Legislator: School police chief didn’t know of 911 calls

Elementary students trapped inside building were pleading for help.

— The commander at the scene of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was not informed of panicked 911 calls coming from students trapped inside the building as the massacre unfolded, a Texas state senator said Thursday.

Sen. Roland Gutierrez said the pleas for help from people inside Robb Elementary School on May 24 did not make their way to Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief. The Democratic senator called it a “system failure” that calls were going to the city police but were not communicated to Arredondo.

“I want to know specifically who was receiving the 911 calls,” Gutierrez said during a news conference. He said no single person or entity was fully to blame for the massacre, but Gov. Greg Abbott should accept much of the responsibility for the failures in the police response.

“There was error at every level, including the legislative level. Greg Abbott has plenty of blame in all of this,” Gutierrez said.

Nineteen children and two teachers died in the attack at Robb Elementary School, the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade. Seventeen more were injured. Funerals for those slain began this week.

The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, spent roughly 80 minutes inside the school. More than an hour passed between the time the first officers followed him into the building and the time Ramos was killed by law enforcement.

Since the shooting, law enforcement and state officials have struggled to present an accurate timeline and details of the event and how police responded, sometimes providing conflicting information or withdrawing some statements hours later. State police have said some accounts were preliminary and may change as more witnesses are interviewed.

Much of the focus turned to Arredondo. Steven Mccraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Arredondo believed the situation had turned into a hostage situation and made the “wrong decision” to not order officers to attempt to breach the classroom as 911 calls were being made to the outside.

Gutierrez said it’s unclear if any details from the 911 calls were being shared with law enforcement officers from multiple agencies on the scene.

“Uvalde PD was the one receiving the 911 calls for 45 minutes while officers were sitting in a hallway,” Gutierrez said. “We don’t know if it was being communicated to those people or not.”

But, the senator said, the Commission on State Emergency Communications told him the school district police chief did not know about the calls.

“He’s the incident commander. He did not receive (the) 911 calls,” Gutierrez said.

JAE C. HONG/AP State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, says there was “error at every level, including the legislative level” in the Robb Elementary School shooting.