The head of the Texas state police called the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting an “abject failure,' saying there were enough officers and firepower on the scene to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building.
“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” McCraw said of the door. ”How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations. Testimony was scheduled to resume Wednesday.
Senate members hearing the latest details reacted with fury, some decrying Arredondo as incompetent and saying the delay cost lives. Others pressed McCraw on why state troopers on the scene didn’t take charge. McCraw said the troopers did not have legal authority to do so. “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 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, McCraw said.
Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the entire premise of lockdown and shooter training is worthless if school doors can’t 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. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said Tuesday that the city has “specific legal reasons” that it’s not answering questions publicly orLater in the day, the Uvalde City Council voted unanimously against giving 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.
Questions about the law enforcement response began days after the massacre. McCraw said three days afterward that 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 anguishedAn hour after the shooter first crashed his truck outside the school, Arredondo said, according to McCraw’s timeline: “People are going to ask why we’re taking so long.
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