STATE COPS IN UVALDE BOTCH Pol: Troopers also stayed back
About 13 Texas state troopers were part of the botched law-enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting, in which 19 kids and two teachers were killed, a state senator said Tuesday.
The revelation is significant because the state Department of Public Safety, the agency investigating the massacre, had previously not disclosed that about a dozen of its own troopers were part of the failure to quickly take out the school gunman, and instead blamed Uvalde officers.
Sen. Roland Gutierrez told the Houston Chronicle that the head of the DPS admitted to him that troopers were among the officers who responded to the May 24 massacre along with Uvalde school district police, Uvalde city police and Border Patrol agents.
“He told me there was enough people and equipment to breach the door [of the classroom where the gunman was holed up],” Gutierrez said.
In the days immediately after the shooting, DPS Director Steve McCraw said the incident commander for the shooting was Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, and that it was Arredondo’s decision to wait about 77 minutes before breaching the classroom.
“It was the wrong decision. Period,” McCraw told reporters during a press conference.
McCraw claimed Arredondo kept about 19 law-enforcement officers from several agencies from breaking down the door to stop the shooting and possibly save victims who had been shot, but were alive and bleeding out.
Arredondo recently disputed the claim that he was the incident commander, telling the Texas Tribune that he never gave orders and didn’t even have his police radios with him.
Tearful promise
Gutierrez told the San Antonio Express-News that in a tearful conversation, McCraw told him the DPS would never again “stand down.”
“Why weren’t the decisions made by the most superior police force on site?” Gutierrez said to the Chronicle.
“How then did everybody just jump on and make [Arredondo] the incident commander? If he never had a radio, then how did he make himself the incident commander? It just doesn’t follow.”
The failure of all law-enforcement officers to act sooner went against their training, which in Texas means they must not stop trying to stop the shooter until that person has either been killed or taken into custody.
The law-enforcement response is under review by the federal Justice Department, the Texas Rangers and the FBI. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee is leading a criminal investigation into the shooting.