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By J. David Goodman, Serge F. Kovaleski, Eduardo Medina and Mike
Baker
June 3, 2022
UVALDE, Texas Two minutes after a gunman burst through an
unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting
inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived
outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.
The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief
Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force
in Uvalde, took charge.
But there were problems from the start.
Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according
to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation,
which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with
police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police
department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a
decision to fall back, the official said.
Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a
message that set the stage for what would prove to be a
disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an
AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower
and we need the building surrounded.
Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as
officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine
High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly
armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more
than an hour.
ImageChief Pete Arredondo, second from right, at a news
conference in Uvalde.
Chief Pete Arredondo, second from right, at a news conference in
Uvalde.Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times
A New York Times examination of the police response, based on
dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, children
who survived, parents who were witnesses outside and experts on
policing, found that breakdowns in communication and tactical
decisions that were out of step with years of police
preparations for school shootings may have contributed to
additional deaths, and certainly delayed critical medical
attention to the wounded.
A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored
orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a
10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers
that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of
medical attention.
The report that the incident commander at least initially had no
police radio emerges as the latest important detail in what has
been a shifting official account of the police response that has
at times proved to be inaccurate on key points about the May 24
shooting.
Spokesmen for the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Justice Department,
the two agencies now investigating the response, have said they
would not be able to reach final conclusions until all
interviews had been conducted and all available video and other
evidence had been reviewed.
Officers who arrived at the scene, coming from at least 14
agencies, did not go into the classrooms as sporadic gunfire
could be heard inside, nor after 911 calls began arriving from
children inside.
There is a lot of bodies, a 10-year-old student, Khloie
Torres, quietly told a 911 dispatcher at 12:10 p.m. 37 minutes
after the gunman began shooting inside the classrooms
according to a review of a transcript of the call. I dont want
to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send
help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.
She stayed on the line for about 17 minutes. Around 11 minutes
into the call, the sound of gunfire could be heard.
Khloie Torres, 10, hugging the officer who rescued her at Robb
Elementary School.Credit...
The officers who finally breached the locked classrooms with a
janitors key were not a formal tactical unit, according to a
person briefed on the response. The officers, including
specially trained Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs
Enforcement agents and a sheriffs deputy, formed an ad hoc
group on their own and gathered in the hallway outside the
classroom, a tense space where they said there appeared to be no
chain of command.
They were done waiting for permission, one of them said,
according to the person, before they moved toward the classroom
where the gunman waited. They continued even after one of them
heard a command crackling in his earpiece: Do not breach.
They entered the room and killed the gunman.
The actions by Chief Arredondo and the array of officers he
suddenly directed which grew to number more than 140, from
local, state and federal agencies, including state troopers,
sheriffs deputies, constables and game wardens are now the
subject of overlapping investigations by the Texas Rangers, the
Justice Department and the local district attorneys office.
Chief Arredondo did not respond to requests for comment. Neither
did the chief of the Uvalde Police Department, Daniel Rodriguez,
or the county sheriff, Ruben Nolasco. The Texas Department of
Public Safety, which is overseeing the Rangers investigation
and had a large presence of state police at the scene, referred
questions to the district attorneys office, which did not
comment.
I think theyre unfair to accuse anybody until we know all the
facts, said Uvalde Countys top executive, Bill Mitchell. We
have agencies coming out and saying there were mistakes. How do
we know, days after, what mistakes?
The fact that control of such a complex and prolonged scene of
violence fell to the head of a police force with six members who
are employed by the local school board seemed unusual in the
aftermath of the tragedy. But it was in keeping with the way
such events are expected to be handled in their early stages,
according to policing experts and the leaders of school district
police departments around Texas.
In cases where a shooting drags on, and more experienced
departments establish themselves at the scene, control may
sometimes be handed over to a larger department. That did not
happen in Uvalde, officials have said.
A Texas state trooper carried an item left by a visitor to a
memorial outside of Robb Elementary School.Credit...Tamir Kalifa
for The New York Times
School district police departments have jurisdiction over school
campuses in Uvalde, there are eight as well as anywhere that
school buses travel.
If we should have a situation like that, we would go in, handle
the situation, stop the kill, and at that point we would
probably look to the state or the feds to assist us with the
forensics, said Chief Solomon Cook of the Humble Independent
School District Police Department, in the suburbs of Houston.
But while the presence of a school district police chief atop
the hierarchy at Robb Elementary was not out of the ordinary,
other elements of the response in Uvalde struck Chief Cook as
concerning. One was the need to use a janitors keys to
ultimately gain entry to the classrooms. All my people carry
keys, said Chief Cook, who is president of the states
association for school district police chiefs.
Another was the uncertainty about whether Chief Arredondo had
been receiving messages from police dispatchers about the
children still in the classrooms pleading for help.
We have direct communication with the P.D. dispatch, and were
about the size of Uvalde, said Chief Bill Avera, who runs a
force of four school district officers, including himself, that
covers eight campuses in Jacksonville, Texas.
A review of the response in Uvalde shows that the school acted
almost immediately after the gunman hopped a fence and
approached Robb Elementary after crashing a pickup truck and
firing shots outside.
Adam Pennington, an 8-year-old student, was in the front office
when the school received what appeared to be the first alert. A
phone call came in and said a man jumped the fence holding a
gun, said Adam, who said he hurried to shelter under a table.
An employee on the campus used a cellphone to open a district
security app, selecting a red lockdown button and a second
button warning that there was an active shooter, according to
David Rogers, the chief marketing officer for Raptor
Technologies, the company that provides the security app.
That warning tool was part of an extensive effort to enhance
security in the Uvalde school district, which also included two-
way radios for key staff, two new school district police
officers and requirements that all classroom doors remain locked.
