By Grant Schwab
The Detroit News
WEST BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP, Mich. — When first responders arrived Thursday at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield Township on a report of an active shooter emergency, smoke could be seen pouring through a vent on top of the synagogue, but arriving law enforcement had little idea what they would encounter inside.
More than 100 children and staff members were inside the synagogue after the suspect, identified as Ayman Ghazali, rammed his F-150 truck through the front doors and got into a gunfire exchange with security as his vehicle caught fire, according to an FBI Detroit Office account.
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“That was some of the worst smoke I’ve ever seen in my life,” said Mike Bouchard Jr, an Oakland County Sheriff’s reserve deputy and son of the longtime county sheriff of the same name.
“There was a large fire from the vehicle, so it was thick smoke everywhere. As you try and get towards the threat, the smoke was overwhelming in some cases,” Bouchard Jr . added. “There was water pouring from the ceilings. Tough situation to clear.”
West Bloomfield Police Department Sgt. Jon Jacob called the situation when he initially arrived “very chaotic.” But he said law enforcement was able to locate and contain the suspect in his vehicle within about a half-hour of the active shooter alert going out, although it took more than three hours before “everything was deemed secure” at the site.
What Bouchard, Jacob and West Bloomfield Police Department Officer Fuad Peysakhov didn’t know when they rushed to the school was that Ghazali would die of a self-inflicted gunshot after injuring a temple security guard. While more than 50 law enforcement officers were treated for smoke inhalation issues, including two of them, no others from the synagogue reported any injuries or hospitalizations.
Bouchard, Jacob and Peysakhov this week gave new firsthand accounts of the law enforcement response, which included over 600 officers from more than 40 agencies. They described a chaotic scene that was eventually brought under control thanks to the collective effort of officers arriving at the synagogue.
“Scared isn’t the right word,” said Jacob, 37, about his initial reaction to hearing of the incident around 12:20 p.m. that day. “There’s an expectation from the public to do your job. And at that point, my thought was just, ‘It’s time to go to work.’”
Ultimately, law enforcement officers cleared the site, although they dealt with the smoke, emergency lights, alarms, a rekindled truck fire and intermittent explosions, Jacob said.
Ghazali, a 41-year-old restaurant worker from Dearborn Heights, acted after four relatives were killed in a March 5 Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, according to two sources apprised of the investigation and Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun. The Israel Defense Forces said Sunday Ghazali’s brother, Ibrahim, one of the four who died, was a Hezbollah commander, but the FBI has not identified a motive for the attack and is treating it as a “targeted” act of violence against the Jewish community.
One officer was at active shooter training when Temple Israel call came
Jacob said Tuesday he was, incidentally, in the middle of a CPR and active shooter response training program with about 15 other officers at his West Bloomfield police station when the Temple Israel call came in.
“Everybody immediately left the room and started to take off,” he said.
Jacob, a SWAT team leader in his department, recalled gathering extra equipment into an armored vehicle and responding directly to the scene. He said he arrived by about 12:30 p.m. on March 12.
Officer Peysakhov, 52, said Tuesday he and a fellow officer had just entered a restaurant about two or three miles away from Temple Israel on their lunch break, but left immediately once they heard the call, arriving at the scene within three or four minutes.
“One thing I did do is I made some phone calls while traveling over there,” Peysakhov said in a phone interview. “I called a couple of other religious facilities in the same area. I called their security personnel, and I advised them to put their buildings on lockdown immediately. Nobody in, nobody out.”
The officer, who is two months away from retirement after serving in the town police department for 27 years, said he thought of a Jewish high school in the area and another temple about a half-mile down the road that has a preschool.
“What was going through my mind is: Is this going to be two or three separate attacks in the same area at the same time?” Peysakhov said.
He recalled thinking about the September 11, 2001, attacks when multiple sites were hit within minutes ― both towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.
Bouchard Jr ., 31, said Monday he happened to be getting lunch with his father when the call came in.
“My dad said, ‘Hey, there’s an active shooter. I gotta go.’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m a reserve. I got some of my equipment in the car. I’ll go with you.’”
The younger Bouchard, who is running for Congress as a Republican in Michigan’s 10th Congressional District , recently reactivated his reserve sheriff’s deputy status after returning from a nine-month deployment with the Army National Guard .
“We hustled over there,” Bouchad said. “My dad commanded the scene, and I looked at where I could be useful.”
Law enforcement goes room to room, looking for the suspect
Bouchard said he quickly joined a team focused on clearing the building’s hallways, entering and exiting intermittently to either gather equipment or breathe fresher air away from the smoke.
“When I’m saying clear, I mean law enforcement personnel are going room to room to make sure that the bad guy is not in that spot, and then they keep going down the hall,” he explained.
Bouchard — who was spotted on camera during WJBK-TV’s coverage of the incident — said he could not immediately get equipped with an oxygen tank to help navigate the environment and was later taken to a nearby hospital to be treated for smoke inhalation.
Jacob, the SWAT leader, said he arrived with more tactical gear from his department. He described a relatively small gathering of personnel when he arrived, compared with the roughly 600 that eventually flocked to Temple Israel for assistance.
He described the scene as “very chaotic” when he led a team of four officers and said it took about 10 minutes — until about 12:40 p.m. — to establish coordination between groups clearing the building. At that point, Jacob described coordinating with Oakland County Sheriff’s SWAT leader Bart Wilson, commander of the Patrol Service Division, to assign groups to different areas.
