GRAFTON — The new warden at Grafton Correctional Institution promised more community notification in the future after a mock prison break training exercise at a home on state Route 83 stopped traffic and worried some motorists Tuesday.
The prison sent a fax to media outlets on Friday alerting them to the training exercise, but that apparently was not enough notification, said Warden Frank Shewalter.
In the future, prison officials will follow up with phone calls and targeted e-mails, he said.
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Plus, they might erect better signage for the public warning of a training exercise in progress.
Shewalter said there were signs for northbound and southbound motorists on state Route 83, but a Chronicle photographer saw only a sign for northbound motorists that stated “GCI Exercise Scenario in Progress.”
The activity by about 100 armed individuals — mostly prison guards and officers from the Ohio Highway Patrol — got the attention of passersby, who called The Chronicle-Telegram. No one at the paper recalled any fax about a training exercise.
En route, a newspaper reporter called police and discovered it was only a training exercise. After arriving, the reporter and photographer noticed telltale signs of training in progress — such as the sign, the fact that state Route 83 was not closed off and the use of some pink-colored weapons.
Two women who had called the newspaper said they thought there was a hostage situation in progress as they passed by the Grafton Prison Farm.
“There were lots of people who didn’t know what was going on,” said Johni Russell, of Lorain, who was passing with her mother Carol Knapp.
Russell said some motorists stopped their cars in the middle of the road and turned around to avoid trouble while others were caught in lines of cars when trains were stopped on a nearby rail crossing.
Knapp said if there was a sign going southbound, she didn’t see it.
“We thought we were going to see a shootout,” said Knapp, who tuned into WEOL and called her husband to see if there was anything else in the media.
Despite a little confusion on the part of passersby, Shewalter said the Critical Incident Management exercise was a success and trained staff from the Grafton Correctional and Lorain Correctional institutions and the Northeast Pre-Release Center in Cleveland, which is a women’s prison.
“We learned how to do better working as a team,” Shewalter said. “We train on this so we can be ready and the community will be safe.”
Shewalter, who previously served as warden of the Northeast Pre-Release Center, said the training exercise focused on the following scenario:
A resident alerts the prison of two empty tractors and a vehicle in the field, and a guard who responds is taken hostage and moved to a farmhouse across the highway. Five “inmates” take part in the walk-away from the prison farm — which does not have a fence around the perimeter — after one of the five was denied a visit to the bedside of his mother, who is ill. During the training exercise, the guard taken hostage was critically injured along with a girlfriend of one of the inmates, while a second girlfriend was killed and two inmates were shot in the legs as they ran toward a radar facility on prison grounds.
The confusion on the part of some passersby during the exercise Tuesday is not the first time in recent years that the public has been affected by training exercises.
On Aug. 25, people in the 128-home Deerfield housing development off Oak Point Road were asked to evacuate after Lorain police conducting training exercises with new gas masks fired off pepper spray at the nearby Amherst Gun Club that wafted into their homes.
Fifteen months ago, three police training drills for Virginia Tech massacre-type violence were canceled until police sorted out what went wrong on July 12, 2008, when two veteran police officers walked into the Stocker Arts Center with guns drawn. The incident happened just prior to a performance of “Willy Wonka Junior” by the Lorain County Children’s Pioneer Theatre.
During the incident, the theater’s treasurer was reportedly placed at gunpoint because police thought he was part of the training scenario. After the incident, he called Mayor Bill Grace and Elyria Police Chief Michael Medders to voice concerns.
Contact Cindy Leise at 329-7245 or cleise@chroniclet.com.
