“A failure that should not have happened.” This is the overwhelming conclusion of a comprehensive report released by the Justice Department this Thursday on the response of Texas authorities to the shooting at the Robb School in Uvalde. The nearly 600-page document details, minute by minute, the “lack of urgency” response with which dozens of companies responded to the events of May 24, 2022, in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered. “Victims and survivors deserve better,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.
Garland this week visited the Uvalde community, which was left devastated after one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history. Especially because the response of the 380 agents from various companies differed from the lessons left for the country by the Columbine massacre in 1999. “After Columbine, tactical experts from security agencies testified that the new paradigm for responding to crises like this is rapid deployment,” the report said. This places great responsibility on the first uniformed officers to arrive on the scene of a shooting. “They are instructed to approach the shooter if necessary, walking past the wounded and putting themselves in danger,” says the detailed document, which is also available in Spanish.
That's what the police officers who arrived at the Texas elementary school in a Latino community of 15,000 southwest of San Antonio avoided. In describing the events, the document states that the first police officers arrived just three minutes after the shooter entered the school. The attacker, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, hit them with shots from his powerful AR-15 rifle. The shrapnel caused officers to take cover. “The agents did not approach the doors again until they entered the classroom more than an hour later,” says the text, which devotes 20 pages to the memory of the victims, mostly children under 9 and 10.
The Justice Department criticized the 43 minutes it took to evacuate the school, a decision made by Pete Arredondo, the school district's police chief. During this time, the shooter posed an active threat in two classrooms where he had already left victims and injuries. “This was a significant factor delaying access to rooms 111 and 112,” the report said. During the evacuation, Arredondo learned that Ramos was locked in a room with students. The police officer tried to negotiate with the murderer and told him that they were “innocent children.” The shooter paid no attention. A few minutes earlier he had shot his grandmother in the head.
Arredondo's role has been heavily criticized. This agent, fired three months after the massacre, became the de facto commander of the response on the morning of the tragedy. His mistakes became apparent early on when he responded to an emergency without a radio because “he wanted his hands free.” His communications with dozens of uniformed officers were verbal or via cell phone calls. “Many of the arriving officers mistakenly believed that the attacker had already been killed or that Arredondo was in the classrooms with the individual, based on inaccurate information transmitted over the radio and because they observed a lack of urgency at the entrance to the classrooms. ” states the report. No one among the hundreds of uniformed officers present knew exactly who was responsible for the emergency.
Time passed and the police did not decide to attack Ramos, whose name is not mentioned once in the 575 pages of the document. Arredondo, who arrived at the scene around 11:37 a.m., had spent precious minutes looking for the keys that would open the doors to the rooms attached to classrooms 111 and 112. “Time is on our side. I know there are children there, but we also have to save the lives of others,” Arredondo was heard saying, also waiting for weapons to arrive. He feared that the attacker's firepower would exceed that of the authorities. “We need a lot of weapons,” said the police chief, who assured that “they only had short weapons.”
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Arredondo gave up looking for the keys that belonged to the locks. Finally, through the classroom window, he ordered the evacuation of Room 109. There were several students in the room, one of whom was wounded in the face and a teacher was shot in the stomach. “They were in room 1091, bleeding and screaming to avoid detection by the attacker,” the document says.
Emergency calls were more serious. At 12:10 p.m., one of the minors in room 112 says his room is full of victims. The communication lasted 16 minutes until shots forced the conversation at around 12:21 p.m. Around this time, the Border Patrol special team arrives at the school that will eventually kill Ramos. However, this would still happen 28 minutes later.
The disaster was not just the responsibility of the police. The doctors who attended to the tragedy were also accused of errors. Vanita Gupta, one of the Justice Department prosecutors, condemned the actions of paramedics who carried the bodies of the deceased to ambulances and the injured children to school buses after the shooting. This resulted in two children and a teacher dying from their injuries within an hour of being rescued.
The report was prepared by compiling 14,100 pieces of evidence. It included several hours of video footage captured by agents' body cameras and interviews with 260 people, including agents from the more than 30 companies connected to the incident, relatives of the victims and school staff. The report's authors visited Uvalde nine times and spent a total of 54 days in the community. They believe the errors discovered that morning were due to a lack of training (several agents had never participated in an exercise before) and a complete lack of planning for situations like this.
Among the recommendations contained in the official document is that in emergencies of this type, shooters who are in a room with potential victims should never be treated as barricaded people or hostages. It remains to be seen whether the United States can avoid repeating the costly mistakes Uvalde made.
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