‘Hostage’ crises help Broward SWAT team train for the real thing

Carrying a loaded handgun, Sean Cobban lurked in a dusty room on the second floor of an abandoned hospital wing as the two women he held at gunpoint screamed for help.

Pops of gunfire echoed in the hallway and hostages crawled along a floor littered with spent casings toward their rescuers.

As SWAT teams from Hollywood and Hallandale Beach inched forward behind large shields, a man jumped out at them, firing off at least six rounds before an on-target shot dropped him to the floor.

Then, with all but one room cleared, police stormed toward Cobban and took him down with a shot to the side of his shaved head.

As officers began to take off their masks and leave the room, Cobban smiled at his ”hostages” and touched the bloody welt on his head made by a glorified paint ball.

”We need to get you a better helmet,” an instructor told him.

On a normal day, Cobban is a Margate police officer. But he played the role of hostage taker Thursday morning during a mock rescue exercise staged to train SWAT team members from around South Florida.

The exercise was just one of a half-dozen staged Thursday at the South Florida State Hospital in Pembroke Pines, where about 200 SWAT team members from 13 agencies gathered to train together.

The idea behind the event, the fifth in as many years, is to familiarize SWAT teams with each other to improve communications when a crisis becomes too large for one department to handle, said Lt. Greg Lees, one of the Broward Sheriff’s Office SWAT commanders.

Lees said the multiagency training day was proposed after the Columbine High School massacre of 1999, which prompted a group of Broward County SWAT commanders to gather and discuss how to better coordinate efforts.

As SWAT members from Hallandale and Hollywood rescued hostages on the second floor, Plantation officers prepared to storm a bus where a man and woman held several captives of their own.

Back inside on the first floor, a team of five Davie officers carrying rifles and handguns modified to shoot nonlethal, paint-filled ammo waited to storm a dark, winding hallway where at least one shooter waited.

Three deafening booms went off inside, and they ran into the building past hostages wearing vests. At a sprint, they turned right and then left as two men turned to fire back at them.

”What do you got?” an officer called out after the chase.

”One in custody,” someone answered.

”Two bodies,” another yelled.

Outside, an instructor from Hollywood told the officers, adrenaline still pumping, that they did a good job — unlike other teams, they spared all the civilian hostages.

Officer Bruce Paquet, a 12-year veteran of the Davie SWAT team, said the training was realistic.

”That’s about as close as you are going to get to the real thing,” said Paquet, 37.

In fact, training is no walk in the park.

Lees, the BSO SWAT commander, said statistics show that training can be more dangerous than real life situations.

”More SWAT guys are killed by SWAT guys than by bad guys,” he told the officers before the day’s exercises began, urging them to be careful.

No one was injured during Thursday’s events.

Lees said there have been a few situations in which the multiagency trainings have already helped, like during a spate of police shootings during 2007.

”When it’s a real game day, when we have an event that is a large scale scenario, I now know exactly who to speak to,” he said.

Link/video