of the ideas specifically. But I'm talking to her and tell her things going to be good. And, and. And I'm getting to the point. I don't want to move her because I know she could be paralyzed and all, but she's bleeding so bad. So we got to do something. We got to get her out here. You know, if you paralyze her, that's better than being dead.

Jim Woosley [00:07:33]:
So I get another guy and I said, get her feet. We're going to carry her out. We're right by the other. We get on the elevator, take her downstairs, and there's. There's no way ambulance. Just chaos is going on. And the guy's coming by in a police car and I stop him and he's going to get the mare. And I said, man, we need your car.

Jim Woosley [00:07:51]:
He said, I gotta go get the marriage. You go get the bear. But we taking your car. And we commandeered his car, put her in the back seat and got a driver, and he drove her to the hospital. Let me go back in. And we do the same thing with a couple others. We take them outside, put them in police cars and take them to the hospital. By that time, we found out that the shooter has been.

Jim Woosley [00:08:15]:
He's taking his long life, like I said. So the situation is, we did a thorough beer. Then it starts. Make sure he's by himself and all. And we're kind of relieved. I know we're sitting up there in this same area, this reception there, which then we're petting herself on the back and said, wow. And we hear a commotion in the back. And some guy comes out of the back.

Jim Woosley [00:08:36]:
This is an hour later. He's been hiding back there for an hour, afraid to come out. I don't know. We scared him, but I was in uniform. How he come out? I said, come on, man, I'll walk you out. I took him outside and he was, he was, as you can imagine, shaking, upset, but, but, but safe. That's pretty much the events of that day.

Jennifer [00:08:58]:
So after that happens, I mean, is there. I mean, you said they're trying to get the mayor, so I'm assuming they did like a press conference, because that was, I'm sure, big news.

Jim Woosley [00:09:08]:
Yeah, yeah. Like I said, it was one of the first in the country. We had press conference. We had the. At that time, they had the, the news trucks, I guess now they use Just the cameras. They don't need the big trucks, but I guess they still got the trucks, but they had the news trucks, and we had the news trucks out there. The news trucks were from Cincinnati, St. Louis, and everybody.

Jim Woosley [00:09:30]:
It was a big item at the time. They all showed up in the next two to three. There's the header pose up and doing live shots.

Jennifer [00:09:39]:
So then what happens after this intense morning?

Jim Woosley [00:09:43]:
Well, there was a. As you can imagine, a sense of shock and sadness, and just over come the community. Not. I mean, the whole community was in a state of mourning. One thing I remember the next day, I. I'm worried about. We paralyzed this girl because, you know, we. We.

Jim Woosley [00:10:04]:
She had a wound and injury. No. And me and a couple other guys, it was the next day or two days later. We went to the hospital, several of those. And. And it's a couple days because I talked to doctors, and the doctor said that it took a. The bullet took a piece out of a spine size of a golf ball. She was paralyzed.

Jim Woosley [00:10:26]:
There's nothing we did. Well, it wasn't good, but it made you feel a little bit better that.

Jennifer [00:10:31]:
Right.

Jim Woosley [00:10:31]:
We didn't cause more damage.

Jennifer [00:10:32]:
I want to be respectful because I don't want to use people's names, but can you say, like, a little bit of her backstory that, you know, first.

Jim Woosley [00:10:41]:
Of all, it was her first day back at work. She'd been off for like two or three weeks or maybe a month, I don't remember, for maternity leave. She. She had a new son who was, you know, month old, two months old at the time. So she was just back to work from attorney leave. And her dad told me, like I said, the news media was there, and it was a picture of me in the paper. And I'm sorry, but take your time. There's a picture of me in the paper and say the paper come out.

Jim Woosley [00:11:11]:
Her dad told me she saw me in the paper. Sorry.

Jennifer [00:11:16]:
Okay.

Jim Woosley [00:11:18]:
And she points to me, said, that's my placement. But we could. We've got friends. Oh, we went to her house and I saw her kids and she came to.

Jennifer [00:11:29]:
I think we hosted something. And she came to her house as well.

Jim Woosley [00:11:32]:
Yeah, she came to her house and.

Jennifer [00:11:35]:
She was a mom again.

Jim Woosley [00:11:37]:
Yeah. More kids later. She had a. Had a daughter, and I'm not senior for a few years, but. But last I know, as far as I know, she had two good kids and everybody as well.

Jennifer [00:11:47]:
But something like that's impactful.

Jim Woosley [00:11:49]:
It is, but it is.

