Manwaring had been patrolling in Tiny Town, a small village 25 miles away in the Rocky Mountain foothills when he got the stacked page about the shootings at Columbine High. The Lieutenant found total mayhem - traumatized people running out of the school, an unknown number of people shooting up the place inside, bombs exploding and officers taking fire in the parking lot. Manwaring knew he had to engage the suspects and rescue the students. As he was donning his bullet-proof vest, he frantically asked a group of kids to draw him a floor plan of the school. This decision has also been criticized, with several Monday morning quarterbacks saying that putting together a SWAT team whose members have not practiced together is a recipe for disaster.
Somebody has to go in and stop it.
The Lieutenant tried to figure out where the gunfire and bomb explosions were coming from, but it was impossible. Two to six shooters. It turned out that the student-sketched floor plan was not detailed enough to guide officers around the 90,000 square foot building with 80 different classrooms, so the team started relying on radio instructions from supervisors who had set up a command post out of the Jefferson County incident command truck about half a block from the school. The school's principal was inside sketching a floor plan with a marker on a board. That information was radioed to officers inside who were in a desperate race to find the shooters.