quote, the driver abandoned the van and escaped from the area the police chief in barcelona said. he went out to the say witnesses did not see a weapon on the driver as he fled. so what does that say to you that the driver is now remains at large? the gives me one clue here, wolf, there s a simple calculous i look at in the initial stages of these investigations. we ve seen two things that are important. numbers of people. as soon as you see a lone wolf, i start to ask questions about whether that person operated in a basement, even simple questions about their mental capacity. a lot of lone wolves i see are not mentally capable. as you see a conspiracy of this size, the likelihood that this conspiracy i think reaches out of spain has increased and the fact that they even have a getaway plan is a clue. a lot of these people, if they re simple, are just focussed on the operation and not thinking as much about how to get away. i think we re going to find more links in this case. glor
that they were prepared, as police say. this required planning to make this happen that s one point. the second point is this. the circumstance of this are extremely unusual. one, the massive police response that we re still seeing under way. but the fact that there appear to be multiple shooters here. the fbi came out with a study a short time ago and it said that of 160 active shooter situations in the u.s. since the year 2000, only two of them have involved more than one gunman. so that s extremely unusual. the other unusual part, too, erin, is the fact that they got away. because, as we know, shooting situations like this in the u.s. have become sort of a form of public suicide, those shooters go in knowing that they are going to die on the scene or possibly wanting to die on the scene, these shooters had a getaway plan. they didn t get far. cops seemed to have gotten them pretty quickly and in the neighborhood but they did get away. and that s extremely unusual as well. there are
period, area, secured, schools, senior centers, public transit facilities and try to limit the degree to which these people can get a getaway plan together. it is all being done in a helter-skelter fashion as these things are done and will involve the u.s. marshals, state police up in wisconsin, illinois state police and many of the other local smaller departments. but you can be sure that the undivided attention of law enforcement of that region is on this event at this point. eugene, talk about the challenges here when we re considering this area. it is not a large community, about 10,000 people in the area of fox lake. but also, it s extremely rural. heavily wooded. surrounded by bodies of water. it s the chain of claks area. resort area, as well. also a lot of areas described as
manhunts such as these tend to go to a wooded area where there is no one or do they tend to go some place like a house where they may have some sort of resources. it depends they re from the area, how well they know the area, presumably the police, if there s associates in that area, the police are doing a full court press on them, on family members, presumably, they ve been getting visits and will get visits, as we saw in the adirondacks with the upstate new york escapee, they all have their own particular character. of course in that case, there was deliberation and planning. the real issue here is how much time did they give it to shooting this officer. the likelihood is this is instantaneous, the getaway plan such as it is is limited. law enforcement should assume nothing here. it is absolutely vital, it often gets overlooked. they have to absolutely be sure that in the midst of this and running urgently to secure the public, make these arrests, that the eyes are dotted, the t s
the shootings saying he had done something stupid. in fact, that text message is what helped authorities identify vester flanagan as a person of interest initially. there isn t any point that vester flanagan purchased a plane ticket but one thing investigators are looking at is whether he had a getaway plan because there were several suspicious belongings found in his rental car where he shot himself, including a wig, a shawl, sunglasses and umbrella, three license plates as well. investigators are looking like this and one of the theories, of course, is that he was going to use these belongings to disguise himself and he thought he could evade police but they re looking at whether he used these belongings to disguise himself before the shooting. they haven t reached any conclusions about what exactly this means at this point. it s all speculation.