The situation was getting desperate. Two police officers, responding to a call, had gone into the building and had not come out. Their cruisers still sat at the curb, waiting.
Dawn Lipscomb, a passerby, reported seeing two men, dressed entirely in black, rush into the building from the rear. A few seconds later thick smoke poured out of the building and people on the street heard sounds of coughing and choking through the open windows.
Additional officers called to the scene made passersby stand on the grass a short distance away. Two men, Nadeem Mian and Malik Berkley were ordered to their knees and asked to show identification. An officer also ordered Berkley to hang up his cell phone.
“It’s against the law to talk on your cell phone?” he asked, incredulous.
It soon became apparent that the building was contaminated by a powerful gas. Fire trucks screeched to the scene and firefighters with gas masks rushed inside to evacuate the contaminated building and another one to its left. People from the contaminated building were cordoned off so as not to expose anyone else to whatever chemicals they had inhaled. Two reporters also rushed inside the building and instantly became contaminated.
The first two police officers were dead. A couple of office workers carried out the body of one of them and lay it on the grass. They were not able to bring out the second one, they said.
FIREFIGHTERS DONNED bright yellow HAZMAT suits, getting ready to decontaminate the area. A little further away, an elite tactical team from the police department was pulling on its beige fatigues, sitting on the rear bumpers of their sport utility vehicles and waiting to be called in.
Bystanders and office workers, still standing off to the side, began to get antsy. Some defied police orders and made a dash for it.
“When it’s time to run we’ll be ahead of you guys,” an officer said, dragging back a would-be escapee.
Berkley could not stand it any more. “I’m calling my lawyer,” he said, pulling out his cell phone.
“Why do all the criminals have lawyers?” Mian quietly asked the man standing next to him.
After a three-hour intervention, it turned out the building had been contaminated by sarin gas, the deadly gas which caused 11 deaths when a Japanese cult group released it in a Tokyo subway in 1995. Several office workers were dead, along with the two police officers. A dozen more office workers had been contaminated.
THE SCENE was an elaborate simulation set up by the Fairfax County Police Department for training purposes. Several dozen officers from the Police and Fire departments and the Sheriff’s Office participated in the event held at the old Lorton Prison on Saturday, as well as about 100 volunteers, many of whom were also officers, using their day off to help their colleagues train.
For the first time, the Police Department was able to use the Lorton facility to simulate city streets and buildings for the annual event. Capt. Larry Moser, the commander of the community policing initiative division, spent several months dreaming up scenarios to throw at the trainees.
“This is a huge operation,” he said. “We’re trying to measure whether people do the right thing.”
After the sarin gas attack, officers were subjected to a simulated rally on the steps of the county’s Judicial Center to protest the acquittal of a police officer on charges of police brutality. And at night, the police department’s Civil Disturbance Unit had to keep control over 100 protesters demonstrating in front of an International Monetary Fund meeting in Washington, D.C. The CDU has already worked at several real IMF meetings and is getting ready to help the D.C. police department with the next round of talks scheduled for Sept. 29.
AS THE 11-HOUR day got underway, volunteers were divided up into teams, and assigned a specific task for the sarin gas simulation. Libscomb, Mian and Berkley were all part of Sgt. Brian Holland’s team of role-players. The three are police academy students, training to become Sheriff’s deputies, or, in Libscomb’s case, police officers. Amy Lewis, Pat Kemp and Jessy Herbert were also academy trainees on Holland’s team.
“We wanted to learn the experience with a different type of training,” Lewis said.
“I just want to see it first hand for myself,” said Lipscomb, who spent eight years in the military before switching to the academy.
“It wasn’t exciting enough for me,” she said of her soldier days.
Mian, the oldest of the group, came along to get a nostalgic look at Lorton again, he said. He served as a corrections officer at the prison for four years until it was closed last year.
“I loved it,” he said with regret. “It was beautiful.” The prison, he added, has been unfairly maligned by “a lot of rumors and gossip.”
“I’ve never seen anything unusual or suspicious,” he said.
During the sarin gas simulation, Holland’s role-players were supposed to be ordinary citizens out and about who get in the officers’ way and who pepper them with questions once the attack has been unleashed. They were surprisingly realistic, especially Berkley, another former soldier, who howled about police abuse.
POLICE ABUSE was what brought the academy role-players together for their second simulation of the day. As the sarin attack wound down, Holland’s team boarded a police bus destined for another wing of the prison to join a crowd upset at the not guilty verdict handed down by a judge in a fictional police brutality case. Sheriff’s deputies would try to defuse the situation at the Fairfax County Judicial Center.
Along the way, Mian pointed out the maximum security wing of the prison, where he was stationed for part of his time.
“I want to see what they do, if they’re going to try to arrest you or calm you down,” Sheriff’s Deputy Sonny Cachuela told the role-players. These deputies have recently been sworn in and are not very experienced, added Cachuela, the commander of the Sheriff’s Emergency Response Team.
“They’re not going to touch us because they’re counting on us to open a section of the new jail,” Lewis joked. “They need us.”
As the exercise started, about 20 deputies in tight formation marched around the corner as the protesters sat on the ground with arms linked, blocking the entrance to the courthouse, chanting and generally following Cachuela’s request that they “hype it up.”
