Sikich, a professional services firm in Naperville, Ill., used Hillard Heintze for risk assessments of their workplaces. (Taylor Glascock/For The Washington Post)
CHICAGO — When a city worker opened fire in a Virginia Beach government office on Friday, killing 11 fellow employees and a contractor, he added another tragedy to the list of horrors recounted by Matt Doherty.
The former Secret Service agent, who now trains office workers on how to prevent such shootings, stood at the front of a Chicago conference room just weeks earlier and tallied similar rampages: Seventeen students and staffers massacred at a Parkland, Fla., high school. Twelve people gunned down at the Washington Navy Yard. Five staff members fatally shot at the Capital Gazette newspaper near Annapolis.
And only two months earlier, five people killed in a warehouse in Aurora, Ill., not far from where Doherty stood.
Each tragedy was preceded by red flags, alarming behaviors and threats of violence from those accused of opening fire, Doherty explained to a group of office workers in a Chicago high-rise. In Aurora, the shooter had told a co-worker he would kill people if he was fired, according to a prosecutor. Later the same day, he did just that.
“That’s what we’re trying to avoid here,” said Doherty, “those warning signs.”
Doherty is trying to change the way companies think about active-shooter training. His sessions focus not on what to do if someone opens fire but how to prevent a shooting from happening in the first place.
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While active-shooter training has become a standard security measure in schools, offices and houses of worship, Doherty’s work is part of an effort to teach employees how to flag possible threats and spot warning signs in their co-workers before they turn violent.
“Workplace violence doesn’t happen at random or out of the blue,” said Brian Harrell, the Department of Homeland Security’s assistant director for infrastructure security. “Perpetrators typically display some sort of behaviors of concern. And awareness of these indicators . . . is critical to any prevention program.”
Police say Gary Martin fatally shot fellow employees and wounded police officers at the Henry Pratt valve assembly plant in Aurora, Ill., on Feb. 15. (Robert Chiarito/Reuters)
So companies are turning to people like Doherty, who used to run the Secret Service’s Threat Assessment Center and now works at the Chicago-based security risk management firm Hillard Heintze.
He teaches employees how to watch for the missed and mishandled warning signs that have preceded some mass shootings: co-workers who seem particularly angry, who make threatening remarks or who react inappropriately to normal workplace situations.
If an employee thinks something is “off” with a colleague, Doherty said, they are probably right. He promotes a variation on the post-9/11 vigilance motto: “Sense something, say something.”
Workplaces have been common targets for active shooters. An FBI study examining 160 attacks by active shooters between 2000 and 2013 found that nearly half of those incidents occurred at businesses — locations including offices, warehouses, malls, restaurants, movie theaters, bars, supermarkets and distribution centers.
While some locations were attacked by people who did not work there, others involved current or former employees or people who had relationships with workers.
“That rank-and-file employee, the administrative assistant or that low-level manager, is now cognizant of threats and violence and a potential crisis episode,” Harrell said. “They’re actively seeking the knowledge of what to do.”
Doherty advises companies to provide ways for employees to report concerns anonymously and to put policies in place for handling such issues internally when possible, including meeting with employees and turning to their own security staff and others. When situations escalate, businesses can enlist firms like Hillard Heintze to interview the employee of concern or review their social media to develop a risk assessment.
The idea isn’t to get people in trouble, Doherty said, but to sound the alarm well before a crisis.
“Not every single case is the next shooter,” Doherty, 60, told the partners and managers at Chicago-based consulting firm Sikich during a recent training session. “That’s not what this exercise is about. It’s early intervention.”
Vice President Mark Brenzinger, left, and CEO Arnette Heintze at the Hillard Heintze offices in Chicago . Hillard Heintze is a security risk management firm that offers risk assessment and training to its clients. (Taylor Glascock/For The Washington Post)
Research has shown that active shooters frequently alarmed people in their lives before their violent rampages and are often fueled by grievances, targeting specific places and expressing a desire to carry out violent acts.
“When it comes to attackers, they pick their victims,” said Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent who is now a security consultant and a professor of national and homeland security at the University of Southern California.
The shooting in Aurora, Ill., seemed to fit these patterns. The gunman showed up at the Henry Pratt Co. facility on Feb. 15, telling co-workers he was worried about being fired because of a safety violation the previous day, according to a report on the shooting released by the Kane County State’s Attorney in late April.
