"Sandy Hook lessons spared lives in Florida shooting"

reuters.com

As soon as she heard “Code Red Lockdown” on her radio in a Florida high school library, Diana Haneski remembered how a fellow librarian saved lives by locking 22 people in a supply closet during the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

“She was there that day in Sandy Hook and because of her I knew what to do,” said Haneski, 57, a library media specialist at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, where a former student is charged with shooting dead 17 people on Wednesday.

Her longtime friend Yvonne Cech, 58, was the librarian on duty at the Newtown, Connecticut school five years ago when a gunman, also a former student, massacred 20 children and six adults. Cech crammed 18 children and four adults into a small closet and locked the door as gunshots rang out. 

“People said to me: ‘What an incredible coincidence that you have such a close friend who could have the same experience’,” Cech told Reuters...

Drawing from her friend’s account five years ago of how she saved lives, Haneski quickly herded 50 students and five adults into a media equipment room in the rear of the library and locked the doors. The radio crackled with news that there was a gunman on the loose.

Some teachers thought it was simply a drill because school staff had just undergone “active shooter” training and were told a mock incident would take place, Haneski said. One teacher who climbed over the dead and wounded lying in the hallways assumed they were theater students drenched in fake blood, she added.

But not Haneski."

“I felt right away this was real,” she said...

Haneski and Cech, who each have two adult children, said the only way to stop such massacres was for Congress to tighten gun control laws.