AUSTIN, Texas (AP) – Law enforcement officials had enough officers at the site of the Uwalde school massacre to stop the shooter three minutes after he entered the building, the Texas public safety chief said Tuesday, declaring police “Absolute failure”
Instead, rifle officers stood and waited for more than an hour until the shooter carried out the May 24 attack, which killed 19 children and two teachers.
Colonel Steve McCrow, director of the Texas Public Safety Department, testified at a U.S. Senate hearing on police work on the tragedy. Delays in law enforcement response have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.
“Obviously, not enough training has been done in this situation, simply and clearly. “Because the terrible decisions were made by a commander on the ground,” McCrow told Pete Aredondo, Uwalde’s school police chief.
Eight minutes after the shooter entered the building, a police officer said police had a “hooligan” lever they could use to break down a classroom door, McCrow said. Nineteen minutes after the shooter entered, the first ballistic shield was inserted into the building by police, the witness said.
McCrow told a Senate committee that Aredondo had decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.
The head of public safety began to outline to the commission a series of missed opportunities, communication failures and other mistakes:
“Aredondo didn’t have a radio with him.”
– The police and sheriff’s radios did not work at the school; inside the school, only the radio stations of the Border Patrol agents worked at the scene, and even they did not work perfectly.
– Some diagrams of the school that the police use to coordinate their reaction were wrong.
‘The classroom door couldn’t be locked from the inside.
State police initially said the gunman entered the school through an outside door that was opened by a teacher, but McGraw said the teacher closed the door and it could only be locked from the outside.
“There’s no way she’ll know the door is locked,” McGraw said. – He went straight.
Questions about law enforcement response began days after the massacre. Macro said three days after the shooting that Aredondo made the “wrong decision” when he chose not to storm the classroom for more than 70 minutes, even when trapped fourth-graders in two classrooms desperately called 911 for help and tortured parents outside the school called to get inside.
Aredondo later said he was not considered responsible and suggested that someone else had taken control of law enforcement response. Arredondo has denied repeated requests for comment to the Associated Press.
The 18-year-old shooter used a semi-automatic rifle type AR-15.
In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and false accounts in the days after the incident, sometimes withdrawing statements hours after they were made.
“Everything I testified today has been confirmed,” McCrow said.
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Bleiberg and Associated Press writer Jamie Stengel contributed to this report from Dallas.
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Find more AP coverage of the shooting at Uvalde School:
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