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Pennsylvania High School Stabbing Details; New Signals Found in Airliner Search

Aired April 09, 2014 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Hi there. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

And we begin this hour with that bloody rampage at a Pennsylvania high school. A mass stabbing that injured 20 people, most of them teenagers. Many of them hurt so badly they could have died. Four had to be flown to hospitals by helicopter.

The suspect identified this afternoon as a student, a sophomore, a tenth grader. And you saw him go by. He is in custody but we have purposely blurred his face because he is all of 16 years of age. Police say he was armed with not just one but two knives, ran down the hallway, through several classrooms before school even started, slashing and stabbing people along the way.

This happened before 7:15 this morning in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. This is about, as you can see here on the map, 15 miles give or take east of downtown Pittsburgh at Franklin Regional High School. The first indication something was wrong was the fact that someone pulled the fire alarm.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: The fire alarm went off. I was walking over towards the exit and there was blood all over the floor. I thought maybe someone had a nosebleed or something. And someone yelled, she got stabbed.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: As we continue to hear from students this afternoon, I can tell you, you can hear the severity of the situation when you listen in to the radio traffic between police and dispatch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: (INAUDIBLE) 187 Murrysville command, I have my whole shift coming your way (INAUDIBLE).

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: OK. Come in the front doors. The first hallway on the right, halfway down. We've got multiple victims here. We need ambulances here as soon as possible. Be advised the suspect is in custody. Only one suspect.

(END VIDEO CLIP) BALDWIN: Nineteen students and a security guard were injured. Many of them were stabbed or slashed in the chest, back, or abdomen. And some of the wounds, as we're hearing from doctors, were quite deep. And this happened in a suburb. This is a small community, tight knit there in Pennsylvania. All but one of the victims were high school students. And treating the wounds this morning, so severe, so deep in some cases, was even tough for some of the doctors who were waiting at the hospital to save their lives.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. MARK RUBINO, FORBES REGIONAL HOSPITAL: I'm an obstetrician, a gynecologist. I've -- a number of these patients, their moms are our patients in our practice. These are kids that we very likely delivered. And - but I think that the team doesn't really react with emotions. And if I'm emotional, it might just be coming out now, as opposed to earlier the response was a clinical response. The team did what they had to do. And one thing about being a doctor that lives in the community that you serve, you can become emotional because these are your friends and neighbors, in addition to your patients. But I was proud of the response.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: From one of the doctors. We will be hearing from more of the doctors from Forbes Hospital in just about a half an hour from now with an update. We know one adult male was taken to that hospital, released. Seven teenagers remain in that hospital. So, again, we'll get an update in half an hour.

We also have a student from this high school on the phone standing by who witnessed much of the aftermath this morning. So we'll talk to him in a minute.

But first, let me go straight to Jean Casarez, our correspondent who's been on this since very early this morning.

And, so, Jean, a lot of questions. First, just beginning with the victims, can you give me an update on the conditions right now?

JEAN CASAREZ, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, what we're learning, there are four different hospitals. And so as we're learning about the victims, you have to go to each hospital. But we do understand that one that was in serious condition has been upgraded to fair condition. There have been two in critical condition. One we just learned about some specifics, which I think are very interesting.

A 17-year-old male. And he was shot in the left part of his front torso, which we're learning seemed to be a pattern of these stabbing wounds. His liver, his diaphragm, many blood vessels were caught in the stabbing. There was massive bleeding. He, probably the most serious, was rushed into surgery. The knife missed his heart and his aorta and that is why doctors say he's still alive. The resuscitation was critical. He is on life support currently and this is just as a few minutes ago. But the doctor said something that was extremely interesting, that by viewing the wound, it was a large knife he said because we've heard nothing about what is a deadly weapon at this point.

BALDWIN: That's right. That's right. We just know that there were two knives. As far as the suspect goes, and, again, we could get more information in half an hour. As far as the suspect goes again, we know he's a sophomore. What more do you know about him?

CASAREZ: You know what we're learning, 16 years old, sophomore. Law enforcement is not releasing his name at this point. But I think rather than his name, let's look at his state of mind.

BALDWIN: Yes.

CASAREZ: The doors had just opened for the school. The classes had not begun. This person allegedly walked in with his fellow students. Not one knife, but two knives. And we also have learned that the crime scene is multiple classrooms, hallways, plural, that are very long. So look at that state of mind, look at that scene, and this is something that obviously critically, critically serious.

BALDWIN: With the deep wounds one would question really intention here. We don't know yet. We're awaiting more information. Jean Casarez for us, thank you so much.

And now to the student who I mentioned, Matt DeCesar. He's on the phone with me.

Matt, can you hear me?

MATT DECESAR, STUDENT (via telephone): Yep, I can hear you.