Jennifer [00:11:51]:
Well, I think it's okay that you, you know, shed Some tears over that. It's a pretty scary day and made an impact obviously on somebody's life. But we brought this up to talk a little bit about our experience and, you know, to say this happened in 1989 and then to think about it just a couple years down the road here. I'm sure 1989 feels like yesterday for me. I know it feels really soon for you as well. But I think you mentioned that they did offer some kind of, you know, critical incident, you know, conversations. The police department. Was it the police department?

Jim Woosley [00:12:38]:
Yeah.

Jennifer [00:12:39]:
Can you talk a little bit about what that is?

Jim Woosley [00:12:41]:
They did this kind of know what we're calling his crystal incidents. Was. Was new. But they made us go talk to some people and we were all big, tough, bad placement. Nobody wanted to do that. I didn't want to do that. But we made. They made us go see when we did in a group, and My group was 10 or 12.

Jim Woosley [00:13:02]:
And it was really good. The guy that run it was really good. It was helpful. It. I had a change of attitude over it. They do can do some good and it's, you know, you ought to encourage it.

Jennifer [00:13:16]:
What was helpful about it?

Jim Woosley [00:13:18]:
Well, you saw that you weren't the only one that had these thoughts or feelings or beliefs and. And it was okay to have sympathy and to feel. I don't say feel guilty, but feel like you maybe had done enough, but everybody had done their best and changed my attitude towards it, towards stress issues.

Jennifer [00:13:41]:
Does that feel pretty true sometimes as a police officer, that there's. There's not enough. You should have done more.

Jim Woosley [00:13:49]:
In situations just. Overall, I think we do. We might not do the right thing, but we do what we think's right at the time. Time.

Jennifer [00:13:56]:
Well, I guess I'm thinking more of like when you go home and did I do enough?

Jim Woosley [00:14:00]:
Did I.

Jennifer [00:14:01]:
Did I paralyze this?

Jim Woosley [00:14:03]:
Yeah. Second guess yourself.

Jennifer [00:14:05]:
So not, you know, could I have done more?

Jim Woosley [00:14:07]:
There's a. No. I guess we always second guess ourself and. And hindsight's 20 20, but. But I think that we're trained pretty well. We use our training to the best of ability. Most of the time I feel like.

Jennifer [00:14:22]:
Well, I definitely feel as, you know, getting to work. The honor of getting to work with first responders in a mental health capacity. I mean, definitely it shows up a lot that I didn't do enough. That's a big theme, I think, for people. So I appreciate you saying that. I mean, I have to say that's pretty cutting edge in 1989 to have a I imagine this is a psychologist that comes and talks to you guys as a group. That's pretty cutting edge.

Jim Woosley [00:14:50]:
It. Like I said, we were post that I ain't going and made us go. And I'm glad they did. And it didn't hurt anybody and I think it helped about everybody.

Jennifer [00:15:00]:
Yeah. So that actually happened to be your wife's birthday that day, did it? Did. You'd already got her a present, so you recovered there?

Jim Woosley [00:15:09]:
I did call her. This is pre. Cell phones off. So I did an office building and there was a phone there and all the news was there. And I called her and said, I can't talk right now. There's a lot of stuff going on, but I'm okay. They said, you'll see the news, know what's going on, but I'm okay.

Jennifer [00:15:24]:
Yeah, I think she. She told me about that and she said I was clueless. I didn't know what he was talking about until, you know, she stepped aside. And so. And I think it was a really impactful. I think her getting to be married to somebody that saved somebody's life, I think that meant a lot to her for you. But I think the reason I wanted to bring this up on the podcast because in 1989, I was in first grade and I don't think we recognized this until I was much old, but I rode the school bus to school. And in 1989, when I'm riding the school bus to school, you know, all buses have radios.

Jennifer [00:16:02]:
And I am noticing in the morning on the way to school that the bus driver seems to be on the radio a lot more than. I mean, they're usually just. I got these stinking kids and I'm breaking them in. They're not really talking on the radio too much, but there was just so much chatter on the radio that it like. I don't know, it just. Again, as a first grader, I just noticed it like I was just like, well, that's interesting. But, you know, as a first grader, you have the attention of a goldfish. So, you know, on to when it's recess.

Jennifer [00:16:33]:
And so I think I don't even. I mean, it's not like your mom sat down and said this happened. I do remember, obviously, the. I hate to use the word victim. The survivor came to our home. And so I kind of understood she was in a wheelchair and a little bit more of the story then. And I think I was probably like in fifth grade and you shared that story with me. Like I sat down at McDonald's and you know, this is what happened.

