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The 18-year-old who massacred 19 students and two teachers in Uvalde on May 24 had no experience with firearms before his uproar began. He pointed to an elementary school with an active shooter policy that had been deemed appropriate, but also with a long history of open doors.
No one was able to stop the gunman from carrying out the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, in part because of the “systemic failures and blatant poor decision-making” of almost everyone involved who was in a position of power, a new investigation into the shooting. has found.
On Sunday, a Texas House committee released the most comprehensive account of the shooter to date, its planning, its attack, and the awkward response it provoked.
The 77-page report, reviewed by The Texas Tribune, offers a doomed portrait of a family unable to recognize warning signs, a school district that had strayed from strict adherence to its safety plan, and a police response that ignored their own training of active shooters. .
He explains how the gunman, who investigators believe had never fired a weapon before May 24, was able to store military-style rifles, accessories and ammunition without arousing suspicion from authorities, allegedly entering a school unhindered. safe and indiscriminately kill children and adults.
In all, 376 law enforcement officers — a force larger than the garrison defending the Poplar — went down to school in a chaotic, uncoordinated scene that lasted more than an hour. The report says the group lacked clear leadership, basic communications and enough urgency to put an end to the gunman.
In particular, the investigation is the first so far to criticize the inaction of state and federal law enforcement, while other reports and public accounts of officials have directly blamed the police chief of the Uvalde school, Pete Arredondo, for his role as incident commander, and others. local police who were among the first to arrive.
The report also reveals for the first time that the vast majority of respondents were federal and state law enforcement: 149 were the U.S. Border Patrol and 91 were state police officers, whose responsibilities include responding to “mass attacks. in public places “. There were 25 UValde police officers and 16 sheriff’s deputies. The Arredondo school police force had five of the officers at the scene. The rest of the force was made up of law enforcement from the neighboring county, U.S. marshals and Federal Drug Enforcement Agency officials.
Investigators said that in the absence of a strong incident commander, another officer could have (and should have) stepped up the task.
“These local officials were not the only ones expected to provide the necessary leadership during this tragedy,” the report said. “Dinners of response officers from numerous law enforcement agencies, many of whom were better trained and equipped than school district police, quickly arrived at the scene.”
The other respondents “could have helped address the chaos that is unfolding.”
The three members of the committee: Representative Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock; Deputy Joe Moody, D-El Paso, and former Supreme Court Judge Eva Guzman said they intended to create a comprehensive account that the Legislature can use to craft policies to prevent future massacres. The trio also tried to present an accurate narrative to the public, in contrast to several contradictory and retracted accounts provided by other officials, including the governor and state police, in the seven weeks following the tragedy that have undermined residents’ confidence in ongoing research. .
They dedicated the document to the 21 people killed in the shooting, and first unveiled their findings during a private meeting with Uvalde residents on Sunday.
“The Committee is now issuing this interim report, believing that the victims, their families and the entire Uvalde community have already waited too long to get answers and transparency,” the report says.
Law enforcement failures
The failure of the police to quickly subdue the shooter has been met with widespread public condemnation and criticism by fellow law enforcement officials. At its core, the committee’s report echoes previous criticisms by police tactics experts: that instead of following the active doctrine developed after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, it dictates that officers immediately confronted the active shooters, Robb Elementary police withdrew after being attacked. and then waited for a backup.
“They did not give priority to saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” the committee said in its report.
The report lists a myriad of law enforcement errors, which spread far beyond any commander or agency. They were not derived from a lack of manpower, but from an absence of leadership and effective communications.
In interviews conducted or obtained by the committee, police officers said they assumed the Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo was in command or did not know who was in charge. Several described the scene as a “chaos” or a “cluster.”
The report listed several ways an effective out-of-school incident commander could have helped: the commander may have noticed that the radios were not working properly and found a better way to communicate. They could have found a school master key faster to enter the classroom where the shooter was barricaded, or suggest that you check to make sure the door was closed. Or they could have urged officers to find another way to enter the classroom.
But Arredondo told The Texas Tribune in June that he did not consider himself the commander of the incident after he was one of the first officers to arrive at the school. He said he assumed another outside officer would play that role.
The committee did not find this argument persuasive. He cited the active response plan of the school district shooters, co-author of Arredondo, which states that the boss “will become the person who controls the efforts of all law enforcement and the first to arrive at the scene.” The school district put him on administrative leave last month.
But the blame for the faulty police response extends far beyond the school district police chief of a six-officer department, the report concludes.
The report criticized other officers and law enforcement, many of them better trained, for failing to fill the leadership gap left by Arredondo’s inaction.
“In this crisis, no response took the initiative to establish an incident command post,” the committee wrote. “Despite an atmosphere of obvious chaos, the classification officers of other responding agencies did not approach the UValde CISD police chief or any other person perceived as a commander to point out the lack and need for a command post, or to offer you that specific point.
In testimony before a Senate committee on June 21, Department of Public Safety Commissioner Steve McCraw said some officers at the scene observed that Arredondo was not acting as an incident commander.
Earlier, McCraw rejected the idea that his state soldiers could or should have taken control of Arredondo.
“Let’s say a DPS captain shows up in a situation, he decides he will exercise control,” McCraw told senators last month. “Well, first of all, he doesn’t have the information. And you know what? He may not be as sharp as the commander in the scene there is … so I resist cheering or even thinking about any situation where you would like some level of hierarchy where a larger police department gets to enter and take over. ”
However, when Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district includes Uvalde, McCraw acknowledged that facing an active shooter is more important than deferring to an officer who, according to protocol, is the legitimate commander. of the incident.
Instead, the report said Border Patrol agents decided they would rape the classroom without asking permission from Arredondo. This team killed the gunman at 12:51 p.m., ending the confrontation.
Despite the collective failure of the police to act decisively, the committee discovered individual cases in which officers acted bravely without instructions.
When officers were kicked out right after entering the school, Uvalde police department lieutenant Javier Martínez tried to confront the shooter again. He advanced down the hall with “an obvious desire to maintain momentum and ‘stop the murder.'” No agent followed him, and he stopped. Several law enforcement officers told the committee that they believed that if others had followed him as support, he could have come to the classroom and related to the shooter.
DPS Special Agent Luke Williams ignored a request to help secure an outside perimeter and entered the building to help clean the rooms. He found a student hiding in the bathroom of a boy with his legs raised so that he could not be seen. The boy refused to leave until Williams proved he was a police officer, which he did by displaying his badge under the stop door.
Williams then met a group of officers grouped at the end of the hallway where the shooter was and heard someone ask “don’t you know if …