How do alerts in a crisis work? Some Cary residents left in the dark during armed standoff
Around 12 hours into a standoff between law enforcement and an armed man barricaded in an apartment, Cary authorities scrambled to alert residents about the evolving situation.
But several residents who live at the Windsor at Tryon Villages say they did not receive some of those communications, making them wonder why teams of law enforcement in tactical gear had descended on their complex.
“A lot of the residents were getting up between 7, 7:30 a.m. walking their dogs, getting ready for work getting the kids on the school bus,” said Jennifer Shapiro, who lives at the complex. “I would say probably 85% of the community had no idea what was going on.”
While most residents slept, the Cary Police Department alerted Shapiro and other residents on the Nextdoor app at 4:47 a.m. asking residents to stay home because of “an individual in crisis.”
Residents of the 13-building complex later learned through media reports what was happening — Cary police, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies had been in a standoff with an armed resident since 11 p.m. the previous night.
Authorities said he was threatening to shoot himself. The standoff continued into Wednesday, with negotiators talking to the man in the apartment over 19 hours.
He shot and injured his 11-year-old son, whom he held hostage, but negotiators were able to recover the boy safely before noon, authorities said.
The man died by suicide Wednesday night, Cary Police Chief Terry Sult told reporters after 8:15 p.m.
Five months after a mass shooting in Raleigh that resulted in five deaths, residents at the 393-unit complex expressed confusion on social media about why they were being told to stay indoors and whether there was any imminent danger.
Sult said alerts went out at 4 a.m., 6:30 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. to 201 residents through ReadyWake, the county’s emergency alert system.
But police did not send out any press releases to media outlets or post on social media platforms, like Facebook or Twitter, to communicate news of the situation.
Shapiro, who lives in the complex with her husband and young child, saw EMTs carry a wounded boy out of an apartment.
She said she didn’t know that a neighbor was armed and potentially a danger to the public until she read media reports from a news conference held just before 1 p.m.
“There’s lot of hands in the pot, but I feel like the police, fire, EMS, they definitely had a huge role to play in this,” Shapiro told The News & Observer Thursday. “And I don’t think they held up their hand in regards to keeping their citizens aware of the situation.”
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Alerts go out, sporadically
Several police agencies, the State Bureau of Investigation and the FBI swarmed the complex off Walnut Street — not far from Cary Crossroads — Wednesday morning and blocked it off. Some residents were evacuated.
Shapiro tweeted after 6 a.m. that she saw the Nextdoor alert about sheltering in place, but wondered whether anyone else knew what was going on.
A resident responded to her tweet that they hadn’t left their apartment: “Since midnight, too!! I live here as well and walked my dog not knowing why I can walk my dog and yet people can’t come in.” Later, the resident tweeted about seeing police with their guns drawn.
At 11:04 a.m. apartment management sent an email to all residents, warning them to stay home. It indicated that the situation was “contained” but did not provide any other details.
Before that email, apartment resident Pamela McKoy didn’t know about the incident. McKoy had returned home from getting breakfast around 10:30 a.m., and police officers told her she wasn’t allowed back inside for her safety.
“Was there a man running around with a gun? We wasn’t told anything,” said McKoy, 62.
Scared, McKoy asked a neighbor what was happening, and she was told there was “a hostage situation.”
She does not have the Nextdoor app. Neither Shapiro or McKoy received the three emergency alerts sent out through ReadyWake.
It was later reported that morning by WRAL to be an armed standoff in the building across from hers involving a child taken hostage.
The apartment complex is within walking distance to Creekside at Tryon Village townhome community.
Several townhome residents arrived home after 5 p.m. and were surprised by the barrage of emergency and law enforcement vehicles blocking off part of the complex.
At least five Creekside residents surveyed Wednesday night told The N&O they didn’t receive any alerts from property managers or anyone else about what was happening nearby.
The complexes have different property managers, according to Greystar, the apartments’ management company.
A Greystar employee declined to comment for this story when reached by phone, and deferred to police for more information.
ReadyWake alerts
The town requested Wake County Emergency Management to send ReadyWake alerts during the emergency, Sult said. But he added that technology didn’t allow them to reach as many residents as they could have.
“We use various different social apps to do that, but it requires people to register for those, without notifying big blocks of areas by ZIP codes,” the police chief told reporters in one of three press updates Wednesday. “It’s very difficult to zero that in.”
Asked why media wasn’t notified, Sult initially said they were busy with an evolving situation. A spokesperson told The N&O Wednesday that they didn’t want to alert the man in the apartment.
Sgt. Kenric Alexander of the Cary Police Department elaborated on the matter on Thursday. Information shared to the public during the standoff was “targeted to complement and not compromise the tactical operations,” he told The N&O.
The ReadyWake system is not able to send targeted alerts to all residents in a specific part of the county, such as residents who might be affected by the emergency in Cary.
Households that don’t have a landline or a voiceover IP line and who only use cellphones may not be registered to Wake County’s database for ReadyWake, said Darshan Patel, Wake County emergency systems specialist, in an interview.
For that reason, Patel said authorities try to “employ as many alert and warning channels as possible” in an emergency.
ReadyWake doesn’t only rely on residents who sign up for the service, Patel said. Alerts went out to impacted Cary residents through a reverse 911 database. The county collects and purchases public phone data to reach residents, he said.
“The Cary Police Department encouraged the management of the apartment complex to reshare the information they put out on Nextdoor as well as what we put out through ReadyWake,” Patel said.
Alexander encouraged residents to sign up to receive ReadyWake alerts.
“We can only connect with members of our community so as much as they allow us to reach them,” Alexander told The N&O.
Alert concerns in Wake
Alerts during emergency situations have come under public scrutiny since an active shooter rampage in Raleigh’s Hedingham neighborhood, about 15 miles northeast of the Cary site.
On Oct. 13, the city of Raleigh did not use several available emergency systems — including the ReadyWake Alerts — to tell residents that night about the unfolding threat, The N&O reported previously. The city made 14 public posts on social media and Nextdoor, The N&O reported, informing people of the active shooter and that they should avoid the area.
The city previously said it would conduct an after-action review of their alert response. City spokeswoman Julia Milstead told The N&O this week that the review would not be released to the media or the public, citing state public record laws.
In Cary this week, any noise made anxious residents even more jittery. Around 6:30 p.m., loud sounds resembling explosions went off in the complex, booming throughout the complex.
”It sounded more like a cannon,” McKoy said. “It was like, ‘boom, boom, boom!’ Scared the hell out of me.”
Sult later said those were “distraction devices” used during the standoff but that police never entered the apartment with the barricaded man until they learned he had killed himself.
He said Wednesday night that his team would review the crisis to see what went well and what went wrong. But he said negotiators were “heartbroken” with the outcome and that talks with the man in crisis deteriorated.
“We just don’t know what the outcome of these things are going to be,” he said. “I will tell you that we used every resource that we could put our hands on, on the local, state and federal level to make sure we had the best advice and the best negotiators in place to try to save this man’s life.”
How to sign up for ReadyWake
Wake County residents can sign up for emergency alerts at ReadyWake.com. Users must create an account and fill out address and contact information in an online submission form.
Residents can receive information by phone, text and email about public safety threats, road closures, missing persons and evacuations of buildings or neighborhoods.
Colleen Hammond and Travis Long contributed to this report.
This story was originally published February 24, 2023 at 3:50 PM.
