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Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents the district where Uvalde is located, asks Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw questions during the Texas Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans hearing regarding the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman/AP/PA Images

Top Texas officer: Uvalde police response was ‘abject failure’

Steve McCraw said officers would have found the door to the classroom where the assailant was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.

THE HEAD OF the Texas state police pronounced the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting an “abject failure,” telling politicians that there were enough officers and firepower on the scene to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building.

Col Steve McCraw also said officers would have found the door to the classroom where the assailant was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.

Instead, police with rifles stood in a hallway for over an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

“I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” Mr McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said on Tuesday in blistering evidence at a state Senate hearing.

texas-school-shooting Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw uses maps and graphics to present a timeline of the school shooting at Robb Elementary School AP / PA Images AP / PA Images / PA Images

The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside by design, according to Mr McCraw, who also said a teacher reported before the shooting that the lock was broken.

Yet there is no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff, Mr McCraw said.

He said police instead waited for keys.

“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” Mr McCraw said of the door.

“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”

texas-school-shooting Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw uses photos of doors to present what happened regarding the keys and doors during the school shooting AP / PA Images AP / PA Images / PA Images

Delays in the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.

Evidence was scheduled to resume on Wednesday.

Mr McCraw tore into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who Mr McCraw said was in charge, saying: “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”

Mr Arredondo made “terrible decisions”, said Mr McCraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade”.

Mr Arredondo has said he did not consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response.

embedded267444289 Reggie Daniels pays his respects at a memorial at Robb Elementary School (Eric Gay/AP)

He has declined repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.

The police chief gave evidence for about five hours on Tuesday at a closed-door hearing of a Texas House committee also investigating the tragedy, according to the panel chairman.

Senate members hearing the latest details reacted with fury, some decrying Mr Arredondo as incompetent and saying the delay cost lives.

Others pressed Mr McCraw on why state troopers on the scene did not take charge.

Mr McCraw said the troopers did not have legal authority to do so.

The public safety chief presented a timeline that said three officers with two rifles entered the building less than three minutes behind the gunman, an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

Several more officers entered minutes after that.

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Two of the officers who went into the hallway early on were grazed by gunfire.

The decision by police to hold back went against much of what law enforcement has learned in the two decades since the Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in which 13 people were killed in 1999, Mr McCraw said.

“You don’t wait for a Swat team. You have one officer, that’s enough,” he said.

He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom.

The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to Mr McCraw.

Eight minutes after the shooter entered, an officer reported that police had a heavy-duty crowbar that they could use to break down the classroom door, Mr McCraw said.

The public safety chief spent nearly five hours offering the clearest picture yet of the massacre, outlining a series of other missed opportunities, communication breakdowns and errors based on an investigation that has included roughly 700 interviews. Among the missteps:

— Mr Arredondo did not have a radio with him.

— Police and sheriffs’ radios did not work inside the school. Only the radios of Border Patrol agents on the scene did, and they did not work perfectly.

— Some school diagrams that police used to co-ordinate their response were wrong.

State police initially said the gunman, Salvador Ramos, entered the school through an exterior door that had been propped open by a teacher.

embedded267380472 Actor Matthew McConaughey holds an image of Alithia Ramirez, 10, who was killed in the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, as he speaks during a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, June 7(Evth an Vucci/AP)

However, Mr McCraw said the teacher had closed the door, but unbeknownst to her, it could be locked only from the outside.

The gunman “walked straight through”, Mr McCraw said.

The gunman knew the building well, having attended the fourth grade in the same classrooms where he carried out the attack, Mr McCraw said.

Ramos never communicated with police that day, the public safety chief said.

Senator Paul Bettencourt said the entire premise of lockdown and shooter training is worthless if school doors cannot be locked.

“We have a culture where we think we’ve trained an entire school for lockdown … but we set up a condition to failure,” he said.

Mr Bettencourt challenged Mr Arredondo to give evidence in public and said he should have removed himself from the job immediately.

He angrily pointed out that shots were heard while police waited.

“There are at least six shots fired during this time,” he said.

“Why is this person shooting? He’s killing somebody. Yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.”

Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin said on Tuesday that the city has “specific legal reasons” that it is not answering questions publicly or releasing records.

“There is no cover-up,” he said in a statement.

