Analyzing the new CVPA High School Shooting Surveillance Footage

Almost two years after the attack, the St. Louis police department has release heavily edited CCTV and body camera footage to comply with a legal mandate.

Following a freedom of information act request, today the St. Louis Police released heavily edited CCTV footage of the school shooting at CVPA High school in October 2022. I’ve been carefully tracking this incident for 2 years, I’ve analyzed the manifesto for KMOV’s investigative team, and I narrated a special about it.

Much like footage released by the Nashville Police Department following the shooting at The Covenant School, the St. Louis video has been edited to remove time stamps, identifying information about the officers, and there are 7 minutes of missing police bodycam footage compared to the timeline.

Additionally, the St. Louis Police Department does not include the time when officers arrived on scene in their timeline of key events even when that is a critically important piece of information. From the available records, at least 6 minutes passed from the shooter entering the school until the first officer arrived on scene. CVPA High is located in downtown St. Louis and it’s hard to understand why the response took so long for a school shooting in progress. The 19-year-old shooter had an AR-15 rifle and 600 rounds of ammo loaded into magazines.

In all, the shooter roamed the hallways of the school for 15 minutes before being located by police. This feels like the same story all over again because I wrote about Nashville Police removing time stamps and only releasing edited footage with missing minutes while there is no official report available. After I published my concerns last year, the Nashville Police Department provided some additional details but still haven’t released a report about the shooting.

Here is the edited school CCTV footage that was released by St. Louis Police this morning:

The video shows of the shooter approaching CVPA High School with an AR-15 rifle. The shooter is visible on camera for 11 seconds as he exits his car and then breaks the window of a side door to access the emergency exit push bar. The school’s security camera is so grainy that even if the school had AI gun detection software or an officer actively watching the camera feeds, you can’t see a gun in the images from the exterior or at the door where the shooter entered.

Here is a video clip from the exterior as the shooter approaches the locked side door where he broke a window to enter.

Here is the interior hallway inside the door where the shooter entered. You can see an unarmed school security officer stationed at the door. He had a radio, but the school security radios are not connected to the St. Louis Police channels and this opportunity for early notification was missed.

The 19-year-old shooter then roams the hallways of the school holding the rifle. The quality is so poor that an AI system or human watching the cameras would be unlikely to spot someone with a gun if they didn’t know a shooting was taking place. Without interoperable radios, someone at the school security center wouldn’t be able to communicate with police anyway. These images make me wonder why the school has security cameras when the image quality is this bad. If a student was being raped or assaulted in the hallway, this image would not provide any useable evidence.

Here is another security camera image of the shooter walking through the hallways.

Waiting for police

The 19-year-old CVPA school shooter wrote in his journals that he was suicidal and just wanted to die. Nine minutes after he entered the school, instead of looking for more victims, he stood in a hallway by the computer lab for about 2 minutes and 30 seconds while he waited for police to find him.

There is a common assumption—which is not supported by empirical evidence—that a school shooter will continue killing victims until he is engaged by police. This planning assumption was fatal for the two victims who died because the shooter was not actively killing for most of the incident while EMS waited outside as the victims bled to death. This article has my recommendations for shifting the school shooting response strategy to prioritize saving the lives of victims with rapid treatment and transport to a hospital.

The shooter knew this was a performance and that he was on camera. He looks directly at the CCTV next to him and gives it the middle finger. The flashes are the fire alarm going on which scrambled police radio transmissions just like in Parkland (see my article: Can you hear me now? Fatal flaws with public safety radios).

Police Body Cam

Based on records, there is 9 minutes between the first officer arriving at the school and the shooter being killed by police. St. Louis Police released 2:44 of body camera footage compiled from multiple officers. The body camera’s time stamps and identifying information from the officers have been removed (just like Nashville).

Couple details I noticed in the body cam:

• Officers prioritize getting other officers with rifles to the front of the group instead of everyone rushing toward the shooter.

• Officers didn’t have keys or forcible entry tools to open the locked door to the computer lab. They fired at the lock with a shotgun multiple times which would mean they assumed that no other students were behind the door.

• When the officers outside the computer lab realize the shooter had an AR-15 rifle, most of them stand back instead of engaging immediately.

• Just like the Uvalde footage, officers comment about the shooter having rifle because facing an assailant with an AR-15 rifle is terrifying for police.

Amid the chaos, there is an extremely close call where an officer with a pistol almost shoots another officer in the back of the head. In this video clip you can see the officer with the pistol fire 2 shots to the left side of the head of the officer in front of him. When the officer in front of him flinches, he fires two more shots to the right side of the other officer’s head.

As schools consider arming staff members and teachers, school administrators should consider that even highly trained police officers can nearly kill another ‘good guy’ during the extreme intensity and adrenaline of a school shooting response.

Takeaway

Without official records or a complete picture of what happened, we can’t analyze these school shooting responses to know what went wrong and what went right. For example, the footage does not show students jumping out of windows which likely saved dozens of lives on the 3rd floor of the building. This is a critical lesson to learn because it supports that evacuating is better than hiding inside a classroom. The DOJ report on Uvalde also recommends that students get away from the school because AR-15 rounds go through the walls of classrooms.

When the St. Louis police department left out 7 minutes of video from the response timeline, why did they do this? I have the same questions that I posed after seeing the Nashville body cam footage:

• Did officers wait outside?

• How many officers arrived and when did they get there?

• Did patrol wait for officers with tactical training before entering the school?

• Is there footage of officers waiting in the hallways rather than engaging the shooter?

• Why didn’t officers have keys or forcible entry tools when this shooting happened months after Uvalde?

• Why did the critically wounded victims wait 30 minutes for EMS treatment?

We also need to realize that school shootings are violent public suicides and a shooter is not deterred by guards, armed staff, or police because the shooter wants and plans to be killed by them.

Stopping a school shooting means helping someone BEFORE they get to the point of wanting to die while also making sure that a teen who is actively suicidal can't get access to an AR-15 rifle.

---

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 recent interviews on Freakonomics Radio, my weekly podcast Back to School Shootings, and my article on CNN about AI and school security.