BALDWIN: OK. Wonderful. I understand -- take me back to this morning. You hear the fire alarm. You thought it was a drill. When did you realize it wasn't a drill?

DECESAR: Just as I was - I'd say either stepping outside or I had just stepped outside. I noticed the sense of urgency. Sort of more of like a -- going from like, oh, it's a fire drill, let's just do this, to more of like a everyone get out now, get where you need to go because this is something more serious.

BALDWIN: So once you realized it's more serious and you start to see teachers rushing back into school, you're starting to see some of the students removed, can you just paint the picture, what were those students saying, what did they look like?

DECESAR: The first - I saw like one or two students come out and they appeared to be covered in blood. But then I saw some more teachers pulling a couple more students out and the one, it looked like - I think we had a lacrosse game scheduled for today. So the students were dressed up in their dress cloths. And he had white pants on being dressed up for the lacrosse game and his pants were just covered in blood and it was truly terrifying. BALDWIN: Were they saying anything? I understand some of the -- was it the teachers who were asking for hoodies, really anything you all might have had, right?

DECESAR: Yes. Yes, these teachers - I noticed that the teachers right away, they came up with this -- what I thought was a heroic idea and just a great reaction was they asked the students to pass in their hoodies if possible and -- so everyone around me, we all took our hoodies off and handed them to the teachers to use as kind of tourniquets to stop the bleeding. And it looked like that definitely helped. I mean I couldn't really get a good - I couldn't really see. The teachers kind of blocked the students a little bit because it was not good to look at. You didn't -- I didn't even want to look at it. But from what I could see, that was very effective.

BALDWIN: In terms of the why part, we don't know yet, Matt, but I'm just curious if you have any idea, talking to any of your student friends, what could have provoked this. Was there any kind of warning?

DECESAR: As far as I know, there was no warning. I mean, I've heard some students speculating that he was acting a little differently this week, maybe, but that was only -- they were just guessing. They've just -- it just occurred to them now, sort of. It was sort of like an afterthought. But just looking at the victims, there doesn't appear to be any pattern other than they're all -- most of them seem to be sophomores, I would say. But there's not really any pattern that it follows. I wouldn't say that he targeted any of these people. In fact, I know one of them very well and I'm not even sure how well he knew this person. But it would be - I would call it impossible to have anything against one of these victims.

BALDWIN: You mentioned your friend here. Is your friend OK?

DECESAR: Yes. He's doing all right now. I just - I was just texting him and talking to him on Twitter. But, yes, he suffered some -- three stabs in his back when he was running away.

BALDWIN: Oh.

DECESAR: And after being take to the hospital, he seems to be doing OK now. And he says that he expects to be released by later today, they say, or early tomorrow. Something about that.

BALDWIN: Let me ask you, because no one really has spoken much about the knives themselves. We know this individual - and, again, we're not identifying this sophomore with the two knives -

DECESAR: Right.

BALDWIN: Because he's 16 and police are not identifying him. But did your friend describe -

DECESAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: Do we know, were they small knives, were they kitchen knives, were they long knifes? Did he say? DECESAR: No, he did not. I think that he was more shaken than anything and I think that it sounded like he was running away from what he has told me. So I don't think he got a real good look at it. I think he was more or less running away because he was scared and shaken. And I don't ever know - I don't know if he actually ever saw the person who stabbed him. I don't know if he ever saw it happen. It may have just happened and he -- while he was running away.

BALDWIN: OK. And just quickly, let me ask you about this assistant principle who I hear - I know you're in the band.

DECESAR: Yes.

BALDWIN: It's this assistant principal that we're hearing might have helped, you know, tackle or take down this young man with these two knives and ultimately helped, you know, hand him over to police. Tell me about your assistant principal. Sounds like he's a hero.

DECESAR: Uh, yes. Mr. King, Samuel King (ph). He's a really great guy. I mean I have never - I can't remember the last time I heard negative criticism of his work. He - just a really -- he's really there for the students. I mean just anything he does, you just never really ask him. He's never (INAUDIBLE) twice about why he's asking you to behave a certain way. He just really is a very agreeable person. And he's always doing thing out of the best interest of students. I mean, like you said, I'm in the band. He actually acted as the administrator that went along on the trip and he was really all about making sure that we were having a good time, being safe and really getting the best experience possible.

BALDWIN: Matt DeCesar, I'm glad you're OK. Thank you so much for calling in. We were talking about the assistant principal. We just showed you a picture. I'm pretty sure that was the school resources officer who also helped subdue this individual and his name is Officer William Buzz Yakshe.

Matt, thank you so much.

Let me go to someone else I'm just hearing is on the phone. On the phone with me now, Dr. Louis Alarcon, medical director, UPMC Presbyterian, trauma surgery.

Doctor, can you hear me?

