Authorities had enough police at the scene of the Uvalde school shooting to arrest the shooter three minutes after he entered the building, the Texas Public Safety official said Tuesday, calling it a “failure.” lamentable” the response of the police on May 24.
Instead, police armed with rifles hovered around for almost an hour before finally storming the classroom and shooting down the gunman, who had just killed 19 children and two teachers.
It turned out that the door to that classroom could not be locked from the inside and there was no evidence that officers tried to open it while the shooter was inside, Colonel Steve said. McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. Instead, he said, the police waited for the key. “Why didn’t you probe the handle to see if the door was really locked?” asked the statewide official.
Colonel McCraw was testifying Tuesday at a Texas Senate hearing on the police handling of the May 24 tragedy at the Uvalde school. Delays in law enforcement response have been investigated by the federal government, Texas government and local government.
“Clearly not enough training was given in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-scene commander,” McCraw said of Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo.
Eight minutes after the gunman burst into the school, an officer pointed out that police had a crowbar that could have been used to kick down the classroom door, McCraw said. Nineteen minutes after the shooter entered, the first ballistic shield was brought into the building by police, the witness said.
The state’s Director of Public Safety listed to the Senate committee on Tuesday a series of missed opportunities that day, miscommunications and other errors: Chief Arredondo did not have a radio with him; police and sheriff radios weren’t working inside the school; only the radios of the Border Patrol agents at the scene worked inside, and they didn’t work perfectly; certain diagrams of the school that the police used to coordinate their intervention were erroneous.
In the days and weeks following the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and incorrect accounts of what happened that day, sometimes retracting statements hours after they were made. But Mr McCraw assured lawmakers on Tuesday that everything he testified was “corroborated”.
With Jamie Stengle