Kishwaukee Community Hospital administrators held another press conference Friday morning to discuss the events of the previous night.

Kishwaukee Community Hospital treated eighteen victims of the Cole Hall shooting for gunshot wounds.

All the victims taken to KCH were brought there for gunshot-related injuries, said Dr. Michael Kulisz, Emergency Medicine Physician and Director of the KCH Emergency Room.

“As you can imagine, in this kind of scenario there can be individuals who are trampled, who can be pushed around, and we did not see any evidence of that in our facility, and I think that just speaks for how the students managed themselves at the site,” said Dr. Roger Maillefer, Chief of Staff and Surgeon on Call.

The hospital staff faced unfamiliar territory as they treated victims’ shotgun-wounds.

“The typical gunshot wound that most of us are trained for in surgery is ‘inner-city’,” Maillefer said. “Inner-city” gunshot wounds are characterized as rifle- or handgun-inflicted,

“It’s typically not what we saw yesterday. In a classroom full of students that were trying to leave as buckshot was being fired at them, there were a varierty of injuries from the front and from the back,” Maillefer added.

Maillefer went on to describe the damage inflicted by the unconventional weapon.

“These are little pellets; they look like little BBs, and although on the surface they look very small and insignificant, you cannot rely on that. They can travel to places where they’re not supposed to be,” Maillefer said.

However, the nature of the ammunition was in at least one respect less dangerous than large-caliber weapons: “We didn’t really sustain a whole lot of blood loss in these injuries; buckshot is relatively small bullets and so they tend not to cause a lot of blood vessel loss,” Maillefer said.

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