The principal of the Texas school where the nation’s deadliest classroom shooting in a decade occurred on Wednesday disputed some key findings of a legislative report into the attack, including that doors were left unlocked and rules were laxly enforced.
In a statement issued by her attorney, Mandy Gutierrez rejected a legislative panel’s finding that a “culture of complacency” regarding safety at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde allowed a gunman to enter the school and kill 19 children and two teachers. She also said the lock on the door to the fourth-grade classroom where the May 24 shooting happened worked when the custodian checked it the night before.
Schools Superintendent Hal Harrell suspended Gutierrez with pay Monday pending a performance review related to school security.
The legislative report places most of the blame on local, state and federal law enforcement, which took more than an hour to enter the classroom where the shooter was and kill him, while parents outside the school begged officials to do something. and dispatchers answered 911 calls from inside the school. Surveillance footage of police officers in bulletproof vests milling about in a hallway as the gunman carried out the massacre has angered the victims’ families, who have demanded accountability.
In the statement addressed to the three members of the Texas House committee that issued the report after its investigation, Gutierrez also said the teacher in charge of the classroom where the shooting took place complained that because the school’s only printer was in his classroom, other teachers often interrupted their studies to unlock the door so they could take out their printed documents.
As for reports that the door had to be forced shut to activate the deadbolt, Gutierrez said, “That’s the condition of many doors in an aging building.” She also said that neither she nor her predecessors had they remembered that the teacher in the classroom complained that the door did not lock.
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Gutierrez disputed that patchy school Wi-Fi prevented school staff from being alerted to a security breach.
Finally, she rejected the finding that complacency had set in because of frequent roadblocks caused by close law enforcement pursuits of migrants trying to escape.
“We have been trained to treat any call from any law enforcement agency as a situation with a high potential to escalate into a dangerous episode for students, teachers and administrators,” she said in a statement issued by San Antonio attorney Ricardo Cedillo.
Gutierrez said her most recent performance review rated her “Completed” in creating a “safe school environment that ensures the social, emotional and physical well-being of staff and students.”
“I will live with the horror of these events for the rest of my life,” she concluded. “I want to keep my job not only so that I can provide for my family, but also so that I can continue to be on the front line helping the children who survived, the families of everyone affected and the whole community of Uvalde, which I love and want to continue to defend.’
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