More details are emerging about what may have delayed authorities in confronting the gunman during the tragic mass shooting atRobb Elementary Schoolin Uvalde, Texas last month.
Based on documents and video, theTimesreported that Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (CISD) Police Chief Pete Arredondo appeared to be worried aboutthe amount of time it was taking to obtain protective shields that would help protect officers when they entered the locked classrooms — as well as finding a key to the classroom doors.
The chief became aware that not everyone inside the classrooms was already dead and that there were people in need of medical attention, according to theTimesarticle. One of those people wasEva Mireles, who called her husbandRuben Ruiz, a school district police officer, to tell him she had been shot.
Ruiz, one of six Uvalde CISD police officers, then rushed to the school, theTimesreported. Documents apparently show that he informed responders on the scene that his wife was still alive, but hurt, inside one of the classrooms. Mireles would reach an ambulance, but died before making it to the hospital.
Officers at Robb Elementary School.Brandon Bell/Getty
That message appeared to have reached a sergeant from the Uvalde Police Department, the paper reported, who was near Arredondo inside of the school.
“There’s a teacher shot in there,” an officer could be heard telling the sergeant, according to the transcript, just before 12:30 p.m.
“I know,” the sergeant replied.
By that time, heavily armed tactical officers had arrived, theTimesreported, along with protective shields.
“We’re ready to breach, but that door is locked,” he said around 12:30 p.m., according to a transcript.
The Uvalde CISD and Police Department did not immediately respond to PEOPLE’s request for comment.
A team of Border Patrol agents and a sheriff’s deputyultimately entered the buildingto hunt down the gunman and killed him at about 12:50 p.m.
In an interview withTheTexas Tribunepublished Thursday, Arredondo said he never considered himself the commander at the scene and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building.
Texas Department of Public Safety officials, though, have described Arredondo as the incident commander. They said the Uvalde CISD police chief made the call to stand down and treat the incident as a “barricaded suspect,” theTribunereported.
Robb Elementary School.Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty
Arredondo also alleged he was unaware of the 911 calls because he did not have his radio — which he left behind because he believed it would slow him down. He further claimed that no one in the hallways relayed the information to him.
Law enforcement investigators have inferred, theTimesreported, that more than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the two classrooms were alive from the time the shooting began inside the classrooms to when four officers made entry — which lasted 1 hour and 17 minutes.
By then, theTimesreported, 60 officers had assembled at the scene.
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A makeshift memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two adults were fatally shot May 24.Michael M. Santiago/Getty
Three days after the tragedy, Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told the press that that approximately 20 officerswaited in a hallwayfor more than 45 minutes before engaging the shooter inside a locked classroom. McCraw stressed that the wrong decision had been made in the moment.
“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision,” McCraw said of the delay in entering, where panicked students called 911.
“Itwas a wrong decision. There’s no excuse for that. We believe there should have been an entry as soon as you can,” he explained. “When there’s an active shooter, the rules change.”
source: people.com