Jacob, who was also later treated at a nearby hospital for smoke inhalation, said there was initially “a little bit of confusion” as officers tried to locate the suspect and determine if there were any threats.
“There was a clear conversation that I had with one of the security guards that said, ‘Hey, this guy came in the building.’ But nobody saw him get out of the car. And by the same token, they couldn’t confirm that with video evidence at that time with the surveillance cameras. They just had one person’s visual recollection of what they saw,” he said.
Jacob also said there were “definitely some small explosions going off” that sounded like rifle rounds, but “because of the smoke, you couldn’t tell where they were.”
Ghazali had fireworks and “several jugs” of gasoline in the trunk that were consumed in the fire inside the synagogue, FBI Detroit Field Office Special Agent In Charge Jennifer Runyan said during a Friday news briefing.
Ghazali was contained in his vehicle by about 12:50 p.m., West Bloomfield Police sergeant says
Jacob said that once officers were able to “dissect” the information amid the chaos, the teams were eventually able to contain the suspect in his vehicle by about 12:50 p.m., though that was not the end of potential dangers.
Jacob said the building’s lights turned off around 1 p.m., and the officers continued to hear explosions as emergency lights were activated and alarms blared. The suspect’s vehicle also caught on fire again, which heightened concerns over any explosives aboard the truck and worsened visibility and breathability conditions inside the building, he said.
The hallways in the Korman Hall area of the building, near where the vehicle crashed, started filling up with black smoke, he said.
“All of our visibility at that time was lost,” Jacob said.
The sergeant said law enforcement moved some officers out of the area to avoid potential crossfire in the haze, and the officers who remained had to communicate with lights and lasers as they pryed into locked doors to continue clearing the scene.
By about 2:15 p.m., Jacob said the environment had “stabilized.” By about 2:45 p.m., he said, there was a confirmation among law enforcement that “all interior rooms had been (entered) and secondary searches had been completed.” He added that by about 3:40 p.m., “everything was deemed secure.”
A team of officers helped to evacuate Temple Israel’s preschool classrooms
Officer Peysakhov said that by the time he reached the building, the first cars had already rushed to the site of the vehicle crash. He decided to take up a different position on the other side of the temple.
“I stationed myself on the east side of the building, and the reason I did that is that’s where most of the classrooms are for their preschool and early childhood education. And the thing on my mind is those little kids. That’s what was on my mind, is those children,” he said.
Peysakhov said he was familiar with the synagogue and knew where to look for the children, but he still could not see anyone through the dark windows.
“And I know the teachers were doing their jobs,” he said, “keeping the kids low to the ground, doing whatever they were trained to do.”
Eventually, he recalled, another officer breached a locked door and gained entry into one of the five classrooms on that side of the building. Peysakhov said he and other officers then used that room to enter the other classrooms and evacuate the children to an adjacent playground, placing them in a position where they were concealed by a brick wall.
“This was a group of 20 to 25 officers working together,” he said. “When we got them out, we got them into ambulances. There was relief. There was relief by all of us that the kids are out of the building.”
“You could see relief in the teachers’ faces. I can’t stress enough, they did a phenomenal job with the kids,” Peysakhov added. “The children, I don’t think half of them understood what was going on. Some were scared. These are policemen. You know, they see uniforms. They see guns. And I don’t think that’s a normal thing for three-, four- or five-year-olds to see during their daily trip to school.”
Peysakhov could not recall how long it took to get the children out to the playground and, eventually, to safer locations than that. Jacob, the sergeant, said he periodically heard of evacuations on his radio as they happened, but he had to remain focused on his position near the vehicle crash site.
Temple Israel’s preparations ‘absolutely prevented a larger tragedy,’ Bouchard Jr. says
Looking back on the attack, Bouchard Jr . said he had “never seen a response this large.”
“Seeing 600 law enforcement people just running up and securing a building gave me a lot of hope for how we respond to these kind of things, he said. “And also the preparation that Temple Israel had done. You could see that they had taken a lot of preparation up until this event that absolutely prevented a larger tragedy. Everything that was supposed to go right to prevent an attack, I think, did that day. And that’s why no innocent lives were lost.”
Bouchard Jr . also said the response from the Shenandoah County Club across the street from the temple stood out to him.
“They got food out for the Jewish community, and there were a lot of people crying, but having a safe spot to come together and heal, I mean, it said a lot that each community was looking out for each other,” the reserve sheriff’s deputy said. “I think that sometimes in the worst of humanity, you also see some of the best. Yeah, I think we saw it that day.”
Sgt. Jacob, whose father recently retired as an Oakland County Sheriff’s deputy, said he thought his department’s well-established partnership with county law enforcement was “influential in stabilizing the incident.” He added that, in general, it made him proud to be around so many others who responded quickly and effectively.
“It sounds cliché, but it’s not just what we were trained to do,” Jacob said. “It’s what signed our name on the line to do at all costs. We all have families, and we all have loved ones and people that care about us. But we made a conscious decision that the lives of others were the biggest priority.”
“And it was humbling to be surrounded by men and women that felt the same,” he added.
Officer Peysakhov, a father of three, said he “couldn’t tell you how thankful I am for everybody. No. 1, everybody that assisted, from fire departments to policemen, everybody that rushed out to help. No. 2, I am just so thankful — and I can’t stress it enough — that every child went home that day.”
“We’re very, very, very, very, very thankful for that.”
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