When Dr. Jeffrey Fetter’s secretary burst into his office at the New Hampshire Hospital Nov. 17 saying she had just seen a man get shot, he locked his door, pushed a table against it, and told her to wait under it while he ran through the halls yelling “active shooter.”
There had been no alarm and Fetter’s calls to the switchboard and campus police were going unanswered. Fetter, the hospital’s chief medical officer, would learn later thattwo people had been killed, security officer Bradley Haas, 63, and the shooter, former patient John Madore, 33, who was shot by an on-duty state trooper.
“I texted my wife and family,” Fetter told the House Criminal Justice and Public Safety Committee in written testimony.
A SWAT team entered the room where he and others were sheltering about an hour after the shooting. “We had our hands up,” Fetter wrote. He said he was told he could choose one doctor to stay behind with nearly 150 patients.
Downstairs, about 100 feet from the shooting, Dr. Samantha Swetter learned she and her colleagues were in danger similarly, when a coworker ran into her office and told her to call 911. Also unable to reach anyone to sound an alarm, Swetter and her colleague hid in her office for an hour, frantically trying to notify staff by phone.
“I’ve been working there for over five years,” Swetter told the committee, working to steady her voice. “These people aren’t just people I work with. They’re my family. And I couldn’t tell them that they were in danger.” Swetter, associate medical director, said, “It was genuinely one of the worst moments of my life.”
Theirs are the first public accounts of the moments immediately after Madore opened fire in the hospital lobby around 3 p.m. that Friday. They shared them in support of House Bill 1711, which would add certain mental health records to gun background checks.
Those records would include the documentation that showed Madore had been involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital and had his guns confiscated. New Hampshire does not submit those records to the federal National Instant Criminal Background Check System, known as NICS, allowing people prohibited under federal law from having guns to buy them.
“If something like (HB 1711) had existed, it’s possible that (the shooting) wouldn’t have happened,” Swetter said, who was testifying on behalf of the New Hampshire Psychiatric Society, not the Department of Health and Human Services. “And so I urge you to vote to pass to try and prevent similar tragedies from occurring in the future.”
The Department of Health and Human Services and the Attorney General’s Office have declined to provide details of the immediate response to the shooting by law enforcement and the hospital to the shooting. Michael Garrity, spokesperson for the Attorney General’s Office, said in an email Monday that their investigation is ongoing.
In an email sent after the story was published, Jake Leon, Health and Human Services spokesman, said the agency is working on improving its communication system.
“What happened at New Hampshire Hospital on November 17th was an unthinkable tragedy,” he wrote. “We are grateful for those inside the facility that day for their quick thinking and efforts to keep their colleagues safe; we are also saddened by what they had to endure. The safety assessment that was conducted by the Department of Safety identified areas for improvement in all areas of safety, including communication, that we are actively working on.”
But there were hints the emergency notification system had failed or fallen short in the recommended security enhancements issued by the Department of Safety 11 days after the shooting. One called for upgrades to the “communication and notification systems within (New Hampshire Hospital) to alert staff of critical events.”
Another called for hiring armed private security guards and arming hospital security officers, who have not carried guns. It’s a measure that’s raised concerns among mental health advocates and is not a practice at most hospitals in the state.
The legislation, sponsored by a pair of lawmakers long at odds on gun bills, Second Amendment advocate Republican Rep. Terry Roy and gun safety supporter Rep. David Meuse, faces a tough fight. Committee members were urged Friday by a number of gun rights advocates and groups to reject the bill.
Guns and mental health records: How bill would change background checks
Angelo Veltri, Northeast regional director for the National Association for Gun Rights, closed his testimony telling the committee members he would keep the group’s “thousands” of members and supporters in New Hampshire informed of their votes.
Fetter, who was testifying on behalf of the New Hampshire Psychiatric Society and the New Hampshire Medical Society, told the committee the bill was necessary to protect the public and carefully crafted to ensure individuals whose names are added to the do-not-sell list have a process for removing them once they are well.
“Two psychiatrists and a judge had determined this shooter was dangerous,” Fetter said, referring to Madore’s court record. “His guns were seized. There is a system in place to ensure that he would not be able to buy another gun. But New Hampshire had no way to report this information to that system.”
The Attorney General’s Office has not said how Madore obtained the pistol and AR-style gun he brought to the hospital.
Swetter recounted learning after being evacuated that Haas, someone employees saw daily as they left work, had died.
“Someone, a co-worker, was murdered 100 feet from my office while I stood there, while other people I loved were in danger, and I could do very little to help them,” she said.
‘It was reassuring, surreal, and heartbreaking all at once’
Fetter said in the aftermath of the shooting employees have had to take time off to get help. He’s seen patients who had been doing well lose their gains. He’s felt “deeply angry,” he said, that a man whose mental health treatment disqualified him from having guns obtained them and used one to murder a colleague.
“(I was) angry that we’ve spent years trying to build this hospital into something good, where people with mental illness can find care, where families can feel comfortable leaving their loved ones,” Fetter said. “Where people can spend a productive career, advancing the field and doing meaningful work. And then to think that on November 17, so much of that was lost, that perhaps it could have been prevented.”
In his written testimony, Fetter described the scene inside the hospital after the shooting.
Clinical staff were locked down and could not provide medical care for Haas or Madore, he wrote. Fetter said he concluded the switchboard operators and campus police had likely evacuated their stations for safety. Patients were anxious.
“We were asking for expedited evacuation,” he said. “We were all flooded with texts and calls. It was hard to keep up while thinking straight about what to do in the moment.”
As he left the building, Fetter could see the front lobby.
“I could see scores of officers … in fatigues with machine guns lying about the main lobby, like soldiers in the Capitol building on January 6,” he said. “It was reassuring, surreal, and heartbreaking all at once.”
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