A deputy slumps to the ground.
"Officer down! Officer down!"
Three members of the Harford County Sheriff's Special Response Team, essentially a SWAT team, corner the suspect with their guns raised. As deputies scatter to secure the living room, the fallen officer lies motionless. An unarmed man in a black Kevlar bulletproof vest rushes in. Unlike the others, he carries no weapons, just two huge black packs, loaded with medicine and supplies.
The unarmed man in the practice drill is Dr. Eric Nager, an emergency room doctor at Franklin Square Hospital, who often accompanies the team in barricade situations.
"I'm there as a person who's administering care if someone is injured, whether it be a police officer or a victim," Nager said.
Like many SWAT teams around the nation, the Harford County sheriff's department has a medical staff. Nager and two emergency medical workers, Jeremy Mothershed and Gregory Young, make up Harford's group.
Every week, the 19-member team, including Nager, practices different scenarios, such as this one where a deputy is injured during a forced entry.
The drills force the deputies to think on the fly and keep safe.
"Treating people in a standard fashion, it ends up getting people killed," Nager said. "The initial response is to run over to them and administer first aid. There's a good chance you become a victim."
When the team is deployed in barricade situations, regular first-responders cannot be in the "hot zone" -- the area where people are in danger and the situation is unfolding. But Nager, Young and Mothershed have been trained to enter these areas.
"You can't bring a volunteer EMS [emergency medical services personnel] into a tactical operation," said Mothershed, a paramedic. "This allows us to have law enforcement with a specialty for life-saving right on the front lines."
The amount of time to shuttle a patient from the hot zone to an ambulance could be deadly, the medical team says.
"A gunshot wound could bleed out in the time it takes to evacuate the person to the ambulance," said Young, an emergency medical technician. "By having a doctor or an EMT, treatment is there. That's a life-saving factor right there."
In one incident, a distraught man barricaded himself inside a house and pointed a hunting crossbow to his chest, threatening to kill himself.
