Photo: The Canadian Press
Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, leaves flowers at a memorial site on Thursday, May 26, 2022, for the victims killed in this week’s shooting at elementary school in Uvalde, Texas. (Photo by AP / Jae C. Hong)
As investigators delve deeper into law enforcement’s response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, there are a number of disturbing questions about what officers at the scene knew as the deadly attack unfolded. .
Did any of them know that the children were trapped in a classroom with the gunman? Was this potentially critical information passed on to the incident commander at the scene? And did the officers challenge the commander’s decision not to rush the classroom quickly?
Authorities have not released audio for 911 calls or radio communications, but have confirmed that dispatchers received 911 calls in a panic from students trapped in the closed classroom with the gunman while officers they waited in an outside hallway.
In an apparent disruption of communications, the commander who supervised the police at the scene, the school district police chief Pete Arredondo, was never informed that the children were calling 911 from the school, the senator said on Thursday. of the state of Texas Roland Gutierrez.
Gutierrez told The Associated Press on Friday that the state agency investigating the shooting determined that Arredondo was not carrying a police radio while the massacre took place.
Arredondo has also been criticized for failing to order officers to enter the classroom immediately and overthrow the gunman. Steven McCraw, head of the Texas Department of Homeland Security, said Arredondo believed the active shooting had become a hostage situation and that the chief had made the “wrong decision.”
Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the attack last week on Robb Elementary, the deadliest shooting at a school in nearly a decade. Seventeen others were injured. Funeral services have begun this week.
Arredondo has not responded to repeated requests for AP interviews, and phone messages left at the school’s police headquarters have not been returned.
There have been other cases where officers at the scene of a crime did not receive critical information from a police dispatcher, often because the dispatcher did not follow protocols, said Dave Warner, a retired police officer. and expert in International Emergency Academies. Office.
He cited a 2009 domestic riot call in Pittsburgh in which a woman told a 911 operator that her son was armed. This information was never passed on to responding officers. When they arrived, the man opened fire and eventually killed three officers and seriously injured two.
“It’s an old case, but it’s still very relevant today,” Warner said.
Warner said protocols for 911 dispatchers handling calls in active shooter situations also specifically warn that the law enforcement response should not be changed based on the time that has elapsed since the shots were heard. for the last time.
Warner said these protocols were developed in part as a result of the 2007 mass shooting at Virginia Tech, where one student killed 32 people.
In this case, the gunman first killed two people in a bedroom. Police and school officials thought the gunman had fled the campus and the danger had passed. But instead, he moved to another part of campus a couple of hours later and continued his murderous assassination.
Warner said the protocols emphasize that dispatchers should not think a shootout is over “just because the caller can no longer see the shooter or hear the shots being fired.”
The protocols also describe key questions for 911 dispatchers to ask users who call in cases of active shooters, including the types of weapons involved, the number and location of suspects, and whether the caller can evacuate the building safe.
Uvalde’s gunman, Salvador Ramos, 18, spent about 80 minutes inside the school before he was killed by law enforcement officials, according to an official timeline.
Since the shooting, law enforcement and state officials have struggled to present an accurate account of how police responded, sometimes providing conflicting information or withdrawing some statements hours later.
Many of those details are likely to become clearer after reviewing 911 calls and police radio communications, said Fritz Reber, a 27-year veteran and former captain of the Chula Vista Police Department in California. , who has studied 911 sending systems.
The operators of a 911 center usually transmit the information of the callers in writing to a dispatcher, who then transmits it to the field agents by radio.
At the scene of major events, a specific radio channel is usually set up so that all local, state, and federal agencies can communicate with each other, Reber said. It is unclear whether this was done in Uvalde.
Reber said one of the reasons dispatchers may not pass on information to field officers is that dispatchers do not want to overload the channel with details that the police at the scene would already know.
“The assumption is that the agents are there and will know more about what’s going on than the people who call 911,” he said.
Thor Eells, a former commander of a 16-member SWAT team in Colorado Springs, Colorado, and director of the National Tactical Officers Association, said another key question is how many people worked at the 911 call center that covers Uvalde.
“A lot of 911 calls were being made and in my experience this could lead to information overload,” he said. “When the 911 call center is overflowing, it’s extremely difficult to make sure you have a timely flow of information.”
There have been disruptions in communication during other mass shootings in Texas, and experts say smaller regional shipping centers are often filled with calls during a major emergency.
Police communications were a problem in 2019 when a gunman shot and killed seven people and injured more than two dozen during an attack in Odessa, Texas.
Authorities said gunman Seth Aaron Ator, 36, called 911 before and after the shootings, but a failure to communicate between agencies – not all of which operated on the same radio channel – slowed the response. . Ator was able to walk about 10 miles before officers shot and killed him.