In the wake of the Uvalde, Texas elementary school shooting, KOIN 6 News talked to a former Oregon fire chief who responded to the 1998 Thurston High School shooting who also pioneered a program that worked to prevent school shootings for nearly a decade.
On May 21, 1998, 15-year-old Kip Kinkel, a freshman at Thurston High School in Springfield shot and killed two student and wounded 25 more. “I got into my office before eight in the morning, which was my common practice and I got a phone call from the incident commander responding. He called me on the cell phone and told me that they were responding to Thurston High School,” Dennis Murphy, who was the Springfield fire chief at the time, explained.
“And I just dropped my jaw what they said they were responding to…and they said the report was multiple students down, an active shooter,” Murphy said.