Vince DiManna, who was also part of the first SWAT team, said they were never told that a teacher was gravely wounded upstairs. But police commander Joe Pelle, who was at Columbine as head of the Boulder SWAT team, argues that textbook rules did not apply. You're basically deciding somebody on your team is likely to get shot. . . . In most situations, you wouldn't do that. However, when you have evil people killing children, all the other stuff goes out the window.
Somebody has to get in there and stop it.
That was Manwaring's goal. We have no idea where the shooters are. Every time we rounded a corner, we didn't know whether it was a good guy or a bad guy. . . . I didn't know how sophisticated they were. I just knew they were armed and were better equipped than we were.