So far, I have deliberately stayed away from this topic. My reasoning was there were already enough articles and posts flying around about what happened in that Texas hill country town of 16,000. I figured I’d wait until a more complete picture started to develop before I weighed in with my two cents. Well, it’s been several days, and we still don’t know a whole hell of a lot about what transpired on Tuesday.
What we do know is honestly disturbing. From what I’ve read and seen the whole thing was a cascade of failures. One so spectacular I have never seen it’s like in my 54 years. And it keeps getting worse day by day.
There are many other articles out there that lay out the timeline, so I’m not going to rehash the entire thing. Instead I’m going to discuss the points of failure that led to the deaths of nineteen 4th graders and two adults.
There are many reports of behavior that should have put the shooter on police radar. None of them have been confirmed as of this writing and other than a quick mention, not worth the time to go over. What we do know for sure is that the shooter came from a difficult background with an unstable home life. We also know that he shot his grandmother in the face before stealing her truck and heading to the school.
Failure One
There were early reports that a school resource officer confronted/engaged the shooter as he entered the school. Those turned out to be false. The SRO wasn’t even present on campus. At this time, we don’t know where the SRO was other than not where he should have been.
Failure Two
Robb elementary school had what’s called a single point of entry. That is to say all of the exterior doors less the main entrance were locked from the outside. However, according to surveillance video, a teacher propped the door to the teacher’s parking lot open at 11:27. At 11:33 the shooter entered the school via that door. Had the door not been propped open the shooter couldn’t have entered where he did. It’s important to note that there had been several 911 calls made by this time and police were already en-route. In fact they began to enter through the same propped open door less than two minutes later.
Failure Three
According to the Uvalde police’s own policy manual officers are expected to put their lives on the line to stop an active shooter. The policy lays out a list of priorities in active shooter situations. It clearly lays out that innocent lives take precedent over first responders and that if officers were unwilling to lay down their lives for the innocent they should find other employment.
Yet after the initial encounter, in which two of the responding officers were slightly wounded, the Uvalde PD simply gathered outside the classroom where the shooter and a class of 4th graders were. This despite sporadic gunfire inside the classroom. We know that during this period of time, between 11:35 and 12:03 as many as 19 Uvalde cops were gathered around the door to the classroom. Doing nothing. Is it on them? Maybe, maybe not.
Failure Four
During his presser yesterday, Texas DPS director Steven McGraw seemed to place the blame for the inaction on the on-scene incident commander, Uvalde Central Independent School District PD chief Pete Arredondo. While not specifically naming him, McGraw said the incident commander had decided that it had gone from an active shooter situation to a barricaded suspect. This despite continued calls to 911 from inside the classroom stating there were still children alive. Why Arredondo, the chief of a 6 member force was incident commander is a question that will have to be answered at some point, as will the question of why some other cop didn’t tell him he was doing exactly the wrong things.
It’s not as if the responding officers hadn’t been trained on what needed to happen. They had training on active shooter response in Robb elementary just two months prior.
Failure Five
The fifth and final failure of this rotten edifice was the attempt by the local police, both the city of Uvalde and the School district cops to deceive everyone from the Governor on down as to what really happened. Greg Abbott made his displeasure known when he found out, and I’d be surprised if some people didn’t lose their jobs over this.
What Went Right
In short, not much.
Shortly after 12:00 agents from the elite Border Patrol BORTAC unit showed up on-scene. They were held back by the incident commander. Finally BORTAC had enough and despite Arredondo’s orders, formed a stack and breached the classroom, killing the shooter. The agent who led the stack was hit. The wound in his scalp took 5 staples to close.