Nashville police officers speak about response to mass shooting: 'Training is what kicked in'
"All of us stepped over a victim," an officer said at a news conference.
The Metro Nashville Police Department officers who ended the mass shooting at a private Christian school in Tennessee that left six people dead cited their police training on how they responded to the scene.
Detective Sgt. Jeff Mathes, Detective Michael Collazo and officer Rex Engelbert started a press conference Tuesday by offering condolences to the families. They all described how it was luck that they were all in the area last week to respond to the call for an active shooter.
The officers thanked the community for the outpouring of support received following the March 27 shooting at The Covenant School that left three children and three adults dead.
According to Nashville police, after the shooter, identified by police as 28-year-old Audrey Hale, opened fire at the school, responding officers shot and killed the suspect about 14 minutes after the initial 911 call was received.
Commander Dayton Wheeler, who also responded to the shooting, described the day as something he would never forget, saying that his "stomach dropped" when he realized the emergency calls that he received about a shooting were at a school.
Detective Sgt. Mathes and three of the detectives from his unit were among the first to enter the school on the morning of the shooting.
Mathes was in his office when he received a call about an active shooter. He and his team raced out the door, donned their ballistic protection, grabbed his shotgun and went into the building.
He described how his training kicked in, recounting how he had to block out the sadness of stepping over a victim to neutralize the threat.
"All of us stepped over a victim. I, to this day, don't know how I did that morally, but training is what kicked in," Mathes said.
According to the Mathes, he entered the school with "purpose" because he knew how serious the situation was based on the number of calls about a shooting.
"We just heard the sounds and from my training experiences, I knew those sounds to be rifles," Mathes said.
Officer Engelbert said he had to go to the Metro Police Academy for business, which put him in the Midtown section of the city at the time of the shooting.
"I really had no business being where I was. I think you can call it fate or God or whatever you want, but I can't count on both my hands the irregularities that put me in that position when a call for service came out for a deadly aggression at a school," Engelbert said.
Detective Collazo, who works for Mathes, said he was completing administrative tasks when the call of the active shooter came in.
Upon arrival, Collazo encountered two employees of the school who led him toward where the shooter entered the building. He found custodian 62-year-old Mike Hill, one of the victims of the shooting, on the ground not moving.
Police released body camera footage from Collazo, a nine-year veteran, and Engelbert, a four-year veteran, on March 28, which showed them firing at the suspect.
Police have identified the slain children as 9-year-old students Evelyn Dieckhaus, William Kinney and Hallie Scruggs. In addition to Hill, the two other adult victims were 60-year-old head of school Katherine Koonce and 61-year-old substitute teacher Cynthia Peak.
ABC News' Morgan Winsor and Emily Shapiro contributed to this report.