On the February night when a gunman terrorized the Michigan State University campus, killing himself and three students, and injuring five others, Dr. Denny Martin, president of Sparrow Hospital, said he was in downtown Lansing’s hip REO Town neighborhood.
“My director of public safety texted me and said, ‘This is a real threat. It’s been validated.’ … So my first thought was get to the hospital as fast as I can,” Martin told the Free Press on Tuesday, following a presentation at the Michigan State Medical Society Alliance’s Fall Focus Health Symposium.
Within minutes, he said he was at the hospital, coordinating a response that would save all five critically injured students who arrived in staccato-like fashion via ambulance that night.
Then, he said, his thoughts turned to standing up more operating rooms. The Lansing-based hospital is the only only Level 1 trauma center in the region, and always has two operating rooms ready for emergencies. That night, Martin said, it would need five.
“Who do we need to mobilize? Who do I need at the hospital? … The initial call was eight individuals have been shot. At least five were en route to the hospital, but also the subject wasn’t apprehended. So what was the scale? What was the number of patients that we would receive to the hospital? That was really some of the most important information for me to gather?”
‘We … made room for 20’ patients
Martin picked up the phone, he said, and began to text and call in the staff he knew would be essential to the emergency response at the hospital: thoracic surgeons, specialty physicians, neurosurgeons, vascular surgeons.
His thoughts then turned to the blood supply and “making sure that somebody had reached out to the Red Cross. … This is an event that we’re going to likely use a lot of blood products to resuscitate patients.
“We immediately looked at … our ER capacity,” Martin said. “We moved a lot of people out. … Our thought was, we needed to be able to handle at least a rush of 20 patients into the hospital. So we cleared, made room for 20.
“And then we started organizing teams. We assume in this kind of event that everyone’s going to need to go to the operating room. From what we were hearing on the calls … we could tell early on that these were individuals that had truly life-threatening injuries, so they would most all likely need to go to the room for immediate, immediate stabilization.”
Martin, who made national headlines in the days after the mass shooting for the vulnerability he showed during news conferences as he updated the public on the conditions of five wounded students, said the shooting was deeply personal for him and for many on his staff.
Giving medical workers time to check on family
He is a Spartan himself, and is working on his third degree from MSU. Many on his staff, he said, were parents of students or had spouses or other loved ones on campus and were worried about their safety.
“There were staff that … (were) trying to get ahold of their kid,” Martin said. “They just needed that moment. They can’t focus on taking care of another person if they’re mentally somewhere else, worrying about their own their own child, or spouse or somebody working on campus.
“Sparrow was part of this community. MSU (is) our neighbor. … People needed their time. Their priority was their family, and we obviously gave that to them because we needed their mind to be focused on what we were about to do, and that was … care for a group of individuals coming in with some really severe injuries.”
Although the Sparrow staff couldn’t help the three students killed that night — Arielle Anderson, Brian Fraser and Alexandria Verner — his team showed up and did all they could to save the five injured by the gunman’s bullets. They were:
- Guadalupe Huapilla-Perez, who comes from a family of migrant workers in south Florida and was enrolled in the MSU College Assistance Migrant Program. She was struck by a pair of bullets while attending an arts and humanities class in Berkey Hall, her family said in a GoFundMe post. The bullets pierced her abdomen, affecting her spleen, lungs, colon, stomach and diaphragm.
- Troy Forbush, a junior studying vocal performance and music education, also was in Berkey Hall when the gunman opened fire. He tried to hide, crouching behind chairs, according to court documents detailed by the Lansing State Journal. Forbush begged the shooter to spare his life, but instead a bullet tore through his left lung, barely missing his heart.
- Nate Statly, an MSU junior studying environmental biology and zoology, suffered brain injury when he was shot in the head inside Berkey Hall, according to the Lansing State Journal. He was in a coma for months.
- Yukai (John) Hao, an international student from China, also was in Berkey when the shots rang out. He was paralyzed from the chest down after a bullet struck his spinal cord, according to a GoFundMe account created by Argent Qian, who said he was Hao’s roommate and friend. “The bullet severed John’s spinal cord (t7-t8) and critically injured his lungs, leaving him paralyzed from the chest down,” Qian wrote.
- A fifth student, who has not been identified.
