AUSTIN, Texas – The Texas state police chief on Tuesday sharply and vehemently criticized police response to last month’s shooting at Rob’s Elementary School in Uwalde, Texas, calling it a “terrible failure” that contradicts decades of training.
Commenting to a special committee of the Austin State Senate, Stephen McCrow, director of the Department of Public Safety, provided the most complete public report to date on his agency’s one-month investigation and a strong argument officials could have – and had to face the archer without delay upon arrival. Just minutes after a gunman started shooting at children on May 24, he said, scene workers had enough firepower and protective equipment to break into classrooms.
“The only thing stopping the corridor of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the commander of the scene,” Mr McCrow said.
But the commander “decided to put the lives of the officers before the lives of the children,” he said, postponing the confrontation with the shooter for more than an hour while he “waited for a key that was never needed.”
Most of the victims appear to have been shot in the first few minutes in the classroom. But Mr McCrow’s testimony addresses a central and painful question that still hangs over the massacre and delayed police response, which investigators sought to answer through interviews with staff and video reviews: were classroom doors locked preventing police officers from entering in time to save others?
“I don’t believe, based on the information we have at the moment, that this door was once secured,” Mr McCrow said of the classroom door through which the shooter entered. “The door was unsecured.”
He said school classroom doors were usually set with a key that locks automatically when closed. But the gunman managed to enter the classroom, he noted, suggesting that either the door was not set to lock or was not completely closed. A teacher asked for the lock to be repaired before the shooting, he said, adding that the lock was not broken, but the so-called lock was “non-functional”, requiring someone to pull it to close it.
In any case, he said: “There is no way to lock the door from the inside. And there is no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside. ”
Mr McCrow focused on the commander of the scene, whom he identified as the head of the Uwalde school district police department, Pete Aredondo, who he said was the highest-ranking man at the scene.
The boss said he was not considered responsible, but Mr McCrow disputed that. “If you are going to issue commands, if you are going to lead actions,” he said, “you are the commander on the ground.”
The delayed confrontation with the shooter, Mr McCrow said, was “contrary to everything we have learned in the last two decades since the Columbine massacre” in 1999.
Several of the senators reacted with shock and anger. “Every shot is death,” said Sen. Paul Betancourt, a Republican from the Houston suburbs. “And yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.”
“I call on this chief to testify publicly,” Mr Betancourt said loudly at one point, referring to Chief Aredondo. The chief was also at the state Capitol on Tuesday, testifying before a closed-door hearing at a Texas House commission of inquiry. He does not speak to the media before or after.
Chief Aredondo’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment, and the chief, who was recently a member of Uwalde’s city council, said he did not want to discuss the case further until the investigation was completed.
At a city council meeting Tuesday night, Uwalde Mayor Don McLaughlin called the legislative hearing a “clown Bozo show” and a “farce” that accuses Uwalde school district police but fails to address the role of Public Security officials and several others. agencies that were also on site.
“I’m actually wondering who the hell is responsible for this investigation because you can’t get an accurate answer,” the mayor said.
Visibly upset, Mr McLaughlin warned that “the gloves have been taken off” and that he will no longer remain silent about what the city knows about the shooting, given that the state continues to release information but has not informed it since 24 May. .
He said Mr McCrow had “lied” and “leaked” to “keep his own soldiers and rangers from answering”.
Chief Aredondo has not attended Council meetings since taking the oath shortly after the shooting, and the Council voted Tuesday not to offer him leave – a situation that could force him to resign after three missed meetings.
Mr McCrow has been director of the Public Safety Department since 2009 and oversees both the state police and the Texas Rangers, the organization that is investigating the Uwalde shooting. A native of El Paso, Mr. McCrow began as a U.S. soldier in Texas in the 1970s and later rose to the ranks of the FBI before returning to Texas law enforcement as director of national security. the state under Governor Rick Perry.
His testimony for more than four hours was unusually accusing, as weeks of few or no official updates to the investigation followed, followed by a stifling and disturbing initial effort by senior government officials to provide details of the shooting and police response.
On Tuesday, Mr McCrow brought up billboards showing the timeline of the shooting and police response at the school, photos of school doors and two maps showing how the shooter and police officers entered the school and then the two connected classrooms. He passed between them as he presented the investigators’ findings to the assembled state senators. He also had part of the classroom door taken from Robb Elementary and demonstrated its locking mechanism.
Senators asked direct questions about the answer, but also turned to broader political debates over school safety and gun control that erupted after the Uwalde shooting.
“You don’t need a gun,” said Sen. Bob Hall, a East Texas Republican. “This man had plenty of time to do it with his hands. Or a baseball bat. “
John Rosenthal, a Democrat from the Texas Chamber of Auditors who watched the hearing from afar, learned the opposite. “Tell me again how arming our teachers is your solution to the problem of gun violence,” he wrote on Twitter. “The problem is WEAPONS.
Mr McCrow’s outline confirms details first reported by The New York Times in a series of articles last month, including that the officers who first entered the school – two minutes after the shooter – had style. AR-15 rifles and that the shields, which could be used to protect employees entering the classroom, arrived before 12 noon, almost an hour before the officers finally entered.
Mr McCrow also provided new details, such as the exact time Chief Aredondo entered the school at 11:36 a.m., three minutes after the assailant entered the classrooms and started firing.
The timeline also notes that by 11:54 a.m. a Texas Ranger was inside the school, one of at least 12 U.S. police officers who responded between the time the shooter began firing into classrooms at 11:33 p.m. in the morning, and when officers killed him at 12:50 p.m.
The presentation contrasts sharply with the version of events proposed by Chief Aredondo in an interview with The Texas Tribune. The Times reported that Mr Aredondo arrived at the school without his police radio and focused on finding classroom keys, although the videos did not show anyone checking the classroom door to see if it was locked.
Chief Aredondo said the classrooms were locked and he knew that because he and another officer had checked both doors. He said he then focused on finding keys, testing dozens of them, he said, in an attempt to find one that worked on the doors. One was eventually found, he said, and was used by the team that entered the classroom and killed the shooter.
But Mr McCrow said there was no indication, either from videos or interviews, that anyone had actually checked the doors. “Besides, you don’t need a key,” he said, pointing to the availability of intrusion tools and the ability to enter through windows.
Tuesday’s hearing is the first public comment on the investigation in weeks.
The Ministry of Public Security stopped holding public briefings within a week of the shooting after some details shared by officials, including Mr McCrow and Governor Greg Abbott, turned out to be incorrect. The information that needed to be corrected included the length of time it took police to fire the shooter’s first shots (not immediately, but one hour and 17 minutes after he started firing at the school) and how he gained access to the building (not during open door, and through unlocked).
Instead of providing updates, state police began forwarding media inquiries to local District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busby, who rejected requests for interviews and did not hold any press conferences.
The volatile account of the massacre, which killed 19 children and two teachers, quickly undermined credibility in official reports of the shooting and created tensions between government officials and those in Uwalde, most of whom rallied around the city’s police department and Chief Aredondo.
This tension only increased when Mr McCrow held a press conference three days after the shooting and said that Chief Aredondo was responsible for …
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