On the contrary, rifle police officers stood and waited in the school corridor for almost an hour, while the armed person attacked the May 24th at the Rob Elementary School that left 19 children dead and two teachers. The 18-year-old gunman used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. “I do not care if you wear flip flops and shorts, you go in,” said Col. Steve McCrow, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, in a shocking testimony at a Senate hearing. The classroom door could not be locked from the inside, but there was no indication that police tried to open it while the gunman was in hiding, said Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety. testimony at a State Senate hearing. Instead, he said, police were waiting for a key. Tragic failure. The words used by Texas DPS Director Steve McGraw in a scathing gesture of police reaction to #Uvalde, namely, the commander on stage. This is during the filing for the special session of the Texas Senate committee. pic.twitter.com/FUJSaDFvq9 – Chris Sadeghi (@chrissadeghi) June 21, 2022 “I have great reason to believe he was never insured,” McCraw said of the door. “How about testing the door and seeing if it is locked?” Delays in law enforcement response have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations. McCraw fired Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who was in charge, saying: officers before the lives of children “. “Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, simple and straightforward. Because terrible decisions were made by the local commander,” McCroe said. He said investigators could not “interview” Arredondo again. The head of public security presented a timetable stating that three officers with two rifles entered the building less than three minutes after the gunman. Several more officers arrived a few minutes later. The police decision to stop was contrary to much of what law enforcement had learned in the two decades since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado that killed 13 people, McCraw said. “You are not waiting for a SWAT team. You have an officer, that is enough,” he said. He also said that officers do not have to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw. Also, eight minutes after the perpetrator entered, a police officer said police had a “hooligan” crowbar that they could use to break down a classroom door, McCrew said. Using a diagram of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw testifies at the Texas Senate hearing in the state capital on Tuesday, June 21, 2022, in Austin, Texas. Eric Gay / AP State police initially said the gunman entered the school through an outside door opened by a teacher. However, McCraw said the teacher had locked the door, but unknowingly, it could only be locked from the outside. The gunman “went straight,” McCraw said. The gunman was well acquainted with the building, having attended the fourth class in the same classes where he carried out the attack, McCraw said. The gunman never contacted police that day, the public security chief said. Texas Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the entire lockdown requirement and sniper training is useless if the doors cannot be locked. Bettencourt challenged Arredondo to testify in public, saying he should have resigned immediately. He angrily pointed out that shots were heard while the police were waiting in the corridor. “There are at least six shots fired during this period,” he said. “Why is this person shooting? He is killing someone. However, this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.” McCraw spent nearly five hours providing the clearest picture of the massacre, describing a number of other missed opportunities, communication errors and mistakes based on a survey of about 700 interviews. Among the mistakes:

Arredondo did not have a radio with him. The police and sheriff’s radios did not work inside the school. Only the radios of the Border Patrol agents on stage did and did not work perfectly. Some school diagrams used by the police to coordinate their response were wrong.

Questions about the answer to law enforcement began days after the massacre. McCraw said three days after the shooting that Arredondo had made the “wrong decision” when he chose not to invade the classroom for more than 70 minutes, even when fourth-graders trapped in two classrooms were desperately calling 911 for help and distressed parents outside the school begged officers to go inside. Arredondo later said he did not consider himself responsible and assumed that someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. Rejected repeated requests for comment from the Associated Press. As for the time it took for police officers to enter the classroom, McCraw said: “In an active sniper environment, this is unacceptable.” “This is what our profession did a decade ago. This is what it did,” he said of the Uvalde police response. Crosses adorn a makeshift memorial to the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas on May 31, 2022. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images Police have not found anything that could be a red flag in the perpetrator’s school disciplinary records, but they learned through interviews that he indulged in animal cruelty. “He was walking with a bag of dead cats,” McCraw said. In the days and weeks following the shooting, authorities made conflicting and inaccurate reports of what happened, sometimes withdrawing statements a few hours after they were fired. But McCraw assured lawmakers: “Everything I have tabled today is being confirmed.” McCraw said that if he could make just one recommendation, it would be for more training. He also said that a “sale” should be placed on every state patrol car in Texas, including shield and door-breaking tools. “I want every soldier to know how to break through and have the tools to do so,” he said. The families of those who lost their lives during the shootings are demanding accountability from law enforcement authorities after the publication of a photo of armed police officers in the school corridor by the American statesman of Austin. The images examined by the newspaper show a time mark that was taken almost an hour before the gunman was stopped.
Many members of the victims’ families made emotional appeals during a school council meeting on Monday to dismiss Arredondo. “We failed at Pete Arredondo,” said Brett Cross, Uziyah Garcia’s uncle and guardian. “He failed our children, our teachers, our parents and our city, and by keeping him in your staff, you continue to disappoint us.” “My mom died protecting her students. But who was protecting my mom?” said Liliana Garcia, daughter of Irma Garcia, one of two teachers who died trying to protect their students. A senior deputy sheriff told the New York Times that two Uvalde police officers also missed a fleeting opportunity to shoot the gunman before entering the school. The unidentified officers, one of whom was armed with an AR-15 rifle, said they were afraid of hitting children playing in the line of fire outside the school, the deputy chief Ricardo Rios of the neighboring Zavalla county told the newspaper.

Shot school in Uvalde, Texas

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