He told one person, “If I get fired, I’m going to kill every motherf----- in here” and “blow police up,” the report said.
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The co-worker never reported the statement because the attacker had a habit of “making ‘off the wall’ statements,” the report said.
According to the report, the attacker — Gary Martin, 45 — started shooting shortly after being told the company “would begin the termination process.” He killed four people in the meeting, including a 21-year-old intern on his first day, and injured the fifth, the report said. Then, the report says, he “specifically targeted” and killed another co-worker he had run into earlier in the day, when “words were exchanged” about the safety incident.
When police showed up, the attacker wounded five of them, as well. He was struck multiple times during a shootout and killed.
Mueller Water Products, the parent company of Henry Pratt Co., did not respond to interview requests for this story.
Standing in the Sikich conference room in Chicago the day after the prosecutor’s report had been publicly released, Doherty returned to the Aurora shooting again and again, laying out some of those red flags and stressing the need of employees to report concerning behaviors.
An affable Philadelphia native, Doherty was a U.S. Capitol police officer before spending two decades in the Secret Service. He retired in 2006 and, two years later, joined Hillard Heintze, which has worked with businesses, police departments and wealthy people on active-shooter training, private security and background investigations, among other things.
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Arnette Heintze, the firm’s co-founder and chief executive, was also a Secret Service agent, working on details for presidents George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton. That experience provides a “unique skill set” when it comes to trying to size up a potential threat, Heintze said.
“The goal of our training is to bring an awareness to companies and to individuals,” Heintze said. “We’re not trying to make threat experts out of anybody in a day or two of training. But out of that training, we hope to better equip a representative of a company with the ability to go, ‘Here’s a problem.’ ”
Hillard Heintze Vice President Mark Brenzinger, a licensed clinical and forensic psychologist, sometimes meets with and conducts direct evaluation of a client’s employee to build a risk profile. (Taylor Glascock/For The Washington Post)
Companies have started paying significantly more attention to workplace violence during the past decade, said Johnny C. Taylor Jr., president and chief executive of the Society for Human Resource Management. Training that focuses on how to prevent such violence and respond to it is more common and increasingly expected by employees, he said.
“It’s the end of innocence,” Taylor said. “You’re in some ways watching all of your fellow colleagues and looking for that thing that gives you an indication that this person might be a perpetrator of workplace violence.”
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To determine a person’s risk level, firms like Hillard Heintze might evaluate the employee in a voluntary interview, said Mark Brenzinger, a clinical and forensic psychologist who, like Doherty, is a vice president of the firm. If he can’t speak to the person directly, the firm will review complaints, incident reports, social media postings and other records.
When he interviews a person, Brenzinger said he tells them their possible risk status and asks if they would accept treatment or counseling. But he does not make predictions about what a person will do.
“There’s always free will,” said Brenzinger, 48. “Low-risk people can go on to commit a homicide, and high risk people can go on to do nothing.”
The goal isn’t to say whether Bob might shoot up the office, Brenzinger said. “The goal is to help Bob get better.”
Hillard Heintze founder and CEO Arnette Heintze stands among employees working at the firm’s office in Chicago . Hillard Heintze provides daily threat intelligence monitoring, which often includes keeping an eye on social media. (Taylor Glascock/For The Washington Post)
The threat assessment process shouldn’t be used to cause problems for a colleague that someone simply does not like, Doherty added. Rather, the training aims to make employees active participants in the safety of their workplace.
“We don’t just look at it from the standpoint of, ‘Look everybody, here’s a memo. There will be this evacuation drill tomorrow. We want everyone to participate,’ ” said Christopher Geier, Sikich’s chief executive and a former Phoenix police officer. “This was more inclusive to include the simple things like, ‘I heard somebody talking about something with guns that sounded a little aggressive. What do I do about that?’ ”
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There are other things employees can do to minimize the threat of violence in their offices, Doherty said. For instance, if a worker has sought a protective order against someone, such as a former romantic partner, they should tell the company so that it can alter its security protocols. That can include moving a person’s parking spot closer to the door or alerting security about the order and the person on the other end of it.
“I tell people the odds of it happening are one in a million,” Geier said of experiencing a workplace shooting. “But you don’t want to be the one.”
