The shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Wednesday left 17 people dead and 20 people wounded, and Coral Springs police Sgt. Jeff Heinrich was on the scene helping those who were hurt.
Heinrich was off-duty on Wednesday, though he was already on campus. In an interview with PEOPLE, he explained that he is a volunteer baseball trainer at the school. He was watering the infield when he heard a popping sound, which he thought was coming from the parking lot.
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“I thought it was fireworks and kids messing around at first,” Heinrich said.
His son is a varsity baseball player at Stoneman Douglas High, while his wife is teacher. He knew something was wrong once students began rushing out of the school building. Heinrich says that with the doors open, he recognized the unmistakable sound of rapid gunfire.
“I knew I had a shooter on campus,” he said.
As an off-duty police officer, Heinrich had no badge and no gun on him, yet he ran toward the parking lot to see if he could help. He immediately ran into a student who had been shot in the lower part of his left leg.
“I got to the parking lot and a kid was coming out of the school screaming he was shot,” he recalled. “He was bleeding pretty good. It was a pretty nasty gunshot wound.”
Heinrich told reporters he helped the student get to the baseball clubhouse, where there was a first-aid kit. The sergeant did what he could for the wound, and called police dispatch. Meanwhile, the wounded student provided a description of the shooter, who was soon identified as Nikolas Cruz, a man who had been expelled from Stoneman Douglas High the previous year.
After he’d contacted police, Heinrich called his wife and son. They were together, locked down in the same classroom, not far from where the shooting had begun.
“I told them this is real and stay locked in the classroom,” Heinrich says.
Heinrich waited for paramedics to arrive so that they could help the injured student, then he ran to join the throng of officers on the scene. He was given a police vest and a spare gun, and he got to work.
Henirich was named Officer of the Year in 2016, when he prevented another school shooting before it began at a different Florida school.
“There is nothing to prepare yourself for this but you have to resort back to your training and it kicks in and overpowers your first thought process,” he said. “It is the most horrific event you could possibly deal with as a human being.”
