The head of the Texas state police pronounced the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting an “abject failure,” telling lawmakers that there were enough officers and firepower on the scene to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building.
Col. Steve McCraw also said officers would have found the door to the classroom where the assailant was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.
Instead, police with rifles stood in a hallway for over an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Tuesday in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing.
The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside by design, according to McCraw, who also said a teacher reported before the shooting that the lock was broken. Yet there is no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff, McCraw said. He said police instead waited for keys.
“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” McCraw said of the door. ”How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
Delays in the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations. Testimony was scheduled to resume Wednesday.
McCraw lit into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who McCraw said was in charge, saying: “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
Arredondo made “terrible decisions,” said McCraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade.”
Arredondo has said he didn’t consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. He has declined repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.
The police chief testified for about five hours Tuesday at a closed-door hearing of a Texas House committee also investigating the tragedy, according to the panel chair.
Senate members hearing the latest details reacted with fury, some decrying Arredondo as incompetent and saying the delay cost lives. Others pressed McCraw on why state troopers on the scene didn’t take charge. McCraw said the troopers did not have legal authority to do so.
The public safety chief presented a timeline that said three officers with two rifles entered the building less than three minutes behind the gunman, an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle. Several more officers entered minutes after that. Two of the officers who went into the hallway early on were grazed by gunfire.
The decision by police to hold back went against much of what law enforcement has learned in the two decades since the Columbine High …read more
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