Analyzing the 432-page police report on the CVPA High school shooting

Two years after the planned attack by a former student at Central Visual and Performing Arts High in St. Louis, police have released the full report.

I’ve followed the CVPA school shooting very closely for the last two years. I obtained exclusive access to the CVPA High School shooter’s manifesto from KMOV’s investigative reporting team. Last year, I narrated the documentary KMOV produced about this attack. I also recorded a podcast with Dr. Jillian Peterson, a forensic psychologist, to explore the shooter’s manifesto in detail.

This week, the St. Louis Police Department released a 432-page report about the shooting. Despite open records requests, the police department has not released all of the CCTV and police body camera footage from the incident. In a prior article, I analyzed the security camera footage that has been made available to the public.

Motives

The 19-year-old left a handwritten manifesto inside his car that was parked next to a side door into the school.

Unlike the previously redacted version, the police report states that he intended to target members of the LGBT community. This is a very important detail because prominent right-wing politicians including JD Vance have falsely claimed that mass shooters are transgender and mentally ill.

In reality, members of the LGBT community and people with mental illnesses are more likely to be the victims of gun violence than to perpetrate attacks. School shootings are a gun violence problem, not a gender or transgender identity issue.

Campus Layout and Security

The hundred-year-old campus has multiple schools with 14 different connected buildings plus an annex building, gymnasium, and dance studio. The CVPA High building is 3-stories plus a basement level. Some officers entered on the first floor while others went into the school from basement boors that were also street level.

The shooter was inside the school for 15-minutes before police found him. I’ve reviewed portions of the police radio traffic and officers had a difficult time explaining which building and which floor they believed the shooter was on. (Note: buildings with entrances at different levels have contributed to firefighter deaths because it’s easy to get disoriented and then not be able to communicate which floor you are on during a mayday emergency).

The CVPA campus had a very confusing layout for officers to navigate. It’s important for police training to include both large building searches and breaching doors/tactical entry to enter a classroom. Firefighters spend significant training time on learning how to communicate their location in a large building to other units.

The school campus was using common security procedures and equipment including metal detectors, door locks, fences, guards, and security cameras. Police didn’t have keys for the locked doors and had to use a shotgun to blow apart one of the locked gates.

Despite the school having physical security, the assailant was a former student who knew the layout of the building and picked the weakest point to enter. He parked next to a side door, used his AR-15 rifle to break the plexiglass window, reached inside to grab the emergency exit “push bar” to open the locked door, and entered the school.

When officers located the teen inside the school’s computer lab, they fired about 90 rounds at him. Luckily students had evacuated from the nearby classrooms rather than locking down because they could have been struck by rounds that went through the walls between classrooms.

From the DOJ Report on the Uvalde school shooting:

Chapter 7. School Safety and Security. Observation 16: Lockdown procedures are predicated on a locked door, impenetrable doors and walls, and other physical security that did not exist at Robb Elementary. One teacher at Robb was shot through several walls and many other teachers and students were at risk of the same fate, given the high-powered rifle used in the attack.

During the response, four police officers were injured while breaking open doors and by broken glass. Unlike firefighters who have protective helmets, jackets, pants, and cut-resistant gloves to wear while forcing open doors and operating breaching tools, most police officers aren’t issued protective clothing.

Just like the need for police to adopt best practices from the fire service for searching buildings and communicating their locations, police departments should re-evaluate the type of protective clothing that officers should wear during a school shooting response.

Details about the AR-15

The rifle the 19-year-old used was a Palmetto State Armory, PA-15 firearm which can be purchased for less than $500. This is the same brand of rifle used during the attempted assassination of Trump in Butler, PA and by a white supremist during the Dollar General mass shooting in a historically Black neighborhood in Jacksonville, FL. Ironically, Trump toured the Palmetto State Armory store in Summerville, SC during a campaign event in 2023.

While there are many companies that manufacture AR-15 style rifles, the new details about the 19-year-old’s desire to target the LGBT community may be connected to buying a Palmetto brand rifle.

In 2020, Palmetto released a special edition “Big Igloo Aloha” AK-47 style assault rifle.

“Big Igloo” is a code word for Boogaloo Boys who are a white nationalist group that wears Hawaiian Aloha shirts. One of the patches worn by members of this group shows a white igloo with a band of red floral print just like the rifle.

Palmetto State Armory designed a rifle specially for a far-right anti-government militia that shares neo-nazi and anti-LGBT messages online.

See more from The Wall Street Journal: Why the Extremist ‘Boogaloo Boys’ Wear Hawaiian Shirts.

School shootings are rooted in ideologies—extreme overvalued beliefs—that promote hate and violence. Children and teens need to be taught about radicalization to avoid it. The attack at CVPA High appears to follow this same pattern of radicalization because the shooter wrote about hate-based ideologies in his manifesto and purchased a rifle from a company that markets products specifically to neo-nazis and hate-based militias.

Peer education and student involvement in interventions is essential to identify a student who is becoming radicalized and fixating on extreme overvalued beliefs. Policymakers and federal officials need to identify and eliminate the online communities that allow children and teens to engage with violent, fringe sub-cultures like the Boogaloo Boys or advertisements from Palmetto State Armory (see: private Discord groups dedicated to school shootings).

To learn more about this, Ep 16. Can psychologists treat school shootings the same way as eating disorders? Dr. Tahir Rahman M.D. explains why extreme overvalued beliefs--not severe mental illness--drive school shooters to commit violence.

Preventing School Shootings

There are not any physical security products on the market that can prevent every school shooting. CVPA High had metal detectors, CCTV cameras, fences, gates, door locks, security guards, and triple-layered plexiglass windows on the doors. A current or former student who knows the school can easily find ways to defeat physical security products.

Here are three steps we can take to stop many school shootings:

1. Public education and standardized reporting system similar to “see something, say something” after 9/11 so that anyone who spots “red flags” can easily report them to police. The system needs to be managed federally so that every report is investigated, the dots are connected, and critical information doesn’t slip through the cracks. (Read more: What can the average person do to prevent the next school shooting?)

2. Fully funded crisis intervention programs in every community to help someone who is suicidal or shows risk factors before they decide violence is their only option. (See: The Off Ramp Project)

3. Every state needs to pass laws that require guns to be stored inside a locked safe and pass red flag laws to prevent an actively suicidal 19-year-old who has been hospitalized for mental evaluations from buying an assault rifle.

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David Riedman is the creator of the K-12 School Shooting Database, Chief Data Officer at a global risk management firm, and a tenure-track professor. Listen to my weekly podcast—Back to School Shootings—or my recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, New England Journal of Medicine, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.