MCSO reviews active shooter situation on Scottsville Road

ROCHESTER, N.Y. (WHEC) — Panic about a recently fired and possibly disgruntled employee triggered a 911 call about an active shooter on Scottsville Road Friday.

Police officers responded in droves, schools and businesses were locked down and roads were closed off. It turns out the call was unfounded but Monroe County Sheriff Todd Baxter tells News10NBC he has no regrets about how the situation was handled—especially in light of the Buffalo mass shooting that happened just one week before.

The call came in around 11:10 a.m. for an active shooter inside an office building. Two different addresses along Scottsville Road were given, “you’ve got a react to the Intel you have in hand if we don’t, it’s hard to play catch-up if this is actually the real deal,” Sheriff Baxter says.

More than 100 police officers, sheriff’s deputies and troopers from across Monroe County responded to the scene and within minutes were entering the two buildings involved.

“I watched an investigator from the Gates Police Department, a couple of Troopers, and a couple of my Deputies that probably don’t even know each other’s names, they didn’t flinch, they went in together to try and save lives,” Baxter says of what he saw when he arrived on-scene.

At least a dozen teams of law enforcers searched both buildings room by room, floor by floor, “we’re going to keep on going until we find out that we’ve got no victims, we’ve got no active crime scene and we don’t have an active shooter,” the Sheriff says.

Investigators quickly realized the 911 call was related to a Facebook conversation between RG&E employees worried about a recently fired co-worker, “while all of this is going on tactically, my investigators are digging into the social media and not only looking at it, calling those people and then going to visit some of them,” Baxter says.

Friday’s incident was also the first time the County’s Rescue Task Force was triggered.

“We’ve practiced that I don’t know how many times in Monroe County but we actually fired one up the other day for the first time, we’ve got police, fire, and EMS ready to go into a hot zone,” Baxter says.

After studying other mass shootings, the county put together the task force.

“You saw how long it took the other day to clear those two massive buildings, if we waited to do that and then called EMS, people could actually bleed out where now we can possibly get EMS to them quicker,” Baxter explains.

Specialty trained firefighters and EMTs essentially follow behind police where they can render immediate aid or drag out victims to waiting ambulances.

“That first hour of a gunshot wound, if you can stabilize the blood pressure you can stop the bleeding,” Sheriff Baxter says. “The likelihood of survival from a gunshot wound is off the charts, it’s much higher so, that’s the whole concept.”