© AP Photo/Dario Lopez-MillsPolice waited 77 minutes to attempt entering Robb Elementary, a new report said.
Security footage shows cops at the Uvalde, Texas school massacre waited 77 minutes before even trying to open the doors to two classrooms where the shooter killed 19 children and two teachers last month, a new report said.
The latest revelation,
published Saturday by The San Antonio Express News, is the latest detail that shows a
botched police response to the massacre, which is now under investigation by the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Video shows that gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 on May 24, even though it was supposed to lock automatically when shut and only be opened from the outside with a key, the newspaper said.
Once inside the classroom, Ramos was able to access classroom 112 through another interior door.It was unclear if the door was locked while Ramos conducted the shooting spree,
but police did not even check or try to open it, despite having access to a Halligan tool which could have broken the lock, according to the report.Uvalde school district police Chief
Pete Arredondo was in charge of the operation.
He previously told The Texas Tribune that he waited for 40 minutes for keys from the custodian to try to open the classroom door.Footage now shows that when Arredondo eventually got the key ring, he was trying to open other doors to find a master key, not the doors to classroom 111 and 112, according to the Express News.
"Each time I tried a key I was just praying," Arredondo told the Texas Tribune. "The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible."
He tried dozens of keys, but told officers to wait for a tactical team when none worked, the report said.
Finally, at 12:50 p.m., police breached the door and shot and killed the suspect who had first broken into the school at 11:33 a.m. through an exterior door that had also failed to automatically lock.During that excruciating and deadly 77-minute span, seven desperate 911 calls were made by students and teachers inside the classrooms under fire as the carnage piled up.Texas investigators say Arredondo mistakenly treated the shooting as a barricaded suspect incident instead of an active shooter situation, where the top priority is for cops to confront the suspect to stop the violence.
Comment: More from
New York Post:
Multiple police officers armed with rifles and a ballistic shield were inside Robb Elementary School 19 minutes after the gunman, according to new details — yet law enforcement still waited roughly an hour to breach the classroom where the shooter carried out his deadly rampage last month.
The new details were included in reports by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE on Monday and mark the latest revelations in the botched police response to the May 24 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
Surveillance footage from inside the school showed the armed officers standing inside a hallway at 11:52 a.m. after gunman Salvador Ramos broke into the school at 11:33 a.m. through an exterior door that had failed to automatically lock.
© KVUEOfficers armed with rifles and a ballistic shield entered Robb Elementary School nine minutes after gunman Salvador Ramos.
"There were 19 officers in there," Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a media briefing days after the mass shooting. "In fact, there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done, with one exception — the incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point."
School security footage as well as police body camera video shows the officers had enough firepower and protection to take out the gunman much sooner than they did, according to the American-Statesman.
Update: Testimony from the public safety chief confirms police never tried to open the door to the classroom. From
Penn Live:
Law enforcement authorities had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they never checked a classroom door to see if it was locked, the Texas public safety chief testified Tuesday, pronouncing the police response an "abject failure."
...
"I have great reasons to believe it was never secured," McCraw said the door. "How about trying the door and seeing if it's locked?"
McCraw testified at a state Senate hearing on the police handling of the tragedy. Delays in the law enforcement response have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.
"Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-site commander," McCraw said of Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief.
...
McCraw told the Senate committee that Arredondo decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.
The public safety chief outlined for the committee a series of missed opportunities, communication breakdowns and other mistakes, among them:
- Arredondo did not have a radio with him.
- Police and sheriff's radios did not work within the school; only the radios of Border Patrol agents on the scene worked inside the school, and even they did not work perfectly.
- Some diagrams of the school that police were using 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, but McGraw said that the teacher had closed the door and it could only be locked from the outside.
"There's no way for her to know the door is locked," McGraw said. "He walked straight through."
...
Arredondo later said he didn't consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. Arredondo has declined repeated requests for comment to The Associated Press.
As for the amount of time that elapsed before officers entered the classroom, McCraw said: "In an active shooter environment, that's intolerable."
"This set our profession back a decade. That's what it did," the said of the police response in Uvalde.
Especially given that they WERE equipped with shields, contradicting the first media reports. The 'higher-ups' are selling out the first-responders.
Not like this hasn't happened before:
Flashback Washington, DC Capitol police board of inquiry report justifies CERT squad's stand down order at Navy Yard shooting by claiming elite tactical response unit "was stuck in traffic"
Specially trained unit did not respond to shooting which killed 12 in part due to concerns about threat to US Capitol A specially trained tactical Capitol police squad was recalled from responding...Best of the Web: Washington D.C. elite tactical police units were ordered to stand down while massacre took place at Navy Yard
Officer says tactical team arrived quickly but Capitol Police commander ordered officers to return. Inquiry ordered. The U.S. Capitol Police have launched an investigation into whether an elite...