AUSTIN, Texas – Col. Steve McCraw, Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety testified that Uvalde police had enough officers and firepower at Robb Elementary school to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building and he said they would have found the door to the classroom where Ramos barricaded himself in, unlocked if they had checked it.
Instead, officers armed with rifles stood in a hallway for more than an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, who killed 19 children and two teachers.
“I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” Col. McCraw said adding that the law enforcement response was an “abject failure.”
The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside by design, according to 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, McCraw said. He said police instead waited for keys.
“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?”
Delays in the law enforcement response at the scene of the mass shooting have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.
McCraw took aim at Pete Arrendondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who 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.”
Arredondo made “terrible decisions,” said McCraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade.”
Arredondo has said he didn’t consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response.
The police chief testified for about five hours Tuesday at a closed-door hearing of a Texas House committee that is also investigating the tragedy, according to the panel chair.
Senate members hearing the latest details reacted with fury, some saying Arredondo as incompetent and 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.
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. 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, 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 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.
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:
- Arredondo did not have a radio with him.
- Police and sheriff’s 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 diagrams of the school that police used to coordinate their response were wrong.
State police initially said the gunman entered the school through an exterior door that had been propped open by a teacher. However, 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,” McCraw said.
The gunman knew the building well, having attended the fourth grade in the same classrooms where he carried out the attack, McCraw said. Ramos never communicated with police that day, the public safety chief said.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said Tuesday that the city has “specific legal reasons” that it’s not answering questions publicly or releasing records. “There is no cover-up,” he said in a statement.
Questions about the law enforcement response began days after the mass shooting 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 calling 911 for help.
In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and incorrect accounts of what happened. But McCraw assured lawmakers: “Everything I’ve testified today is corroborated.”
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.
