30 Seconds: Lessons from the Grand Blanc Church Attack

On the morning of September 28, 2025, a Sunday service at the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Grand Blanc Township, Michigan, turned into one of the most layered critical incidents I have studied in recent memory. Around 10:25 a.m., 40-year-old Thomas Sanford drove a pickup truck through the front doors of the church while hundreds of parishioners were inside. He exited the vehicle, opened fire with an assault rifle, and deliberately set the building on fire using gasoline. Investigators later recovered improvised explosive devices from the scene.

The first 911 call came in at 10:25 a.m. A Michigan Department of Natural Resources officer and a Grand Blanc Township officer were on the church grounds within roughly 30 seconds of that call. By 10:33 a.m., the suspect was down in the parking lot. Two people were killed and eight were injured. Given the number of people inside that building and the multiple threats unfolding at once, the response prevented what could have been a far greater tragedy.

I have written before that chaos is the constant in active shooter incidents. Grand Blanc is a reminder that chaos rarely shows up as one problem at a time.

The officers who responded to that church did not arrive at a single, defined threat. They arrived at a vehicle ramming, an active shooter, an arson fire, and the possibility of explosives, all at the same location, with hundreds of civilians evacuating in every direction. Any one of those things is a critical incident on its own. Stacked together, they create the kind of cognitive overload that can freeze even experienced officers.

And yet, those two officers moved forward.

When I talk about preparing for chaos, this is the scenario I am talking about. Not the clean, single-threat training video. The compounded one. The one where the building is on fire and there are still rounds being fired and you do not yet know if the suspect is alone.

Here are the lessons I take from Grand Blanc:

• Train for layered threats, not single ones. Most of our scenario training focuses on one problem. Real incidents stack. Your people need reps in environments where the shooting is not the only thing happening.

• Trust your training and move. Those officers were on scene in roughly 30 seconds. They did not wait for backup, a tactical team, or perfect information. They closed the distance because they knew that every second the suspect had access to victims, more people would die.

• Accept that you will not have a complete picture. Information was incomplete and conflicting. There were reports of a fire, a vehicle, a shooter, and possible explosives. The officers acted on what was in front of them while staying open to what came next.

• Decide what stops the killing, and prioritize that. The fire was a serious threat. The IEDs were a serious threat. But the person actively shooting people was the threat that had to be addressed first. Everything else, however dangerous, was secondary in that moment.

  
  

Critical incidents will keep getting more complex. Suspects are increasingly combining tactics involving vehicles, firearms, fire, and explosives. The agencies that perform best in those moments will be the ones that have trained their people to think clearly when it matters most.