LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) -- Louisville Metro Emergency Services oversees 911 dispatchers and EMS but also helps coordinate the city's overall response.

One of its key roles is getting a mobile command center set up, an RV outfitted for the needs of critical response situations like active shooters, SWAT situations and even natural disasters.

On the day of the Old National Bank shooting, the RV was parked one block down from the bank at Jackson and Main streets.  

"You hope all that training is a waste of time," said Jody Meiman, executive director of LMES. "But that day, it wasn't."

The command center is equipped with WiFi, charging ports, radios, several TV screens, printers and even a coffee machine for long days. 

Around 8:30 a.m. April 10, 2023, the 911 call center stared lighting up with calls about an active shooter at Old National Bank. Connor Sturgeon, a 25-year-old former employee of Old National Bank, had opened fire inside the bank's Main Street offices.

He killed five people and injured eight others before being killed by Louisville Metro Police Officer Cory Galloway.

Meiman said the city started prepping an active shooter plan back in 2013 and continues to update it as more information about best practices is released. And, unfortunately, more information is learned each time there's a mass shooting.

"We learned a lot of it from the Pulse nightclub shooting in Orlando," he said. "That was where a Family Assistance Center was truly needed. And we look at all the mass shootings that happened and what was good and what can be learned from those."

Family Assistance is provided in partnership with areas hospitals, Red Cross, LMPD and Metro Emergency services, and it helps reunify someone with loved ones and also helps provide someone with religious assistance or any other support that person might need.

Old National Bank Shooting

"As soon as we identified that it was a real mass shooting, we contacted our partners," Meimain said. "They had it set up within two hours."

At the 911 dispatch center at MetroSafe downtown on April 10, call-takers were trying to help keep people inside the bank calm, fielding additional 911 calls and directing police with the new details as they came in.

"That was an incident that day that we had to look at our responders' mental health, maybe where we hadn't had to look at it before in the past," Meiman said.

They had off-duty dispatchers volunteer to come in and help relieve some of the people who had just taken calls, and there was behavioral health providers who showed up that day to help talk dispatchers through what they just experienced. While dispatchers are used to tragedy in their daily work, hearing pleas for help from people on their worst days, it was an unexpected call when the shooter's mother called 911 to try and stop her son.

"We hadn't heard of that in the past," Meiman said. "We really talked about that internally, how to pass that information on to law enforcement if it comes in like that again."

When Sturgeon's mother called 911 that morning, the shooting had already occurred. His mother told the dispatcher her son's roommate found a note that her son was headed to Old National Bank. She didn't think her son owned a gun  said he's a good kid and hoped he wouldn't get hurt. She went on to say she wanted to go to the bank anyway, but the dispatcher told her there was a dangerous situation going on and urged her not to go to the bank.

Without a plan for that situation, Meiman said dispatchers — and many first responders in general — are trained to act on their feet.

"You act as the situation dictates," he said. "Whatever you see, whatever you have, you take whatever experiences you've got to try to implement it in that time. Their adrenaline gets going like anybody else's adrenaline going, and your body and your mind feeds off that and you're able to get yourself through the situation."

Meiman said he credits a quick and thorough response at the bank to the trainings the various first responders have done for years. But he also admitted there are things to continue to learn from and grow.

"There was a lot of sadness," he said. "My heart goes out to the families. We've got to look at it and what we can do different next time if, God forbid, this situation happened again."

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