A damning report and newly released footage from a Texas school shooting have again prompted questions over the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to Robb Elementary School, but "systemic failures" created a chaotic scene that lasted more than an hour before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a report from investigators released Sunday.
he nearly 80-page report was the first to criticise both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the inaction.
Altogether, the report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy amounted to the fullest account to date of one of the worst school shootings in US history.
Some families blasted police as cowards and demanded resignations.
"At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritise saving innocent lives over their own safety," the report said.
The gunman fired approximately 142 rounds inside the building, and it is "almost certain" that at least 100 shots came before any officer entered, according to the report.
Hours after the report was released, Uvalde officials separately made public for the first time hours of body camera footage from the city's police officers who responded to the attack.
It includes video of several officers reacting to word from a dispatcher, roughly 30 minutes after the shooting began, that a child in the room had called 911.
"The room is full of victims. Child 911 call," an officer says.
Other body camera video from Uvalde Staff Sgt Eduardo Canales, the head of the city's SWAT team, shows the officer approaching the classrooms when gunfire rings out at 11.37am.
Canales asks if he's bleeding, and later says he's bleeding from his ear.
A minute later, Canales says: "Dude, we've got to get in there. We've got to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We've got to get in there."
Another officer can be heard saying "DPS is sending their people."
It is 72 minutes later, at 12.50pm, when officers finally breach the classrooms and kill the shooter.
The report — the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives and released to family members on Sunday.
According to the report, 376 law enforcement officers were at the school. The overwhelming majority of those who responded were federal and state law enforcement. That included nearly 150 US Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials.
"Other than the attacker, the Committee did not find any 'villains' in the course of its investigation," the report said. "There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making."
The report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than the school district police — which the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police force, previously faulted for not going into the room sooner.
"In this crisis, no responder seized the initiative to establish an incident command post," the report read.
There is no ethical or even remotely psychologically healthy context in which this or any LE personnel would have been laughing or smiling in Uvalde — he's in a building where children and their teachers are being murdered in real time. pic.twitter.com/1cU3SSmW0I
— Dr. Jack Brown (@DrGJackBrown) July 14, 2022
A spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety did not immediately return a request for comment Sunday.
Family members of the victims in Uvalde received copies of the report Sunday before it was released to the public.
"It's a joke. They're a joke. They've got no business wearing a badge. None of them do," Vincent Salazar, grandfather of 11-year-old Layla Salazer, said Sunday.
The report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement who were on the scene of the shooting.
Flowers that had been piled high in the city's central square had been removed as of Sunday, leaving a few stuffed animal maps scattered around the fountains alongside photos of some of the children who were killed.
No single officer has received as much scrutiny since the shooting as Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who resigned from his newly appointed seat on the City Council after the shooting. Arredondo told the committee he treated the shooters as "barricaded subject", according to the report, and defended never treating the scene as an active-shooter situation because he did not have visual contact with the gunman.
Arredondo also tried to find a key for the classrooms, but no one ever bothered to see if the doors were locked, according to the report.
"Arredondo's search for a key consumed his attention and wasted precious time, delaying the breach of the classrooms," the report read.
The report criticised as "lackadaisical" the approach of the hundreds of officers who surrounded the school and said that they should have recognised that Arredondo remaining in the school without reliable communication was "inconsistent" with him being the scene commander. The report concluded that some officers waited because they relied on bad information while others "had enough information to know better".
A nearly 80-minute hallway surveillance video published by the Austin American-Statesman this week publicly showed for the first time a hesitant and haphazard tactical response, which the head of Texas' state police has condemned as a failure and some Uvalde residents have blasted as cowardly.
Calls for police accountability have grown in Uvalde since the shooting. So far, only one officer from the scene of the deadliest school shooting in Texas history is known to be on leave.
The report is the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including another led by the Justice Department. A report earlier this month by tactical experts at Texas State University alleged that a Uvalde police officer had a chance to stop the gunman before he went inside the school armed with an AR-15.
But in an example of the conflicting statements and disputed accounts since the shooting, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin has said that never happened. That report had been done at the request of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which McLaughlin has increasingly criticised and accused of trying to minimise the role of its troopers during the massacre.
Steve McCraw, the head of Texas DPS, has called the police response an abject failure.
The committee didn't "receive medical evidence" to show that police breaching the classroom sooner would have saved lives, but it concluded that "it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue".
- AP
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