Not much, it would seem.
As many as 13 troopers with the Texas Department of Public Safety waited in a hallway at one point during a gunman’s rampage that killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde last month, state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said.
Gutierrez, a San Antonio Democrat whose district encompasses Uvalde, said DPS Director Steven McCraw revealed the number of responding state troopers to him in a recent exchange.
“He told me there was enough people and equipment to breach the door,” Gutierrez said, even as officers continued to wait for more than an hour and some of the children inside the two locked classrooms called 911 for help.
In previous statements, McCraw has said that as many as 19 officers from various law enforcement agencies waited outside the classrooms. DPS has not publicly clarified the extent to which it was involved in the widely criticized police response to the May 24 mass shooting.
[…]
At a news conference last month, McCraw described Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde school district, as the on-scene commander. He said that after Arredondo arrived at the school, he instructed other officers not to force entry into the locked classrooms until they could acquire more equipment, such as ballistic shields.
Gutierrez said he spoke May 28 with McCraw, who was in tears. McCraw told Gutierrez that day that DPS would never again “stand down,” the lawmaker told the San Antonio Express-News.
In another exchange June 2, McCraw told Gutierrez that as many as 13 DPS troopers had massed in the hallway outside the classrooms at one point — waiting to make entry even as the massacre unfolded.
[…]
The district attorney for Uvalde, Christina Mitchell Busbee, is leading a criminal investigation into the shooting. The Texas Rangers, with assistance from the FBI, are investigating the police response.
Separately, the Justice Department is conducting a “critical incident review” of the police response. And a three-member legislative committee appointed by House Speaker Dade Phelan is investigating the massacre.
Gutierrez wants more answers now.
“We’re supposed to be the big bad-ass cops in the region,” Gutierrez said of the DPS troopers. “What happened here? Where were they situated in that building, and what time did they get there? When it came to protecting our children, we failed.”
Yeah, lots of investigations of this massive tragedy – perhaps this explains why the local cops quit cooperating the DPS’ own investigation, or why Uvalde schools top cop Pete Arredondo sounds so defensive. Maybe we need all these investigations now because clearly no one wants to have ownership of any of this. Which, given what a massive clusterfuck it appears to have been, I can understand. But man, everything about this just keeps getting worse and more infuriating. I’m with Scott Braddock:
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Decades of covering Texas and I have NEVER seen this level of incompetence and misplaced priorities.
Few travel this entire incredible state talking to everyone from all walks of life like I do.
We ARE better than what we are getting from leadership right now.— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:25 PM – 13 June 2022
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Gov @GregAbbott_TX has drained almost every other state agency’s budgets to fund DPS operations in South Texas. When DPS was on the scene of the #UvaldeMassacre in South Texas what did they do?
Fucking nothing.
Your tax dollars at work, Texans.— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:13 PM – 13 June 2022
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The Abbott Administration’s officers stood down while those kids were slaughtered in that classroom. This isn’t hard to understand.
What will you do about it?— Scott Braddock (@scottbraddock) 10:01 PM – 13 June 2022
To put this another way:
Gutierrez questioned why state troopers on the scene would automatically defer to a school district officer with no radios.
“Why weren’t the decisions made by the most superior police force on-site?” he asked. “How then did everybody just jump on and make (Arredondo) the incident commander? If he never had a radio, then how did he make himself the incident commander? It just doesn’t follow.”
At the news conference last month, McCraw told reporters that police in Texas are trained not to wait for orders to neutralize an active shooter.
“When there’s an active shooter, the rules change,” McCraw said. “You don’t have time. You don’t have to have a leader on the scene. Every officer lines up, stacks up, goes and finds where those rounds are being fired at and keeps shooting until the subject is dead. Period.”
Law enforcement sources told the Express-News that four Border Patrol agents and two sheriff’s deputies made entry into the classrooms and killed Ramos.
Gutierrez said officers in the hallway at one point had as many as three ballistic shields before finally breaching the door to the classrooms. Once they did, nearly two dozen people inside were dead.
“There was enough material in that room to stop this threat,” he said. “And it didn’t happen.”
There were an awful lot of good guys with guns (and vests and helmet and shields) at Robb Elementary School. They amounted to exactly zero when it came to stopping one guy from killing almost two dozen people, almost all children. That is a goddamn disgrace.
If it took him over an hour to kill all of his victims, why the furore over an “assault rifle” that can “fire 700 rounds a minute?” the semi automatic rifle can only fire once per trigger pull. Yes, it can be fast. But if it took him that long to shoot 20 people, he could have done the same thing with a 38 special or .357 magnum.
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