Jennifer [00:17:01]:
And a little bit about, I think unfortunately sometimes I guess some good in a tragedy is that the city realized they did not have enough ambulance. And so we got more ambulance in the city because there wasn't enough to respond to a crisis like that. So, you know, I just think we had that conversation. But I don't know, as a first responder, as a police officer and having a day like that, like, how are you supposed to go home to your family?

Jim Woosley [00:17:30]:
I don't know. That's a. I don't know. That's. Well, I mean, you need to talk to professionals, which they were smart enough to let us do. And you, you know, you've got to go on. Time heals wounds, I guess, but. But that left a dip scar and it's a.

Jim Woosley [00:17:46]:
I mean, we're survive it. And most of the victims survived. Yeah, you got to go on.

Jennifer [00:17:53]:
Yeah. I mean, the sad news is that that's not the last mass shooting there ever was. No, that's a sad thing. But at the same time, I think to say, okay, those things happen and our families, our family life does go on and how to make sense of that when you had to see something horrific like that.

Jim Woosley [00:18:11]:
One little humorous sidebar, if I may add. Your mind plays funny tricks on you. And right before that happened, me and your mother had taken our first trip to Europe. And we spent months in. In Europe and had a great trip and we been to Germany and half a dozen countries, just had a great trip. We come back and been to work less than two weeks and you talking about getting on the elevator and you smell a gunfound and you hear shots and all and your mind plays tricks on it. And I'm thinking, man, I'm glad I took that trip. And if I get killed here, I won't have to pay for it.

Jim Woosley [00:18:47]:
I won't have to pay that credit card off. So you might you mind play.

Jennifer [00:18:53]:
To survive things that you have to do to survive. I appreciate your levity because I'll be honest with you. You know, Ashlee and I talk a lot about resiliency and I will say a very resilient, resilient trait that you have is your sense of humor. That's definitely something that you've passed to your children as well. We probably would be canceled because it's very inappropriate. But it's still, I think a good sense of humor is helpful in those kind of situations for sure. But I think it was interesting for us to again in the late 1900s, in 1989, to kind of recognize that. Wow, if I'm in first grade and I sense that there's something off, how to.

Jennifer [00:19:40]:
How do families do it nowadays when there's social media, when there's so much access to information and maybe what our first responders are responding to?

Jim Woosley [00:19:50]:
I don't know. I'm. I'm not sure all progress is good.

Jennifer [00:19:55]:
Well, I mean, I feel like the cat's out of the bag a little.

Jim Woosley [00:19:58]:
But, yeah, we can't go back. But we can't go back. But I don't have to accept all of it.

Jennifer [00:20:05]:
Well, I mean, not to be too obnoxious and pat ourselves on the back, but I mean, we did eventually have a conversation about it that led to like, oh, I can remember that in first grade. And I think I remember your response to that. Being really surprised that I had knew something was up that day. But I think that comes back to communication, like being able to communicate with your kiddos, age appropriate. Like, I don't think in first grade I needed to know that you had to step over bodies. Like, that's horrible. I don't need to know that. And I think it's important when I talk to my first responder families.

Jennifer [00:20:41]:
You know, the one thing that we can always communicate with our kids is that we'll do whatever we need to do to be home. You know, I can't promise that I'll always be safe, but I will promise that I'll do whatever I can do to be home. And so I think that's an important conversation to have with your kids. And we've talked a little bit before about front loading. Like, the more you can have those conversations ahead of time, the more important that could be.

Jim Woosley [00:21:06]:
Yeah, it's a good point. You.

Jennifer [00:21:08]:
I get all my, My brains and smart points from you. Is that what you're telling me?

Jim Woosley [00:21:12]:
Yes. I thought it was obvious.

Jennifer [00:21:15]:
Yeah. Well, I appreciate even willing to come back to the show and talk a little bit. I know that wasn't obviously an easy topic. I mean, it's definitely something that's been a part of our lives for a long time. And being able to share that with our. With Nicole Hits Home family. I appreciate you being willing to do that. That takes some courage.

Jim Woosley [00:21:33]:
I'm not sure that's a right word, but. But I don't. I don't mind talking about it, and I'm not sure it helps anybody, but if it does help somebody, I'm proud to talk about it.

Jennifer [00:21:42]:
Well, again, I appreciate that. Again, in 1989, there was some talk about mental health. That's impressive. And you're so. You're such a trendsetter and so on. Cutting edge. Yeah. Yeah, well.

Jennifer [00:21:54]:
And I'll. I'll say, like the person that you saved. You're my police officer, too. I love you. And you're my hero. So, again, Ashlee always says this the best. But you guys know, if you need anything, when the call hits home, we're here for you.