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Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents the district where Uvalde is located, asks Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw questions during the Texas Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans hearing regarding the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde
Sara Diggins/Austin American-Statesman/AP/PA Images
School Shooting
Top Texas officer: Uvalde police response was ‘abject failure’
Steve McCraw said officers would have found the door to the classroom where the assailant was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.
THE HEAD OF the Texas state police pronounced the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school shooting an “abject failure,” telling politicians that there were enough officers and firepower on the scene to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building.
Col Steve McCraw also said officers would have found the door to the classroom where the assailant was holed up unlocked if they had bothered to check it.
Instead, police with rifles stood in a hallway for over an hour, waiting in part for more weapons and gear, before they finally stormed the classroom and killed the gunman, putting an end to the May 24 attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” Mr McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said on Tuesday in blistering evidence at a state Senate hearing.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw uses maps and graphics to present a timeline of the school shooting at Robb Elementary School AP / PA Images
AP / PA Images / PA Images
The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside by design, according to Mr 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, Mr McCraw said.
He said police instead waited for keys.
“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” Mr McCraw said of the door.
“How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw uses photos of doors to present what happened regarding the keys and doors during the school shooting AP / PA Images
AP / PA Images / PA Images
Delays in the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.
Evidence was scheduled to resume on Wednesday.
Mr McCraw tore into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who Mr 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.”
Mr Arredondo made “terrible decisions”, said Mr McCraw, who lamented that the police response “set our profession back a decade”.
Mr Arredondo has said he did not consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response.
Reggie Daniels pays his respects at a memorial at Robb Elementary School (Eric Gay/AP)
He has declined repeated requests for comment from The Associated Press.
The police chief gave evidence for about five hours on Tuesday at a closed-door hearing of a Texas House committee also investigating the tragedy, according to the panel chairman.
Senate members hearing the latest details reacted with fury, some decrying Mr Arredondo as incompetent and saying the delay cost lives.
Others pressed Mr McCraw on why state troopers on the scene did not take charge.
Mr 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, Mr 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 Mr 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, Mr 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:
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— Mr Arredondo did not have a radio with him.
— Police and sheriffs’ 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 school diagrams that police used to co-ordinate their response were wrong.
State police initially said the gunman, Salvador Ramos, entered the school through an exterior door that had been propped open by a teacher.
Actor Matthew McConaughey holds an image of Alithia Ramirez, 10, who was killed in the mass shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, as he speaks during a press briefing at the White House on Tuesday, June 7(Evth an Vucci/AP)
However, Mr 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”, Mr McCraw said.
The gunman knew the building well, having attended the fourth grade in the same classrooms where he carried out the attack, Mr McCraw said.
Ramos never communicated with police that day, the public safety chief said.
Senator Paul Bettencourt said the entire premise of lockdown and shooter training is worthless if school doors cannot be locked.
“We have a culture where we think we’ve trained an entire school for lockdown … but we set up a condition to failure,” he said.
Mr Bettencourt challenged Mr Arredondo to give evidence in public and said he should have removed himself from the job immediately.
He angrily pointed out that shots were heard while police waited.
“There are at least six shots fired during this time,” he said.
“Why is this person shooting? He’s killing somebody. Yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.”
Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin said on Tuesday that the city has “specific legal reasons” that it is not answering questions publicly or releasing records.
“There is no cover-up,” he said in a statement.
Later in the day, the Uvalde City Council voted unanimously against giving Mr Arredondo, who is a council member, a leave of absence from appearing at public meetings.
Relatives of the shooting victims had pleaded with city leaders to instead fire him.
“Please, please, we’re begging you, get this man out of our lives,” said Berlinda Arreola, the grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza.
After the meeting, the mayor pushed back on Mr McCraw’s evidence casting blame on Arredondo, saying that the Department of Public Safety has repeatedly put out false information about the shooting and glossed over the role of its own officers.
He called the Senate hearing a “clown show” and said he heard nothing from Mr McCraw about state troopers’ involvement, even though Mr McLaughlin said their number in the school hallway at points during the slaughter surpassed that of any other law enforcement agency.
Questions about the law enforcement response began days after the massacre.
