Safe Rooms at Police Stations Could be Lifesavers

April 15, 2013
The rooms usually are small and nondescript and open to the station lobby.

REYNOLDSBURG, Ohio -- The last time Debbie Butsko could walk, she ran.

Her husband was right behind her. Charles Vonschriltz had a gun, and he didn't care where they were.

Butsko barreled through the first door, shoved her way past the second. She burst into the empty lobby of the Reynoldsburg police station. The doors inside were all locked. Butsko was trapped.

The first bullet blew out one of the doors behind her. Two more shots grazed her arms. One bullet shattered a bone in her forearm, and another pierced her abdomen. Vonschriltz stood over his wife, the mother of his baby girl, and fired once more into her spine.

Ten seconds had passed. Maybe 15.

When three police officers reached the lobby, Vonschriltz dropped his pistol. Butsko lay on the floor, bleeding.

"I was in shock," she says today. "I thought I was fine."

It was April 9, 1991, and what happened that day sent Vonschriltz to prison, robbed Butsko of the use of her legs and changed the way a lot of central Ohio police stations are designed.

Because of Butsko, Reynoldsburg's police station now has a safe place for someone to run to. So do the stations in New Albany, Newark and Bexley, and in one that opened on April 5 in Marysville. Because of Butsko, the Dublin-based architectural firm Horne & King puts bullet-resistant, auto-locking safe rooms in every one of the police stations it designs -- more than a dozen since the shooting.

The Reynoldsburg incident "made very clear how important they were," said firm partner David King.

The rooms usually are small and nondescript and open to the station lobby. King said they cost about $500 to add, mainly for the bullet-resistant material. They're built with Kevlar behind the drywall and have doors that swing shut and lock from both sides. The rooms usually aren't labeled, which is intentional, Reynoldsburg Chief Jim O'Neill said. In most stations, an employee working behind a lobby window will signal where a panicked person should run.

"We don't want somebody to recognize that room," O'Neill said. "We don't want the bad guy to cut someone off from getting there."

The rooms almost never are used for their intended purpose. Just three times in 10 years have Reynoldsburg police directed a frantic person into theirs.

In Newark, police use the safe room to interview people or separate arguing couples, Sgt. Scott Snow said.In Bexley, Police Chief Larry Rinehart can't remember a time his safe room was used in an emergency.

"It's ... one of those things that you hope you never have to use," Rinehart said. "But if you have to use it one time in the life of the building, it was worth having."

--*

Maybe the safe room would have spared Butsko. She was 29 the day she was shot. Her husband was a charismatic guy she'd met through a friend. They married after she got pregnant.

In time, she said, Vonschriltz grew violent. One night they fought in the car, their 2-year-old daughter in the back seat, and he told her they'd all be dead in 15 minutes. He left the car running inside the garage.

Butsko took their daughter to her sister's house and left him a message: I want a divorce.

Her mother, Ilona, drove her back the next afternoon to pick up blankets.

Vonschriltz, then 34, was in the driveway, rustling through his trunk. Ilona tried to turn her car around without drawing his attention, but her elbow bumped the horn.

Vonschriltz noticed. He jumped in his car and began to chase them. Ilona turned and caught her Chrysler on a curb.

Boom. He slammed into the car. He grabbed a pistol from his trunk and pressed it to Ilona's head. She floored it down Main Street toward the police station, straight up to the door.

Boom. His car struck them again. Butsko got out and ran.

Boom. Boom-boom-boom-boom-boom. The bullet holes would stay in the Reynoldsburg police station until a new one was built 10 years later. Butsko would never walk again.

Months later, Vonschriltz, now 56, pleaded guilty to attempted murder and kidnapping and was sentenced to at least 17 years in prison, where he remains nearly 20 years later.

Butsko divorced Vonschriltz, reclaimed her maiden name and moved. She's 51 and in constant pain.

She still thinks about that day. She blames Vonschriltz the most, attending his parole hearings because she believes it only proper that he rot in prison.

But she also blames herself for not getting to the door fast enough. And she blames police for letting her stand there, helpless, in the lobby.

It was, she says, "like running into the emergency room with no doctors there."

Copyright 2013 - The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

McClatchy-Tribune News Service

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