GREENWOOD — Those who responded to the call for help at the Greenwood Park Mall during the active shooter incident are sharing their perspective.
"You hope that you respond the right way, your training kicks in, and that you will have the courage to do what it takes. But you don't really know until it happens," said Officer Chris Reed.
Reed has been an officer with Greenwood Police for over 10 years.
The deadly mass shooting in Greenwood took the lives of 3 and injured 2 others.
RELATED: What we know about the mass shooting at Greenwood Park Mall
Officer Reed remembered the moments he walked into the mall:
"The screaming, the yelling, the chaos, all the background noise," he said. "Blood, victims laying on the floor, some of them not moving."
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Johnson County Sheriff's Office bomb squad commander, Matt Rhinehart, also shared what is was like.
"There's food that is still sitting on the table because people just go up and left," said Rhinehart.
Answering the call for help is the job for police officers.
"My job is to get in here and protect lives," said Reed.
Reed says it came without hesitation. He ran toward the danger, as shoppers ran away to find safety.
Driving to the scene, Reed says he said a prayer.
"Lord you've got to make me courageous. I've got to do what needs to be done, I need to keep the other people safe, I need to be tactically sound. I need to stop the shooter, stop the killing," said Reed.
Reed says he was fully prepared to die when walking into the food court Sunday evening, not knowing the shooter had already been killed.
"I made peace with that a long time ago — I know where I am going if I don't make it," Reed said.
He says there isn't time in an instance like that to react emotionally.
Reed said, "I've gotten good at shutting it off. This is not the time for any of that."
Rhinehart said not hesitating to save lives is the job.
"We have to throw, in a sense, our safety out the window to ensure that other people are safe," Rhinehart said.
A bomb squad commander Rhinehart said his teams job Sunday was to eliminate the threat of a possible bomb inside.
Rhinehart says he didn't hesitate to run inside either. He drove straight from his family vacation to the mall.
"I was wearing Birkenstocks, shorts and a t-shirt," Rhinehart said.
Reed said his training kicked in.
"We had trained for an active shooter at the mall in the food court, It was exactly like the training," he said.
Despite the training, officer reed says you can never really be prepared.
"You never get used to it. Each individual you make contact with on any incident is somebody's wife, somebody's daughter, somebody's husband. Somebody's not coming home," said Reed.
Both Reed and Rhinehart said they would do it again, without hesitation.
Many people are calling the responding officers a hero. Officer Reed said the real hero is the armed civilian who took the gunman down.
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