Mr McCraw said three days afterward that Mr 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 desperately calling 911 for help and anguished parents outside the school begged officers to go inside.
An hour after the shooter first crashed his truck outside the school, Mr Arredondo said, according to Mr McCraw’s timeline: “People are going to ask why we’re taking so long. We’re trying to preserve the rest of the life.”
But Mr McCraw said on Tuesday that the amount of time that elapsed before officers entered the classroom was “intolerable”.
Police haven’t found any red flags in Ramos’ school disciplinary files but learned through interviews that he engaged in cruelty to animals.
“He walked around with a bag of dead cats,” Mr McCraw said.
In the days and weeks after the shooting, authorities gave conflicting and incorrect accounts of what happened.
But Mr McCraw assured politicians: “Everything I’ve testified today is corroborated.”
Mr 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.
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I miss ‘Most Haunted’ with Derek Acorah. When he exorcised the wandering spirit of Dick Turpin by making whinnying noises to simulate Black Bess it was just beautiful
“I’m getting a Mary..Yes Yes definitley a Mary .Mary loves Dick ..Yep Yep ,Mary Definitley loves Dick”..I cried fcuking laughing for an hour when he said that..
This can’t be the first ever televised exorcism, because exorcisms aren’t real. It’s like advertising the first ever televised unicorn race, and then showing some horses with cardboard tubes stuck onto their heads running around.
Well, exorcisms are real in that they take place in the real world and there are enough gullible people to believe that they are genuine, but no doubt the ‘demons’ won’t show up tonight, they don’t seem to like cameras.
Channel4 did a live exorcism years ago now using test equipment etc and it blew them away… and it was funny as the outcome wasn’t what Channel4 wanted or expected. They said they would be back but never did or said another word about it. http://www.theguardian.com/media/2005/feb/25/broadcasting.channel41
Channel 4 has been trying to rubbish exorcism since this program aired…
I doubt the god fearing would watch it..does the station have permission to carry out a rc exorcism? doubt it, so its probably a non religion specific exorcism. I’d still watch it though
“Without that confirmation from Coffey and other psychics that something creepy remains there, Tovay said that Destination America wouldn’t go to the house.”
That’s like NASA saying “Without Astrologers we wouldn’t go into space.”
Ah for Jazus sake will you ever f*ck off! we can’t even have an Halloween ghost story without some idiot mentioning Enda Kenny. Do you think you’re brilliantly original or something?
I’m totally relaxed, enjoying a lightweight Halloween story and a glass of wine, at least I was until the wag of the year (you) decided to interject with a totally original comment. Enda Kenny, eh? How DID you come up with that one? But hey, you’re obviously a wit of the highest order, so I will defer to your superior intellect and crawl away chastened and chastised.
lads do yous know whats haunting…nothing…hey matt..did you know they do this halloween thing in Ireland..and they sold it to America…do you know whats amazing about that matt…nothing ..club classic today matt..rockwell..amazing fact matt..he didnt really sing on the song matt..he was shite..so his daddy brought in michael jackson matt…number one song matt..something else matt..halloween matt..nothing. enjoy
I saw a program on discovery and there is something like 56 or maybe 52 catholic priests who work as exorcist in the US today and apparently they are always very busy. There are ways you can tell mental illness from possession and they showed some of the ways. All seemed very believable if it wasn’t a load of nonsense. Still loads still believe in this. Very odd.
There’s no such thing as an authentic exorcism. People supposedly possessed are usually mentally ill. So are some of the exorcists, mind you, albeit they might be well intentioned.
Dermot the catholic church uses professional psychologists to evaluate people who believe there are processed, most have some psychological problem but not all and psychologists are present as well at exorcisms and some left the profession after being involved with the exorcism then, very few do stay as an psychologist for exorcisms. It scares the hell out of them, that is why.
People excuse the paranormal under psychological terms for it saying it is all in their head but a few cases do prove the rule, just because we can’t explain it doesn’t mean we should ignore it or excuse it until when we can find an excuse that makes us feel that when we know what it is, in terms that we can explain what it is? Once we can explain it then we accept it because knowledge gives us control over it or a feeling of control anyway?
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