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Wednesday, March 27, 2024 | Back issues
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Feds slam Uvalde law enforcement failures in Robb Elementary School shooting response

The 575-page report released Thursday identifies in stark detail several breakdowns before and during the response to the Uvalde elementary school, including decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to the “unimaginable failure.”

UVALDE, Texas (CN) — A federal inquiry into the May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School concluded that “cascading failures of leadership” and a lack of urgency contributed to the disastrous law enforcement response during the shooting that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers and stunned the nation already numb to mass shootings.

The 575-page report released Thursday identifies in stark detail several breakdowns before and during the response to the Uvalde elementary school, including decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to the “unimaginable failure.”

“The massacre at Robb Elementary shattered families throughout this community and devastated our country,” said U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland. “The law enforcement response at Robb Elementary was a failure.”

According to the report, the most significant collapse in the critical 77-minute gap between the arrival of first responders on scene and the killing of the gunman came from their failure to treat the scene as an active shooter situation. Instead, officers treated the shooter as a barricaded subject in contrast to generally accepted active shooter practices.

“That failure meant that law enforcement officials prioritized the protracted evacuation of students and teachers from other classrooms instead of immediately rescuing the victims trapped with the active shooter,” Garland said during a news conference in Uvalde on Thursday. “Lives would’ve been saved."

The Justice Department report identified Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo as the de facto on-scene incident commander who began treating the incident as a barricaded subject scenario.

That decision by Arredondo, who has since been fired along with four other officers in the aftermath of the shooting, resulted in first responders attempting to negotiate with the shooter and waiting for additional responders and equipment to arrive, instead of confronting the shooter.

On May 24, 2022, the 18-year-old shooter entered Robb Elementary School with a high-powered AR15 rifle and began unloading shots within a minute of entering connecting classrooms 111 and 112. Eleven local law enforcement officers arrived at the school within three minutes of the shooter’s entry, but retreated to cover after two offices were hit with shrapnel when additional shots were fired inside one of the rooms.

The report states that as “overwhelming numbers of law enforcement personnel” self-deployed to the school, many believed the shooter had already been killed or that Arredondo was in the room with him based on inaccurate information at the scene or over the radio.

It wasn’t until approximately 12:50 p.m. that a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team and deputies from two local sheriffs’ offices entered the room and killed the shooter when he emerged shooting from a closet, according to the report.

By then more than an hour had passed after the first officers entered the school, and hundreds of rounds of ammunition were fired. But a barrage of gunfire during the initial response, the notification from an officer on scene that his wife, a teacher, was inside one of the classrooms, and multiple radio broadcasts of a 911 call from a student inside the classroom should have indicated that there was an active threat, the report says.

The law enforcement response incident review began less than a month after the massacre at the request of then-Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who has since resigned to run for the Texas House. The review included interviews with more than 200 individuals from more than 30 organizations and agencies and analyzed nearly 13,000 pieces of evidence as of spring 2023.

On Wednesday in Uvalde, about 80 miles west of downtown San Antonio, Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta toured the “Healing Uvalde” murals painted to honor the lives of the children and teachers killed. Justice Department officials met privately with family members later that evening to brief them before the report’s public release.

The town with a population of 15,217 just east of the Texas/Mexico border has been on edge in anticipation of the Justice Department’s report since news reports of its release spread on Monday.

“We got to learn from what happened in Uvalde, Texas,” Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez told reporters after the report’s release Thursday. “It’s my hope that at least this report tells this entire world that we need to have some real change.”

President Joe Biden on Thursday again called on Congress to pass "common-sense gun safety laws to ensure that mass shootings like this one don't happen in the first place."

"We need universal background checks, we need a national red flag law, and we must ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. The families of Uvalde — and all American communities — deserve nothing less," the president said.

A separate criminal investigation into police failures in Uvalde is still ongoing. While Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell initially said a grand jury would convene in the matter before the end of 2023, she has not released a new timeline and is still reviewing the matter.

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Categories / Criminal, Government, National

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