New audio obtained by CNN shows that Texas’ top law enforcement agency knew children were trapped inside Robb Elementary more than 30 minutes before someone shot the gunman and rescued them.
Less than two minutes after acting Uvalde Police Chief Lt. Mariano Pargas received details that children were alive among classmates who were massacred in their classroom, essentially the same information was shared with someone at the Department of Public Safety (DPS).
Pargas, 65, resigned Thursday, two days before a “special meeting” called by the Uvalde municipality to decide his fate. The rare meeting Saturday afternoon was planned after CNN revealed it knew a girl was calling from the classroom saying eight or nine children were still alive and she was unable to organize help.
It’s unclear how DPS’ internal investigation is looking into the communication failures. The department announced it is reviewing the actions of the 91 DPS officers who arrived at Robb Elementary on May 24, the day 19 children and two teachers died while a shooter lingered in classrooms for 77 minutes.
Those failures would include what happened at headquarters in Austin, as well as how information was shared via phone, text and radio.
New audio obtained by CNN reveals a woman from “DPS in Austin” calling Uvalde police dispatchers to get more information apparently to give to DPS special teams dispatched to help, including SWAT.
The operator is visibly shocked as she gets the details that the murders took place at an elementary school.
“Robb Elementary? Oh my God,” he says.
When the dispatcher tells her, “We have several DOAs (deaths),” she interrupts, “Are you kidding me?”
“I’m not,” replies the sender.
“Oh my god,” sighs the DPS employee. “OKAY.”
She gets details about the shooter and that he is still at the school with students before ending the call at about 12:20 p.m.
CNN does not know the caller’s DPS rank or where else he may have shared the information with his agency.
DPS has not responded to CNN’s questions about the call and what happened after it was made.
But it’s clear that the information given in the phone call between Uvalde and Austin — that children were at school with the shooter and that people had already been killed — was not adequately shared.
Statewide DPS assists local law enforcement agencies with major incidents and has specialized equipment and teams that smaller city and county forces may not have.
Multiple teams were sent to Uvalde, but the crucial information that should have supercharged the response and focused on stopping the killer and saving the victims instead of waiting for him outside, was not given to them.
While Pargas could have changed the momentum of the stalled operation, as did other on-scene leaders, so did the DPS leaders.
But the urgency of children and teachers needing help seems to have receded into a communication quagmire.
Capt. John Miller, the DPS SWAT commander, deployed his entire team when they were told about the active shooter around noon on May 24, even though almost everyone was at least 175 miles away, he told an investigator, according to interview records obtained . from CNN.
But once they were on the road, they got no new information, he said. “Initially the word was that there’s a shooter with a barricade, but he’s shooting at law enforcement at a school,” he said. “There was no word after that about whether there were any hostages.”
He said he then spent several minutes trying to figure out what was going on so he could make an appropriate plan, critically to account for any innocent people with the shooter.
“For the next 40 minutes, the barrage of phone calls and texts on my end was trying to figure it out,” he told the investigator.
Only one member of Miller’s team made it to Robb Elementary before law enforcement breached the classroom and killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m.
And his first task was also to find out if any children had been trapped.
“I spoke to the highway patrol sergeant and asked her if there were still any children inside the building that the shooter was in,” said Sgt. Lucas Patterson told a Texas Ranger investigating the response, according to records obtained by CNN. “She wasn’t positive about it from information, she was trying to verify.”
The failed information flow didn’t just affect the DPS SWAT team that was called to the call to Uvalde at 12:18 p.m.
DPS Capt. Joel Betancourt told investigators, “The only thing reported was that it was a barrier issue. There were no more shots. We didn’t know there were children or anyone injured in the building like we are now. At the time, it was just one person in a room.”
Even so, Betancourt radioed the breaching team to halt their advance up the grade, believing a better team was on the way, as CNN previously reported. No one answered his call.
That breach that stopped the gunman came more than 30 minutes after Parga and DPS were given information about trapped children.
DPS’s actions that day, and immediately afterward, when senior leaders gave conflicting accounts of what had happened and how they were tasked with investigating the response, continue to trouble Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who told CNN again that the week that he believed there. it was a cover up. DPS Director Steven McCraw rejected that suggestion.
A total of 376 law enforcement officers from 23 agencies – including 91 men and women from DPS – responded to Robb’s massacre.
Along with personnel, an arsenal of specialized equipment was developed, much of it from DPS, apparently without a clear plan for whether it was needed.
“Two DPS helicopters, one with an AUF package – one aerial sniper – and that will take about 25-30 minutes,” says an officer at the Uvalde mission just after 12:30 p.m. After asking for a “real-time update” and confirming that the location was Robb Elementary, he added, “I’m trying not to be a pest, but we’re trying to coordinate.”
