MOCK RAMPAGE TESTS DEPUTIES.

Byline: Greg Botonis Staff Writer

LANCASTER - A trainer, stalking the campus in a mock shooting rampage at Lancaster High School, fired dozens of blanks Wednesday in a test of sheriff's deputies' response.

The school was empty for spring break, and teen-age Explorers, made up with fake blood, played the roles of wounded and panicked students in the mock rampage similar to real ones that have occurred at Columbine High School, Santana High School and other campuses.

``This was basically a proactive approach,'' said Deputy Donald Rubio. ``They gave us a real-life situation where all heck is breaking loose. Even though it was a training situation, deputies had the feeling they were being fired at, so it was pretty realistic.''

A team from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department's Special Enforcement Bureau conducted the 30-minute drill in which a trainer posed as a campus gunman ``shooting'' students.

The trainees included deputies assigned to local high school campuses and some others from the Lancaster sheriff's station. They had to play their assigned parts - pulling ``wounded'' but obviously alive students to safety, dragging away others apparently ``dead'' and tracking or trying to subdue the shooter.

The trainees - about two dozen - also spent two hours in the classroom reviewing strategy. Antelope Valley Union High School District security officers sat in on the classroom session to learn how to help deputies if there were a campus gun crisis.

More than 40 Explorers volunteered for the assigned roles of students under attack. Some, screaming for help, ran at the deputies, forced to decide instantly whether the screamer was a threat or someone in need of help.

``Everything was going down at once, and it was really stressful - training or not,'' Rubio said.

The mock rampage had been planned for more than a year to train deputies to face not only any school shooting, but also such a rampage in any large public building.

Special Enforcement Bureau teams typically handle such crises, but they are based in East Los Angeles, and it could take an hour or more to reach the Antelope Valley. So the bureau planned training for deputies who would be the first responders.

The department's media resources team supplied the Explorers with realistic-looking ``wounds'' and filmed the entire drill as a training video for other sheriff's stations.