DR. LOUIS ALARCON, MEDICAL DIRECTOR, UPMC PRESBYTERIAN (via telephone): Yes, I can.

BALDWIN: My goodness, what a morning I'm sure you and your team have had. Can you just walk me through, without obviously, you know, violating HIPPA, how many people have you seen? Describe the severity of the injuries.

ALARCON: So at my hospital, at Presbyterian Hospital, we took care of one individual. And I do have permission from the family to give you some information.

BALDWIN: Great.

ALARCON: And he is a 17-year-old gentleman who sustained a single stab wound very deep and very large to the left side of his torso, between his chest and his abdomen. And he arrived with a very low blood pressure in our trauma bay in the emergency department with evidence of massive bleeding in his chest and abdomen. And within minutes we had him in the operating room to stop the hemorrhage, both in his chest and in his abdomen.

BALDWIN: How -- how -- teetering is the word that's coming to my mind I mean as far as like how close, how touch and go was it at times with him?

ALARCON: He was very critically injured. He had massive bleeding, like I said, into his chest and his abdomen.

BALDWIN: Yes.

ALARCON: And it's thanks really to the lifesaving maneuvers that the EMS crews provided in bringing him as quickly as possible to a level one trauma center, that we could get him to the operating room in order to stop this bleeding, which would have been fatal had he not arrived quickly to a hospital capable of providing this type of treatment.

BALDWIN: Yes. I've heard from other doctors that the paramedics in the field were absolutely phenomenal.

Let me just end with this. Since you do have permission from the family and also just from your own experience with this 17-year-old, will he be OK?

ALARCON: Yes, we're very hopeful he's going to make it through this. But like I said, he's still critically ill in our intensive care unit and he will need additional surgery in the next several days.

BALDWIN: OK. All right. Dr. Alarcon, thank you so much, to you and your team. And, obviously, our best wishes to this 17-year-old young man.

Coming up next, as we await that news conference, as I mentioned, from one of the other hospitals treating multiple students, Pamela Brown will join me live outside of Franklin Regional High School where she just arrived. So you will see the scene here on CNN.

Also ahead, the other major story we're following here, in the urgent search for Flight 370. Crews hearing not one but two new signals that are consistent with the black box pinging from the plane. Stay with me. You're watching CNN's special coverage of two major stories on this Wednesday.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

And we take you back to our breaking news coverage here of this horrendous event just outside of Pittsburgh this morning. The stabbing rampage that injured 20 people at Franklin Regional High School in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. There are already, just hours after the fact, stories of heroism coming out of this school. We mentioned this with a student a minute ago, that assistant principal who helped stop what was happening, the teenage girl who kept calm, ignoring the chaos all around her, applying pressure to a boy's wounds. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DR. MARK RUBINO, FORBES REGIONAL HOSPITAL: She displayed an amazing amount of composure to really help that friend who was having probably pretty significant bleeding at that point and the pressure that she applied probably played a significant role in his ability to survive this.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: How about that? CNN's justice correspondent Pamela Brown just arriving there, just on the school grounds in Murrysville, Pennsylvania.

And, Pam, what more can you tell us?

PAMELA BROWN, CNN JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, we are just arriving here, as you mentioned, Brooke. It's very quiet right now, right outside of Franklin Regional Heritage School. It -- earlier today, it was a very chaotic scene as one of their fellow students went on a stabbing spree here.

We know that several students remain in the hospital at this hour, Brooke. The ages of those students injured range from 14 to 17 years old. We know that a least a couple of them are still in critical condition. Many of them had stab wounds to their stomachs and one of those victims was a 17-year-old, according to a doctor we just heard from, a 17-year-old in critical condition who went into surgery right after the attack happened.

But as you can imagine, Brooke, the students here very shaken up. This all happened right before classes even started this morning. And many students didn't know what was happening. Because this was a stabbing spree, they didn't hear gunshots or anything else indicating what exactly was going on. Some students said they thought that a fight was breaking out. And so students just started running out and apparently this attacker, this 16-year-old student who we're not naming right now, was just going around, according to witnesses, and just stabbing anyone who was in his way, going from classroom to classroom and stabbing students in the hallways. Twenty people injured altogether, 19 students, one school resource officer.

And as you mentioned there, Brooke, the assistant principle apparently tackled the attacker and that helped end this stabbing spree. We know that the suspect is being questioned at police headquarters here. He was taken to the hospital for a wound to his hand. He's being questioned. The FBI is involved. And you can bet they are looking through his computers, interviewing students. There's about 1,200 students here at this school. They're going to be interviewing them, figuring out if he was bullied. What could have prompted him to do this today.

BALDWIN: Pamela Brown for us in Murrysville, Pennsylvania. Pamela, thank you.

