DOJ finds ‘failure’ in Uvalde response
Says police delay to confront the shooter cost lives
UVALDE, Texas — A neartotal breakdown in policing protocols hindered the response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde that left 21 people dead — and the refusal to rapidly confront the killer needlessly cost lives, the Justice Department concluded Thursday after a nearly two-year investigation.
The department blamed “cascading failures of leadership, decision making, tactics, policy, and training” for the delayed and passive law enforcement response that allowed an 18-year-old gunman with a semi-automatic rifle to remain inside a pair of connected fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School for 77 minutes before he was confronted and killed.
The “most significant failure,” investigators concluded, was the decision by local police officials to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff rather than an “active-shooter” scenario, which would have demanded instant and aggressive action. Almost all of the officials in charge that day have already been fired or have retired.
Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, speaking to reporters in Uvalde, said the officers who converged on the school within minutes of the attack intended to storm the classrooms but were told to stand down.
“Lives would have been saved, and people could have survived” if officers had acted quickly to confront the gunman, Garland said. He related a timeline of several critical moments when officers outside the classrooms could have halted the rampage but did not take action.
The main takeaway from the investigation, Garland said, was that officers who respond to an active shooting scene need “to immediately enter the room to stop the shooter with whatever weapons and tools the officers have with them.”
Since the shooting, blame for the delayed police confrontation with the gunman has shifted: In the immediate aftermath, the top state police official, Steven McCraw, blamed the local school police chief, Pete Arredondo. Then, it turned out that state police officers were also among those who failed to actively confront the gunman. In its report, the Justice Department focused largely on decisions by Arredondo, finding that his decisions delayed the response.
The nearly 600-page report, compiled from 260 interviews and 14,000 documents and videos, represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of a killing spree that helped spur passage of new federal gun control legislation and that continues to haunt a community traumatized by the slaughter and the inadequacy of the police response.
The conclusions largely mirror those of a state investigation released in July. In accordance with department policy, it does not refer to the gunman by name.
The federal report puts a particular focus on the actions of law enforcement officials in the aftermath of the massacre and outlines another set of mistakes and failures, including a disorganized system for tracking the whereabouts of students, which led to confusion over whether they were safe, and to one instance in which a parent of one victim was given false hope that the child was still alive.
Investigators also identified repeated incidents, captured on body cameras, of officials and other onlookers roaming through the school in the days after the shooting, forcing crime scene investigators to “continually stop” their evidence collection.
Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who oversaw the investigation, said the shooting caused “a loss of faith and trust” in law enforcement.