Later in the day, the Uvalde City Council voted unanimously against giving Mr Arredondo, who is a council member, a leave of absence from appearing at public meetings.

Relatives of the shooting victims had pleaded with city leaders to instead fire him.

“Please, please, we’re begging you, get this man out of our lives,” said Berlinda Arreola, the grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza.

After the meeting, the mayor pushed back on Mr McCraw’s evidence casting blame on Arredondo, saying that the Department of Public Safety has repeatedly put out false information about the shooting and glossed over the role of its own officers.

He called the Senate hearing a “clown show” and said he heard nothing from Mr McCraw about state troopers’ involvement, even though Mr McLaughlin said their number in the school hallway at points during the slaughter surpassed that of any other law enforcement agency.

Questions about the law enforcement response began days after the massacre.

Mr McCraw said three days afterward that Mr Arredondo made “the wrong decision” when he chose not to storm the classroom for more than 70 minutes, even as trapped fourth graders inside two classrooms were desperately calling 911 for help and anguished parents outside the school begged officers to go inside.

An hour after the shooter first crashed his truck outside the school, Mr Arredondo said, according to Mr McCraw’s timeline: “People are going to ask why we’re taking so long. We’re trying to preserve the rest of the life.”

But Mr McCraw said on Tuesday that the amount of time that elapsed before officers entered the classroom was “intolerable”.

Police haven’t found any red flags in Ramos’ school disciplinary files but learned through interviews that he engaged in cruelty to animals.

“He walked around with a bag of dead cats,” Mr McCraw said.

In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and incorrect accounts of what happened.

But Mr McCraw assured politicians: “Everything I’ve testified today is corroborated.”

Mr McCraw said if he could make just one recommendation, it would be for more training.

He also said every state patrol car in Texas should have shields and door-breaching tools.

“I want every trooper to know how to breach and have the tools to do it,” he said.

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    Mute David cotter
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 7:13 PM

    We’ll NRA …..you had a bad guy with a gun and good guys wilt a gun..and the good guys stay safe outside to direct traffic and watch parents …this particular force didn’t have the b@!!s when it counted…

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    Mute Bri Lyons
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 7:58 PM

    @David cotter: love all these heroes calling on others to storm and enter a class room full of kids with a shooter inside … if they went in and he killed the kids the cops would be blamed .. if they stayed out and he killed the kids the cops would be blamed … no win

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    Mute G man
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 8:20 PM

    @Bri Lyons: Are you saying the cops were right to stand by and wait till there were no kids left to rescue?

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    Mute Bri Lyons
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 11:41 PM

    @G man: read comment again and you will see what I’m saying.. it’s fairly simple.

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    Mute JusticeForJoe
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    Jun 23rd 2022, 8:42 AM

    @G man: So yes, that’s what they’re saying.

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    Mute Garret Fawl
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 7:32 PM

    I thought the press conference after the shooting by the police had a grim humour to it, all these big police guys wearing stetson hats like they were Wyatt Earp, clown costumes would have been more fitting.

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    Mute John Fagan
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 6:56 PM

    American prefer to shoot people who have no guns.

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    Mute Stephen Lambkin Moroney
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 8:29 PM

    Scapegoats come to mind !!

    Jesus this is not an isolated event. It is an occurrence which is sad to say !!!

    Can’t blame the police ,it is deeper than the law enforcement!!

    A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

    They signed this off ,might need to be rewritten

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    Mute Damien Leen
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 10:04 PM

    Deflection…slight change in gun control. .onto the nx massacre!

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    Mute Peter
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 10:39 PM

    The whole thing was a s**t show from start to finish but the ROE are very simple and have been since columbine, you breach as soon and as fast as possible, the risk to life is less when the suspect has less time to act. Another point would be that cops have take an oath to protect which when it comes to kids at least should mean putting body in way of bullets. I would suspect that most of the cops into hall that day would have chosen to enter the room and stop the lunatic but held fast due to orders only. If that is the case that the on scene commander making that call deserves all the blame and everything else headed his way.

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    Mute Johannes Baader
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    Jun 22nd 2022, 8:26 PM

    Sick country…. Of course there are a millions ” what if” now

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    Mute Aine O Connor
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    Jun 23rd 2022, 8:33 AM

    Well orders or no orders I would not have been able to stay outside this classroom where I knew a murderer was shooting children whatever the cost.

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