But Chief Arredondo had no police radio when he arrived,
according to the latest information gathered in the
investigation, and the door to the classroom where most of the
killing occurred, Room 112, was unlocked when the gunman arrived.
The lockdown alert was sent at 26 seconds past 11:32 a.m., about
two minutes after the initial 911 call from outside the school.
It triggered an immediate mass distribution of emails, text
messages and notifications that included blaring alarms sent to
the cellphones of other school employees, Mr. Rogers said.
Less than a minute later, the gunman was already inside the
school.
Khloie Torres had been watching a movie with her fourth-grade
classmates in Room 112 when her teacher, Irma Garcia, told the
class to go into lockdown. Ms. Garcia turned off the movie, and
then rushed toward the classroom door to lock it. But she
struggled to find the right key for the door. Gunfire could be
heard in the hallways.
Irma Garcia
Credit...
Ms. Garcia finally got hold of the right key, but the gunman was
already there. He grabbed the door, and he opened it, Khloie
said. Ms. Garcia tried to protect her students. The gunman began
firing.
Khloie hid under a table, listening to more gunshots. Youll
die, the gunman said to the room.
He shot one of Khloies best friends, Amerie Jo Garza, and the
other teacher in the class, Eva Mireles. Then the gunman said
Good night, Khloie said, and began firing at students across
the classroom.
One child shouted, Im shot, catching the attention of the
gunman. He came back to the spot where the child was lying and
shot the student again, killing him, Khloie said.
Chief Arredondo arrived at 11:35 a.m., as the first officers
began moving into the hallway outside the classroom door. Two
minutes later, a lieutenant and a sergeant from the Uvalde
Police Department approached the door, and were grazed by
bullets.
Shortly after that, Chief Arredondo placed a phone call from the
scene, reaching a police department landline. He described the
situation and requested a radio, a rifle and a contingent of
heavily armed officers, according to the law enforcement
official familiar with the initial response, who described it on
condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized
to publicly disclose the details.
The decision to establish a perimeter outside the classroom, a
little over five minutes after the shooting began, shifted the
police response from one in which every officer would try to
confront the gunman as fast as possible to one where officers
treated the gunman as barricaded and no longer killing. Instead
of storming the classroom, a decision was made to deploy a
negotiator and to muster a more heavily armed and shielded
tactical entry force.
They made a poor decision, defining that as a hostage-barricade
situation, said Bill Francis, a former F.B.I. agent who was a
senior leader on the bureaus hostage rescue team for 17 years.
The longer you delay in finding and eliminating that threat,
the longer he has to continue to kill other victims.
Inside, the gunman moved between the two adjoining classrooms.
After he left her room, Khloie said, she called out quietly: Is
anybody OK? Is anybody hurt?
Yeah, one classmate replied.
Just be quiet, so he doesnt come back in here, Khloie
remembered responding. Another child asked for help getting Ms.
Garcias body off her.
A boy in her class, Khloie said, was worried that the gunman
would find them. He wont find us, she told him.
Shortly after noon, nearly half an hour after the first police
officers had arrived, Khloie began dialing 911. She said she
called over and over again.
By then, the first tactical teams had arrived, along with
officers carrying long guns. Scores of other officers were
outside the school, keeping frantic parents away and starting to
remove children from other classrooms, pulling some through
windows. In video taken outside the school, Border Patrol agents
could be seen donning specialized equipment at around 12:15 p.m.
Parents were seen pleading with officers outside the Uvalde,
Texas, elementary school where a gunman killed 19 students and
two teachers while he remained inside for more than an
hour.CreditCredit...Ivan Pierre Aguirre for The New York Times
Six minutes later, several shots were heard, the sound coming
from inside the classroom.
Mayor Don McLaughlin of Uvalde said in an interview with CNN on
Thursday that the gunman did not answer his telephone when a
negotiator tried to call him.
In the hallway outside the classrooms, a throng of heavily armed
law enforcement officers anxiously awaited instructions. But
frustrations were growing, particularly among members of a
Border Patrol tactical unit, according to the person who was
briefed on the teams response.
No one entity or individual seemed to have control of the
scene, the person said. It was chaos.
The sense of frustration among tactical team members was
corroborated by two officials familiar with their debriefing.
After more than an hour, the ad hoc group of officers who had
arrived ready to attack the gunman was growing impatient, and
decided to move in.
One of the members equipped with an earpiece and small
microphone quietly announced over the radio that the group was
preparing to go into the classrooms. At that point a voice
responded, telling them not to breach the doors.
They ignored the directive.
As the agents entered, the gunman appeared to be ready for them,
the person said. He fired. They fired back, with at least one
bullet striking him in the head. A bullet fragment also grazed
the head of one of the Border Patrol agents.
Law enforcement officers pulled children from windows at Robb
Elementary.Credit...Pete Luna/Uvalde Leader-News
As soon as the agents announced over the radio that the gunman
had been killed, attention turned to treating the wounded. The
agents helped set up a triage system, as more officers and
emergency medical workers descended on the classrooms, trying to
stabilize the children who had been shot but were still alive.
At one point during the siege, one of the two children who
called 911 had reported that at least eight or nine of the
children in the two classrooms were still alive.
Khloie and her surviving classmates were rushed from the
classroom. The bodies of 19 children were recovered, along with
those of the two teachers. Seventeen people, including a third
teacher, were wounded.
I dont understand why somebody did not go in, said Khloies
mother, Jamie Torres. Children and teachers would have still
been shot, she said, but it would have been way less than 21.
Edgar Sandoval, Adam Goldman and Robin Stein contributed
reporting. Jack Begg, Susan C. Beachy and Kirsten Noyes
contributed research.
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/03/us/uvalde-police-response.html