The deputies found the instigator of the protest, played by police officer Rich McEachin, and pulled him aside. They told him he could hold a demonstration but must not block the entrance or exit of the building.
“We ain’t going nowhere!” the crowd shouted in response to the request.
“Move now or you will be arrested.”
“Hell no! We won’t go!”
“Somebody call Jesse Jackson!”
The deputies moved in. They formed a line, pushing the protesters back into a corner and separated those who had linked arms. Berkley, Kemp, Lipscomb and several others were arrested. But a few demonstrators had slipped through the line and were behind the deputies, effectively closing them in before the deputies turned around and reclaimed the access road. The demonstration broke up.
“It gives you a different mindset, the reality of it,” said Kemp, after being released. “Then it hits you: this is not real.”
Lewis was rubbing her wrist. She had tried to chain herself to another protester but the deputies applied a special kind of hold on her wrist which caused a sharp pain and forced Lewis to let go. This is a common way of separating people, Lewis said, adding that she knew she was risking the response when she tried to hold on to a fellow demonstrator.
“I was hoping it was going to be somebody else,” she said.
Cachuela was not satisfied with the simulation. The deputies did not make it clear enough to the protesters that they needed to move or they would face arrest. They also allowed protesters to get behind them.
He ran the simulation again. This time he was pleased and the role players broke for dinner before the evening's big event.
WHEN THEY RECONVENED for the anti-IMF protest, black clouds were swirling overhead. Role players and police officers sat in the bleachers of the Lorton baseball field and listened to a short briefing by Moser.
“It’s going to be dark. It’s going to be realistic. It’s going to be an environment you’re not familiar with. All good things,” he said.
Then the anti-IMF protesters picked up signs and wooden sticks and converged on a row of movable fences. They beat on the rungs of the fences with the sticks, blew whistles, waved signs reading “Say No To WTO” and chanted. It started to rain.
As night fell, stone-faced police officers stood their ground, repulsing waves of wet and angry protesters attempting to storm the fences and simulated pepper spraying the crowd which obligingly fell back.
Inside the police’s command center, set up inside a van a few yards away from the line, Capt. Maggie Deboard, CDU commander, watched the proceedings on a live video feed. Occasionally she alerted the officer in charge of the scene, Lt. Ron Novak, of what the protesters were doing. Moser was also in the van, directing the protesters, calling the plays like a football coach.
Someone put a bag of popcorn in the van’s microwave and the smell of butter filled the command center.
Plainclothes officers mingling with the protesters reported that members of the anarchist group Black Block were putting on black masks and marching towards the line.
“I want pepper ball guns on the line,” Deboard shouted into the radio. “If we can get a couple more up there that would be good.”
The radio cackled in reply.
Out on the line, Novak was getting his four pepper ball gun sharpshooters ready. They were armed with a rifle that shoots little balls which explode and release pepper spray when they hit their mark. It is a way of targeting pepper spray to specific people rather than spraying it arbitrarily into the crowd.
“We got a whole group coming with Molotov cocktails,” he yelled above the din.
When the Black block members made their appearance, they lobbed tennis balls, foam bricks and balloons filled with paint at the officers. The paint splashed over the officers’ helmets and shields, making it hard to see. In return, the protesters got pelted with pepper spray bullets.
Lewis and Mian, who were not members of the Black Block, moved to the front of the line, banging on the fences with their sticks.
After a few more surges, a supervisor called out the signal: “Red light” and the exercise ended. The noise stopped. Officers impersonating the protesters leaned on the fence and chatted with their colleagues on the other side. Sometime during the simulation the rain stopped. The officers who had been playing protesters headed to the changing room to put on their uniforms. Uniformed officers put on civilian clothes. They would run the exercise again with the roles reversed.
There had been a couple injuries. One role player got a cut above the eye and a woman twisted her knee clambering over a fence.
"We've discovered small tactical problems that we weren’t prepared for,” said Deboard. “It opened our eyes.”
Those issues will be addressed before the unit goes the D.C. in a couple weeks, she added.
“Using our own people for role players gives them a good view of the other side,” she said.
“We’re right where we need to be,” agreed Moser.
While the IMF event ran smoothly there were a few questions raised during the “chaotic” sarin attack, he said. Communication with the Fire Department and problems with equipment were the main issues, he said.
Nevertheless, he said, “I don’t consider it going wrong. … It was very positive.”
BACK ON THE BLEACHERS, Mian was sitting by himself and talking on his cell phone.
“I’ve never participated in any protest,” he said. “It was kind of fun.”
He did not know how caught up he was going to get in the exercise, he added. Then he talked about his prison guard days.
But while tensions mounted during the simulations, role players and officers quickly calmed down once a supervisor gave the “red light” signal.
For instance, during the afternoon session at the Judicial Center, the role players harassed the deputies mercilessly.
“UPS is getting tough,” Berkley shouted, pointing at their brown uniforms.
“They’re not even real cops,” said Lipscomb.
But afterwards, the deputies and academy trainees stood around, gossiping about their colleagues, like extras on a movie set.
“We’re just kidding about the UPS thing, guys,” Berkley said.