Top lawman blasts Uvalde response
Testimony: Police could have ended rampage early on
Police had enough officers and firepower on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they would have found the door to the classroom where he was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it, the head of the Texas state police testified Tuesday, pronouncing the law enforcement response an “abject failure.”
Officers with rifles instead stood in a hallway for over an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” Col. Steve Mccraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing.
The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside, according to Mccraw, who said a teacher reported before the shooting that the lock was broken. Yet there is no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff, Mccraw said. He said police instead waited for keys.
“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” Mccraw said of the door. ”How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
Delays in the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.
Mccraw lit into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who Mccraw said was in charge, saying: “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
Arredondo made “terrible decisions,” said Mccraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade.”
Arredondo has said he didn’t consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. He has declined repeated requests for comment from the AP, and his lawyer did not immediately respond Tuesday.
The police chief testified for about five hours Tuesday at a closed-door hearing of a Texas House committee that is also investigating the tragedy, according to the panel chair.
The decision by police to hold back went against much of what law enforcement has learned in the two decades since the Columbine shooting in Colorado, Mccraw said.