Ten years after Binghamton's greatest tragedy, the pain and lessons from that day live on among those who sprung into action.
"It was difficult to wrap our minds around then, and it still is 10 years later,” said Broome County EMS Coordinator Raymond Serowik.
“It affected the officers that, including myself, had gone into the building, seen the carnage that had taken place there, so it’s just something I’ll never forget,” said Binghamton Police Chief Joseph Zikuski.
A DECADE OF REFLECTION
On the morning of April 3, 2009, a gunman entered the American Civic Association and opened fire, eventually killing 13 people, the largest mass shooting in New York's history.
As chaos erupted inside the building, emergency crews from across the region were faced with something even they never could have imagined.
"We still didn't know what we had. We knew we had a whole bunch of people that were still left in the building,” Serowik said. “We didn't know what their conditions were. We know we had the potential for a very large mass casualty incident."
The initial 911 call was placed by a receptionist who was playing dead. Her quick thinking and police response would ultimately save dozens of lives.
Seventeen ambulances were brought to the scene to transport victims, along with a large force of law enforcement.
"It was the perpetrator’s awareness that the police had arrived outside the building that apparently led to his decision to take his own life, rather than to continue to try to take others' lives, and effectively put an end to the killing,” Serowik said.
As terrified 911 callers hid inside, SWAT teams quickly suited up and entered the building. Chief Joseph Zikuski said even 10 years later, these events play a crucial role in their training.
“We are now prepared better for something like that,” he said. “I thought we did a very good job under the circumstances, being a smaller city not dealing with that, and not too many municipalities have dealt with this at all in that magnitude.”
Zikuski said one of the biggest challenges was communicating with victims’ families, since most of them didn't speak English.
"We sat down afterwards as a team and went over how we did things and how we might have done better, how we might have dealt better with the victims' families, but it was very difficult because some of them didn't speak English,” Zikuski said.
The department also made changes to how it deals with mass casualty incidents "in regards to where we might set up a command post, things like that, technical type stuff, where we have ambulances staged, how we’d control outside agencies coming into our jurisdiction to assist us,” Zikuski said.
While first responders now know how to better deal this kind of scenario, they still grapple with the memories that remain vivid to this day.
"You're never quite the same after particularly something even approaches this magnitude. You carry it with you for the rest of your life,” Serowik said.