As police waited, children inside Texas school called 911 begging for help
UVALDE, Texas — Children inside a Texas elementary school frantically called 911, begging for the police to save them, as a tactical decision by a commander kept 19 officers from storming a classroom in what a law enforcement officials acknowledged on Friday was a mistake in judgment.
“Of course, it wasn’t the right decision,” Department of Public Safety Director Steven Mccraw said at a news conference, choking back tears. “It was the wrong decision. Period.”
With 19 officers, Mccraw said, there were “plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done.” But the commander inside — Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde Consolidated School District chief of police — decided the team needed more equipment and officers to enter the classroom where the shooter was holed up. He said the team did not move to take out the gunman until a full Border Patrol tactical unit arrived.
Nineteen children and two teachers died in the massacre Tuesday.
The magnitude of the mistake became glaringly clear Friday as officials also shared details of the 911 calls from children still alive in the barricaded classrooms.
At 12:03 p.m., Mccraw said, a 911 caller whispered that she was in Room 112 and that multiple people were dead. Ten minutes later, she said eight or nine students were still alive.
More than half an hour later, a child calling from Room 111 said she could hear law enforcement officers next door. “Please send the police now,” she pleaded.
Mccraw did not say how many children might have been saved had officers entered immediately. He also did not spell out the degree to which the commander was aware of the children’s 911 pleas.
“Ultimately, this is tragic. What do you tell the parents of 19 kids or the families of two teachers?” Mccraw said. “We’re not here to defend what happened. We’re here to report the facts.”
Mccraw stressed that every officer in Texas has gone through active shooter training and learns you go in without waiting — exactly the opposite of what officers did in Uvalde.
“Texas embraces active shooter training, active shooter certification,” McCraw said. “And that doctrine requires officers — we don’t care what agency you’re from, you don’t have to have a leader on the scene — every officer lines up, stacks up, goes and finds where those rounds are being fired at and keeps shooting until the subject is dead. Period.”
Some parents whose children were inside the school said they were even further troubled by the new timeline. Officers on the scene should have done more, they said.
“I understand that they’re afraid for their own lives, but these guys are in tactical gear,” said Laura Pennington, whose 8-year-old son, Adam, hid in the principal’s office as the massacre unfolded. ”They could have swarmed the building from all angles. He was terrorizing these children. They needed to do more.”
Pennington, whose brother-in-law was among those who rushed to the school to help but were forcibly kept outside by officers, was eventually reunited with her son Tuesday afternoon. But she said she was in touch with a woman whose niece was wounded in the attack and was still hospitalized Friday.
“There’s several more that are critical and I don’t know if they’ll live,” Pen
nington said. “I want to cry because they deserve better than that.”
Law enforcement experts across the country were also shocked to learn new details of Tuesday's police response, which ignored best practices adopted by Texas law enforcement to immediately send officers in to confront and kill active shooters.
“You've got to stop the bleed,” said Art Acevedo, former police chief of Houston, Austin and Miami. “You have to go in immediately. The kids were calling 911 for help.”
Travis Norton, a leader of the California Association of Tactical Officers' after-action review team who has studied numerous mass shootings, said it is a common mistake in such situations to think “when the shooting stops, we stop.”
“That is the problem with the term `active shooter': The shooter is still active if there are people in harm's way,“he said.
But law enforcement keeps making the same mistake, he said. From the 2016 Pulse night club shooting in Orlando, Florida, and the 2018 Borderline club shooting in Thousand Oaks, California, to the 2021 King Soopers grocery store shooting in Boulder, Colorado, on-scene commanders mistook a lack of shots for a barricade situation, Norton said. In contrast, when a gunman attacked a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018, officers did not stop when the killer stopped shooting.
Investigators in Uvalde are interviewing witnesses and poring over video to piece together a timeline that explains how the 18-year-old gunman, Salvador Ramos, was able to walk up to the school with a long gun enter through an unlocked door and barricade himself inside a classroom for nearly an hour before he was shot and killed.
With pressure mounting to explain the delayed response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott scrapped plans to attend the National Rifle Association's annual convention in Houston and traveled to Uvalde on Friday.
“Texas stands with Uvalde for the long term and helping every single person in this community be able to piece their lives back together to heal as much as they possibly can,” he said.
In his initial remarks, Abbott did not address errors by law enforcement or acknowledge previous misinformation he provided. Later, in response to a question from a reporter, he said it was inexcusable that families got inaccurate information.