And just again a quick reminder, as we're getting more information. Remember, this happened just mere hours ago. In about 10 minutes from now, we will be taking a news conference. We'll be hearing from some of the doctors at one of the hospitals treating a number of these students and one adult. So stay tuned for that.

Meantime, another possible breakthrough in the search for Flight 370. Crews hearing not one but two new signals that are consistent with the black box pings from a plane. Could this be it? The man in charge of the search is pretty confident.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: We, of course, are staying on the school stabbing story out of suburban Pittsburgh. We're awaiting that news conference, as we mentioned, at the bottom of the hour.

But let me just talk about the other big story we've been watching here for weeks, the hunt for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. It was called a monumental task, relocate the possible black box pings heard over the past weekend. And, incredibly, they believe they have done just that. Officials are now saying they are optimistic, their word, that they will find the plane's wreckage.

Not just one, two new signals picked up by the U.S. Navy's pinger locater towed behind the Ocean Shield, that vessel. That brings now the total of four possible black box signals over the past several days. All of them located within 17 miles of one another. You see the four different signals here. The question now, where to go from here?

Joining me now to discuss, former NTSB Chairman Jim Hall. He oversaw TWA Flight 800's investigation. Also joining me, CNN's safety analyst, David Soucie, author of "Why Planes Crash."

So, gentlemen, thank you for being with us.

Feeling like there is some optimism and a real lead here, Jim, let me begin with you. I mean count them, four signals within this 17 mile stretch. In your opinion, how significant is that? I mean do you think they might actually find this plane?

JIM HALL, FORMER CHAIRMAN, NTSB: Well, first, let me say, in light of the past disappointments and in respect to the families, I think we have to be very conservative. But this is encouraging news and hopefully it will lead to the discovery of the wreckage.

BALDWIN: Why are you still dubious?

HALL: Well, because this is about a 500 mile search area. The depths of the water are about 15,000 feet. The ocean is constantly moving on the ocean floor and the possibility of silt or other debris covering up the wreckage or the batteries running out before is a real possibility.

BALDWIN: So you mentioned the silt. Obviously we've been talking a lot about the fading battery life here, David. I mean let's say that - because we know the last two signals were much weaker. Let's say they hear nothing else beyond this point. Do searchers finally have enough information to pull the trigger, put those, you know, submersibles under water to find the black boxes?

DAVID SOUCIE, CNN SAFETY ANALYST: Yes, absolutely they do. What they're doing now is just trying to get some more pings so that they can narrow in on where specifically they're coming from. You have some propagation going on now, so its - the pings are not only going out, but they're going up and evidently reflecting off and coming back down again. So that does complicate the search quite a lot. Again, as Angus Houston stated too though that these diminishing signal strengths could also be because they're further away from the sender, which makes sense to me because the first ping was two hours and it was quite a bit further north.

BALDWIN: Right. Right, the first ping two hours, very strong. The second ping, thinking we might have heard sets of pings, which could mean that they heard the ping from the voice -- cockpit voice recorder and then the flight data recorder. But then this leads me to my next question. We've talked a lot about this, David Soucie. Here we are, five weeks out. I mean, still, despite all these reports of possible pings, no debris has been found yet. Is it possible -- does that give this whole theory of the plane being underwater more or less in tact more -- could that really be the situation?

SOUCIE: Well, you know, I'm leaning more and more that way because of the fact that before -- at first we were looking for debris and then we were going to have to reverse engineer or reverse track that debris back to a singular point, which is nearly impossible to do at this point because there's so -- the pieces would be so spread out. But now what we're talking about is knowing the single point and then forecasting, forward casting what would happened from that point forward from the impact point. So now you would think there would be a lot more debris to spot and they're spotting in those areas and not finding anything. So I'm -- I am leaning towards the fact that it is at least more intact than say the Flight 447 was in the Air France accident.

BALDWIN: Jim Hall, is that possible? I mean, I want to end with you. I mean is it really possible that this 777 could have crash landed intact?

HALL: Not in my experience. Both TWA 800 and Egypt Air had several debris fields. But, you know, this - at this point, one person's opinion is as good as anothers until we find the wreckage and have a good idea of what's going on.

BALDWIN: Jim Hall and David Soucie, gentlemen, thank you both so much.

We have talked, you know, a lot about exactly how deep the Indian Ocean is in this search area. And coming up, we will tell you about this one piece of technology that can go deeper than any other. It is called the Alvin (ph) and can go nearly three miles underwater and can carry up to three scientists. So coming up next, we'll talk about that.

Also ahead, we will stay on this story we've been watching out of Pittsburgh here talking to another student. This student, an eyewitness to the violent stabbings this morning that unfolded at this high school. Her friend was one of the victims. And she will explain what happened and how she made it out safely, next.

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