Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo decided that the group of officers should wait to confront the assailant, believing that the active attack was over, according to Colonel McCraw .
The crisis ended shortly after officers used a janitor’s keys to open the classroom door, entered the room and shot and killed Ramos.
Colonel McCraw said the commander at the scene believed at the time that Ramos was there alone, with no survivors, after his initial assault.
“I’m not advocating anything, but going back in the timeline, there was a bombing, hundreds of rounds were bombed in four minutes, okay, those two classrooms,” Colonel McCraw said.
“Any subsequent dismissal was sporadic and went to the door. So the belief is that maybe no one is alive anymore.”
But records show that the 911 call received at 12:16 p.m. reported eight or nine children still alive.
“It was a wrong decision, period,” he said Friday, after reading transcripts of children’s calls from a police inaction timeline for nearly 90 minutes of horror.