UVALDE, Texas — Children inside a Texas elementary school begged the police to enter their classroom and save them, frantically calling 911, as a team of 19 officers waited in the corridor for an hour because a commander believed the situation had shifted from active shooter to a barricaded subject, a state law enforcement officer said Friday.
“Of course, it wasn’t the right decision.” Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference, choking back tears. “It was the wrong decision. Period.”
With 19 officers inside, McCraw said, there were “plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done.” But the commander inside — Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde Consolidated School District chief of police — decided the team needed more equipment and officers to enter the classroom where the shooter was holed up. He said the team did not move to take out the gunman until a full Border Patrol tactical unit arrived.
Nineteen children and two teachers died in the massacre.
“Ultimately, this is tragic. What do you tell the parents of 19 kids or the families of two teachers?” McCraw said. “We’re not here to defend what happened. We’re here to report the facts.”
Law enforcement officials across the country were quick to criticize Tuesday’s police response, which ignored best practices adopted by Texas law enforcement to immediately send officers in to confront and kill active shooters.
“You’ve got to stop the bleed,” said Art Acevedo, former police chief of Houston, Austin and Miami. “You have to go in immediately. The kids were calling 911 for help.”
Travis Norton, a leader of the California Association of Tactical Officers’ after-action review team who has studied numerous mass shootings, said it is a common mistake in mass shooting situations to think “when the shooting stops, we stop.”
“That is the problem with the term ‘active shooter’: The shooter is still active if there are people in harm’s way,“ he said.
But law enforcement keeps making the same mistake, he said. From the 2016 Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the 2018 Borderline club shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, to the 2021 King Soopers grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on-scene commanders mistook a lack of shots for a barricade situation, Norton said. In contrast, when a gunman attacked a Pittsburgh mosque in 2018, officers did not stop when the killer stopped shooting.
Investigators in Uvalde are interviewing witnesses and poring over video to piece together a timeline that explains how the 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, was able to walk up to the school with a long gun, enter through an unlocked door and barricade himself inside a classroom for nearly an hour before he was shot and killed.
With pressure mounting to explain the delayed response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott scrapped plans to attend the National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston and will travel to the grieving town of Uvalde on Friday.
Earlier this week, Abbott hailed the speedy response of “valiant local officials” who he said had engaged the gunman before he entered Robb Elementary School.
“They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire,” the Republican governor said at a Wednesday news conference. “And it is a fact that because of their quick response, getting on the scene, being able to respond to the gunman and eliminate the gunman, they were able to save lives.”
Actually, the gunman roamed outside the school for 12 minutes before entering unchallenged through an unlocked door, according to a timeline given by Texas Ranger Victor Escalon on Thursday. About 90 minutes passed from when the gunman crashed his car outside the school at 11:28 a.m. until he was shot dead at 12:58 p.m.
That delay — as a crowd of anguished parents gathered outside and begged to get in to confront the gunman — has led to growing scrutiny of the law enforcement response to the deadliest U.S. school shooting in almost a decade. Some parents have criticized police for not stopping the shooter sooner, and San Antonio-area Democratic Rep. Joaquin Castro on Thursday urged the FBI to investigate local law enforcement actions.
Texas officials have repeatedly changed the narrative of the timeline, leaving unexplained how the shooter had time to get into the school after the crash, entered through an unlocked door and barricaded himself inside at least one classroom. They have also not explained why local law enforcement officers apparently spent an hour inside the school “negotiating” with an active shooter.
Ramos’ shooting rampage began just after 11 a.m. Tuesday, when he shot his grandmother in the face at her Uvalde home. According to officials, Ramos then posted a social media message declaring that “I’m going to shoot an elementary school” and drove off at a high speed in his grandmother’s pickup truck.
At 11:28 a.m., Ramos crashed the truck in a ditch and jumped out of the passenger side, carrying a rifle. He fired at two people at a nearby funeral home as he walked toward Robb Elementary, climbed a fence and crossed the school parking lot.
At 11:40 a.m., he walked around the west side of the one-story brick school, shot multiple rounds and entered through an unlocked door. After making his way down a series of short hallways, he turned left and entered an empty classroom. From there, he found an adjoining classroom full of students and opened fire, authorities said.
This has raised questions about security in a school district that has threat-assessment teams, a threat-reporting system, social media monitoring software, fences around schools and motion detectors to detect campus breaches. According to online district records, “teachers are instructed to keep their classroom doors closed and locked at all times.”
Four minutes after Ramos entered the school, officers with the Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department went inside. Hearing gunfire, they attempted to enter the classroom, authorities said, but some were shot or grazed and took cover.
Sporadic gunfire erupted as police attempted “negotiations,” Escalon said.
“During the negotiations, there wasn’t much gunfire apart from keeping officers at bay,” he said.
According to Texas law enforcement sources, the classroom door was locked and reinforced, preventing police from breaching it easily, and it took time to locate a key that could open it.
It was not until an hour after police entered the building that an off-duty U.S. Border Patrol tactical officer arrived and killed Ramos.
A Texas law- enforcement source told the Los Angeles Times that officers fired 15 shots when they finally entered the classroom. Radio communications indicate the officers reported the gunman was dead at 1 p.m.
Even though Uvalde is a small city of 16,000, its school district has its own police department, formed a few months after the 2018 school mass shooting in Parkland, Florida. It had six officers and one security guard. One of its newest hires, Officer Adrian Gonzalez, had been an assistant commander and SWAT training commander at the Uvalde Police Department for 10 years and had taken training courses in advanced SWAT tactics and how to respond to active shooters and rescue hostages.
“They failed,” said Carlos Ovalle, 32, a county worker who rushed to the school Tuesday in a bid to save his 8-year-old daughter, Makaylah, who survived. “Someone off duty got there faster than they did.”
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(Rector reported from Uvalde, Jarvie from Atlanta and Winton and Smith from Los Angeles.)
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