AURORA, Colo. — In a demonstration at Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora Thursday, Texas-based company Campus Guardian Angel unveiled drone technology that could change how schools nationwide respond to threats.
Within seconds of an alert being received, the company’s drones can lift off, track, and immobilize a possible school shooter with non-lethal force.
Campus Guardian Angel CEO Justin Marston said the goal is to buy precious time for students, staff and law enforcement.
“If that shooter is focused on dealing with us putting pepper spray on them, or if we’re hitting that person at 50 to 60 miles an hour with a drone, they’re not shooting kids,” Marston said.
The system uses a network of security cameras and campus mapping to help the drones find and target a threat. In practice, it looks like a video game, with the pilots wearing first-person view googles to maneuver the drone through narrow school hallways and into classrooms at high speed.
- The graph below shows the number of school shootings in the U.S. dating back nearly 60 years
K-12 School Shooting Database
While the pilots were at Regis Jesuit for the demonstration, normally they operate out of the company’s Austin headquarters.
“We pre-stage the drones everywhere and from (Austin) we can jump into a school in any state of the nation in five seconds,” Marston said.
The company also demonstrated how difficult it would be for a shooter to disable the drones. A trained security guard was unable to hit them with a paintball gun.
- POV video recorded by Campus Guardian drones during Thursday’s demonstrations shows how the drones could pursue an intruder inside a school. Watch in the video player below:
POV demo shows a drone’s pursuit of a school intruder
Marston said the company is on track to produce 10,000 drones a month by March and deploy the technology in hundreds of schools. So far, they have implemented the drones in a handful of schools in Texas, and they’re working with Florida Governor Ron DeSantis to reach schools there.
The school shooting tragedies in Parkland, Florida, and Uvalde, Texas, were some of the inspirations behind Campus Guardian Angel. Marston said in their analysis of all major school shootings, their technology likely would have saved the majority of lives lost because of its immediate response capabilities.
“You think about Uvalde, we would have got (the shooter) in the parking lot, we’d have got him in the corridor, and then we’d have been able to breach the classroom,” he said.
Denver7
Colorado, sadly, is also familiar with mass shootings. Erika Mahoney, who lost her father Kevin Mahoney in the Boulder King Soopers shooting in 2021, was at the demonstration at Regis Jesuit High School.
“It’s hard not to think about what if this technology had been around and lives could have been saved?” Mahoney reflected.
With a podcast she recently launched, Mahoney has been exploring the impact of mass shootings. She feels it’s important for communities to explore all possible solutions to gun violence.
“We have to try everything to stop this American tragedy,” she said.
The company estimates the cost of implementing the drones in a school like Regis would be around $8,000 per month. Regis Jesuit High School President David Card said the school is still in the exploration phase, but he was impressed by the technology’s potential. An alumnus of the school is an investor with the company and helped arrange the demonstration at Regis Jesuit High School.
Coloradans making a difference | Denver7 featured videos
Denver7 is committed to making a difference in our community by standing up for what’s right, listening, lending a helping hand and following through on promises. See that work in action, in the videos above.
