Lebanon
Casey Husband is using the time to get his global defense and military contracting company off the ground.
The 17-year old Windsor High School student has launched Lazarus Defense, a company to manufacture detachable backpacks that hold emergency medical supplies for police officers and others to access while treating trauma victims when responding to a mass shooting.
Husband’s backpack evolved out of his senior year capstone project, which is designed to involve the student in experiential learning and real-life problem solving as a requirement for graduation.
“I follow the news a lot and started noticing patrol officers going to the scene with just their duty belt” and lacking the first-aid tools to help victims, Husband said.
The what’s-wrong-with-this-picture epiphany inspired Husband to design a purse-size pouch that would hold emergency medical supplies such as a tourniquet, QuickClot packets and bandages and which police easily could access to treat shooting victims.
Husband began developing the idea last summer — students are urged to get to cracking on their capstone projects before returning for their senior year — by studying the logistics, equipment, and protocol of police who are responding to an “active shooter scenario,” a grimly familiar reality for U.S. law enforcement.
He learned that by the time police SWAT teams arrive, the shooting typically has ceased and valuable time is lost waiting for emergency medical services to arrive at the scene.
“The first responders to mass shootings are almost always regular police officers,” Husband points out. “They often find themselves under-equipped in situations like these.”
Once Husband educated himself on how active shooter situations unfold and police respond, he got to work on designing the backpack, first by sketching designs on paper and then with a computer-aided design program on his laptop.
He started to envision commercial possibilities after he received encouraging feedback about his invention from the local law enforcement community.
“I’ve always wanted to do something in entrepreneurship and design my own products,” said Husband, who plans to study engineering and business in college.
But businesses require require registration with the Vermont Secretary of State’s Office, of course, so Husband registered the Lazarus Defense trade name for $50 online. He spent another $300 with legalzoom.com to submit a “patent pending” application for the design of his backpack. And because in the digital age every company needs a website, Husband built his own through the website-building platform wix.com. He populated the website with black-and-white images of police and military scenes culled from the nonprofit free license source creativecommons.org.
As of now, Husband’s “international defense corporation with a focus on production design” (as the website describes) is a one-teenager show, although Husband has enlisted the help of a seamstress who works in the Windsor High School cafeteria to construct several prototypes of the backpack. He acknowledges that if he gets more than “25 or 50” orders for the backpack, he will have to contract out production. Orders for the backpack would be placed through the website, and he would allow customization in design according to customer’s specifications.
Initially, during email correspondence last summer with Windsor High’s capstone program coordinator Stan Spencer, Husband said he had an idea for an “enhanced version” of the military’s M4 and M16 carbine rifle, but that was perhaps overly ambitious.
“He was thinking of adapting weapons systems,” Spencer said. “We decided to dial it back.”
Spencer said that one of the challenges of the capstone project is that the deep research required as part of the process involves “cold calling” people to get their views and input. And Husband, like others, had to suffer through the initial shock of rejection before that one contact who responds positvely and motivates the student to move forward.
“What happened with Casey is that all of a sudden people were interested in his idea,” Spencer relates, which morphed the backpack from a capstone project into a potential business that has a wide-ranging application by servicing not only police but the broader military and first-responder markets.
The prospect of going to college at the same time as running a business doesn’t faze Husband, who is weighing acceptances at the University of Vermont’s engineering school, Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston, State University of New York at Stony Brook, University of Massachusetts Lowell and Philadelphia’s Temple and Drexel universities (he’s taking calculus classes at Dartmouth College because he “maxed out” of all the math and science classes offered at Windsor).
“I hope to kind of multi-task,” he explained, “and maybe take on another engineering student as a partner” to share the workload.
Crucially, early reviews of Husband’s backpack are getting a salute from the police officers and departments that have been given a glimpse of the prototype.
“He’s found something that really hasn’t been thought of and could be definitely useful to officers who get involved in an active shooter situation,” said Richard Mello, chief of the Lebanon Police Department.
Last week Husband made his second trip to the Lebanon Police Department to demonstrate his backpack in a basement conference room before eight officers and Mello. Standing behind a folding table, Husband, dressed in khakis, a pullover and sporting an Apple Watch, reached into a cardboard box and pulled out a prototype of the khaki-colored pouch constructed from military-grade Cordura material. He demonstrated how the pack attaches to an officer’s protective vest with MOLLE, or Modular Lightweight Load Carrying Equipment, straps.
Husband explained the backpack was purposefully designed so that a police officer can reach behind with one hand and access the medical supplies in order — per standard operating procedure — so the officer can maintain holding his or her weapon in his or her other hand at all times.
The Lebanon officers then began lobbing questions that Husband answered with practiced ease: “Who’s making it?” (“I have a local seamstress”); “How about when you need to go into production?” (“I’ll probably subcontract”); “Do you have orders now?” (“Not yet”); “What’s the price points?” (I’m not sure. I’m thinking maybe $89?”).
“Yup, it works. I like it,” Mello said approvingly. Later, asked if his department would buy Husband’s backpack for its officers, Mello said it’s “certainly something we’ll be thinking about.”
The visit to the Lebanon Police Department is one of several that Husband has made in recent months as he solicited advice and feedback about the backpack’s design from officers in the field. He reached out via email to the police departments in the 50 largest U.S. cities with specs and questions about the backpack’s design and “got responses from 15,” Husband said.
Over the course of six months Husband made contact with nearly a dozen different police departments, including those in Boston, Washington, New York City, Los Angeles, San Antonio and Las Vegas, as well as the Vermont State Police. Last month, he spoke before a Trooper training exercise in Essex, Vt. (Husband’s mom, Karen Husband, who owns and operates the Boston Dreams cafe in Windsor, has had to ferry her son to meetings with police departments because, as Husband explained, he’s been so busy on his backpack project that taking his driver’s license test has been “pushed to the bottom of my list as it comes to scheduling priorities.”)
Husband’s first prototypes were shipped last week to police departments in Washington, Boston, Colorado Springs and Oklahoma City for testing and further feedback.
Frank Nogueira, an officer with the Boston Police Department’s SWAT team, was one of the first in law enforcement to respond to Husband’s queries and offered some advice — for example, Nogueira suggested that Husband make the backpack large enough to fit a unfolding nylon stretcher, which is about the size of a water bottle when compacted.
Nogueira currently is waiting for Husband’s prototype to arrive so he can see first hand what the two have been discussing for several months. “I think he’s on the right track,” Nogueira said. But at the same time, “I let him know it’s a tough market. There are a lot of companies out there and so many different designs with different packs. Casey’s got his work cut out for him, in terms of carving a niche.”
Spencer, Windsor’s capstone coordinator, said whether Husband is able to evolve his capstone project into a business is almost secondary compared to the benefits Husband already has reaped from the project.
“I see his current experience in what he’s winning in communication and marketing skills,” Spencer says. “He’s the kind of kid who is going to have 10 ideas in the next 10 years. It’s going to make him very valuable to another organization or employer.”
