Instead, police officers with rifles stood and waited for more than an hour, while the gunman carried out the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Colonel Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, testified at a State Senate hearing about the handling of the tragedy by police. Delays in law enforcement response have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations. “Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, simple and straightforward. Because terrible decisions were made by the local commander,” McCraw said of Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief. Eight minutes after the perpetrator entered the building, an officer said police had a crowded “hooligan” that they could use to break down a classroom door, McCrew said. Nineteen minutes after the gunman entered, the first ballistic shield was inserted into the building by police, the witness testified. McCraw told the Senate committee that Arredondo decided to put the lives of the officers above the lives of the children.
Confirms the radio report
The head of public safety began to describe to the committee a number of missed opportunities, communication failures and other errors:
Arredondo did not have a radio with him, confirming previous news. The police and sheriff’s radios did not work inside the school. Only the Border Patrol’s radio stations on stage worked inside the school, and even these did not work perfectly. Some school diagrams used by the police to coordinate their response were wrong. The classroom door could not be locked from the inside.
State police initially said the gunman entered the school through an outside door opened by a teacher, but McGraw said the teacher had closed the door and could only be locked from the outside. “There is no way he can tell the door is locked,” McGraw said. “It went straight through.” CLOCKS The US Senate hears from sad relatives of the victims of the shootings in New York, Texas:
Survivors of mass shootings, families of victims urge US Congress to take action on gun control
The US House of Representatives’s Oversight and Reform Committee hears from families of victims and survivors of the Uvalde and Buffalo mass shootings. 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 urged 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. Arredondo has repeatedly denied requests for comment from the Associated Press. The 18-year-old gunman used an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle. 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. “Everything I have submitted today is being confirmed,” McCraw assured lawmakers.
