A memorial to the victims of the Robb Elementary mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas. Photo / Ivan Pierre Aguirre, The New York Times
The director of the Department of Public Safety said that police officers wasted time looking for a classroom door key that was "never needed."
The head of the Texas State Police offered a pointed and emphatic rebuke of the police response to a shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, calling it "an abject failure" that ran counter to decades of training.
In his comments before a special state Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children inside a pair of connected classrooms May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.
But, he said, the on-scene commander "decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children." McCraw, speaking forcefully, said the same commander had delayed confronting the gunman because he "waited for a key that was never needed."
McCraw said that the doors to the classrooms could be locked only from the outside. "There's no way to lock the door from the inside. And there's no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside," he said, adding that a teacher had made a request for the locks to be fixed, believing they were broken, before the shooting.
"I don't believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured," McCraw said. "The door was unsecured."
He said that the on-scene commander was the chief of the school district police department, Pete Arredondo, who was the highest-ranking person at the scene. The chief has said he did not consider himself in charge.
"If you're going to issue commands, if you're going to direct action," McCraw said, "you're the on-scene commander."
The delayed confrontation with the gunman, McCraw said, ran counter to "everything we have learned over the past two decades."
McCraw brought poster boards showing a timeline of the shooting and police response at the school May 24, photos of doors at the school, and two maps depicting how the gunman and police officers entered the school and then the two connected classrooms. He walked between them as he presented investigators' findings to the assembled state senators.
The outline presented by McCraw confirmed details first reported by The New York Times over a series of articles during the past month, including that the officers who first arrived inside the school — two minutes after the gunman — had AR-15-style rifles that could have been used against the gunman; that a school district police officer informed other officers at 11:48am that his wife, a teacher, had been shot but was still alive inside the classroom, providing them with a clear indication that people inside the classroom were in urgent need of help; and that shields that could have been used to protect officers making an entry into the classroom had arrived outside the classroom before 12pm, nearly an hour before officers finally went in.
McCraw also presented new details, such as the exact time that Arredondo went into the school, at 11:36am, three minutes after the gunman entered the classrooms and began firing.
The timeline also noted that, by 11:54am, a Texas Ranger was inside the school, one of at least 12 members of the State Police who responded between the time when the gunman began shooting in classrooms at 11:33am and when officers killed him at 12:50pm.
And, in response to questions from a state senator about the locks on the classroom doors, McCraw said there had been requests about fixing the classroom door locks: A teacher thought that the lock was broken, he said.
The testimony was unusually charged because it followed weeks of little to no official updates on the investigation and came after what had been a halting and troubled initial effort by top state officials to provide details about the shooting and the police response.
The Department of Public Safety stopped holding public briefings within a week of the May 24 shooting after several of the details shared by officials, including McCraw and Governor Greg Abbott, turned out to be incorrect. The information that had be corrected included the length of time it took for officers to fire the first shots at the gunman (not immediately, but one hour and 17 minutes after he began shooting inside the school) and how he had gained access to the building (not through a door that had been propped open, but through one that was unlocked.)
The State Police stopped providing updates and began referring media inquiries to the local district attorney, Christina Mitchell Busbee, who has declined all requests for interviews and has not held any news conferences.
The shifting narrative surrounding the massacre, which left 19 children and two teachers dead, quickly undermined trust in the official accounts of the shooting and created tension between state officials and those in Uvalde, most of whom rallied around their city police department and Arredondo, who recently took a seat on the City Council.
A lawyer for Arredondo did respond to a request for comment.
Those tensions only grew when McCraw held a news conference three days after the shooting and said that Arredondo had been in charge of the police response and had made the "wrong decision" in not trying to immediately confront the gunman.
Soon after that news conference, on May 27, the mayor of Uvalde, Don McLaughlin, requested that the federal Department of Justice conduct its own investigation, independent of the one by the Texas Rangers, who report to McCraw. The state Legislature is also conducting an inquiry, meaning there are now at least three separate investigations into what happened.
Without official briefings, details emerged by other means, including through investigatory documents, surveillance video and transcripts of police body camera recordings reviewed by the Times.
The Times revealed that Arredondo had arrived at the school without his police radio and focused on finding keys to the classrooms, even though it was not apparent in the videos that anyone had checked the classroom door to see if it was locked. It also reported that police supervisors had been told there were people alive but wounded in the classrooms; that the officer had been on the phone with his wife, a teacher, after she was shot but before she died; and that a Uvalde police officer passed up an opportunity to take a shot at the gunman outside the school, fearing he might hit children.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: J. David Goodman
Photographs by: Ivan Pierre Aguirre and Callaghan O'Hare
© 2022 THE NEW YORK TIMES
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