A hard-to-find key to a locked classroom door was the main reason police waited 77 minutes to enter a Robb Elementary classroom to kill a gunman, stopping the massacre that claimed the life of 19 students and two teachers, police under fire. said the boss.
Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was in charge during the May 24 massacre in Uvalde, Texas, offered the explanation in a new interview with the Texas Tribune where he defended the late response from law enforcement after killing an 18-year-old. shooter Salvador Ramos.
Arredondo has been widely scrutinized by critics, who believe that lives could have been saved if the police had acted faster and reached the injured more quickly.
“Not a single responding agent hesitated, not even for a moment, to put himself at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the newspaper. “We responded to the information we had and had to adapt to everything we faced.”
The door to the classroom where Ramos stood had a steel jamb and could not be kicked, Arredondo told the newspaper. He spent more than an hour in the hallway trying dozens of keys.
“Every time I tried a key I was just praying,” Arredondo told the Texas Tribune. “The only thing that mattered to me right now was saving as many teachers and children as possible.”
People visit the memorials to the victims of the school shooting in Uvalde City Square on May 26, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. Getty Images
In the first 40 minutes, Arredondo says he was waiting to receive the set of keys. During this time, he called for tactical equipment and a sniper, while avoiding the gates, believing that it could cause Ramos to fire. Dozens of keys finally arrived, but none of them opened the door.
“My mind was to get there as quickly as possible, eliminate any threats and protect students and staff,” Arredondo said.
An hour and 17 minutes after Ramos began firing, killing schoolchildren with an AR-15-style pistol, police finally entered the classroom door and killed the gunman.
Arredondo’s account of the police response is not supported by the Texas Department of Homeland Security, which is investigating the shooting and the subsequent police response.
DPS said Arredondo mistakenly treated the shooting as a suspicious barricade incident, in which law enforcement negotiated with the gunman. Instead, he should have treated it as an active shooter situation, where the number one priority for officers is to stop the shooting by killing the gunman or arresting him.
An hour and 17 minutes after Ramos started firing, police finally entered the classroom door and killed the suspect.
“With the benefit of the retrospective, where I’m sitting now, of course, it wasn’t the right decision. It was a wrong decision, period,” DPS Colonel Steven McCraw told a news conference on May 27.
Arredondo tried to talk to the gunman through the wall, but there was no answer, he told the newspaper.
The school district police chief also tried to justify his decision not to take his police radios to school with him, believing he needed both hands to shoot down the shooter instead of grabbing devices that could reveal his position if the gunman heard them. Arredondo also had no bulletproof vest, he told the newspaper.
“Our goal was to save as many lives as we could, and the removal of students from the classrooms by everyone involved saved more than 500 of our students and teachers from Uvalde before we had access to the shooter and eliminated the threat, “Arredondo said. dit.
But Arredondo’s decision not to take his radios with him made him unaware that the students were calling 911 from the two classrooms to which the gunman was directed, asking the police to stop him.
He also said that he did not consider himself the commander of the incident and thought that another officer had taken control of the organization of the various police agencies that responded.
A villain delivers flowers to a monument at Robb Elementary School to honor the victims on June 9, 2022 in Uvalde.AP
“I did not give any orders,” Arredondo said. “I asked for help and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”
Arredondo says he never told anyone not to enter the building, while acknowledging that he told officers to break windows from the outside so that students from other classrooms could be evacuated.
Some of the U.S. Border Patrol officers who responded to the school say they ignored the order not to enter the classroom, the New York Times reported. Arredondo did not object when the team entered the room.
Arredondo did not comment soon to avoid causing further pain to the families of the victims, he said. He has hired attorney George E. Hyde.
The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request for comment from The Post.