Uvalde shooting: Steve McCraw: Misinformation leads to failure
In an exclusive interview, the DPS director stated that law enforcement was not provided with accurate information following their response to Robb Elementary.
Tony Plohetski and Nate Chute, Austin American-Statesman
Warning: The following video, audio, and descriptions of the Uvalde School shooting are disturbing. Discretion is advised.
When a gunman entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022, panicked, desperate calls poured in to Uvalde’s emergency dispatch center.
At 11:33 a.m., a man yelled to a telephone operator, “He’s in the school! Oh my God, in the name of Jesus, he’s in the school shooting the children.”
Three minutes later, a teacher at Robb Elementary School who was on the line with a 911 operator for 28 minutes remained silent for most of the conversation but occasionally whispered. At one point, her voice broke and she shouted, “I’m scared. They’re banging on my door.”
The city of Uvalde on Saturday released a trove of documents related to the state’s deadliest school massacre, the largest and most comprehensive release of documents since that day. The documents include body camera footage, some dashcam video, 911 and other calls, text messages and other redacted documents.
The release does not change the public narrative of what is known about that day, much of which has been leaked to journalists in the more than two years since the shooting: A gunman entered the school, entered two classrooms and began shooting while police waited more than an hour to enter the classroom. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed.
But the publication of the documents is part of the resolution of a legal dispute brought by a coalition of media outlets, including the American-Statesman and its parent company Gannett.
“We are grateful that the City of Uvalde is taking this step toward transparency,” said attorney Laura Prather, who represented the coalition. “Transparency is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow all of us to understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies.”
The coalition of news organizations still has lawsuits pending against the Texas Department of Public Safety, Uvalde County and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District over their records.
Body cameras worn by officers show the chaos at Robb Elementary School as the shooting unfolded. One footage shows several officers cautiously approaching the school.
“Watch the windows! Watch the windows,” one officer says. When it is pointed out that the shooter was armed with an “AR,” short for the military-issue AR-15, the officer responds with a single curse word.
One officer said of the shooter: “I hope he rots in hell.”
More: How a false story about police heroism in Uvalde spread and was exposed
The emergency calls also came from a man who claimed to be the shooter’s uncle.
He called at 12:57 p.m. – just minutes after a SWAT team entered the classroom and killed the shooter – and expressed a desire to speak with his nephew, telling the operator that the man sometimes listens to him.
“Oh my God, please don’t do anything stupid,” he said out loud.
“I think he’s shooting children,” said the uncle. “Why did you do that? Why?”
Emails to then-Mayor of Uvalde, Don McLaughlin, also paint a picture of the frustration, sadness and anger that continued days after the shooting.
In one of these letters, dated May 31, 2022, a week after the deadly attack, McLaughlin was criticized for his perceived failure to hold police officers accountable for the botched response to the massacre.
“Come on Don, you have to do something,” the sender (the sender line in the email has been redacted) wrote in the profanity-laced message. “You can’t just sit back and do nothing like you’re used to. You have to fire the cops involved and you know it. But you won’t do it because you’re trapped in politics. You’d rather take a donation from the NRA than protect your citizens.”
The chief of staff for the mayor of Orlando, Florida, sent McLaughlin an email expressing his condolences and offering his support. The email included a PDF attachment titled “Mass Shooting Protocol: Checklist,” which provides guidelines for communicating with residents and media.
“Keep your messages simple, credible and consistent,” it said. “Correct misinformation.”
The Texas Department of Public Safety still faces a lawsuit from 14 news organizations, including the Statesman, demanding records about the shooting, including footage from the crime scene and internal investigations. The department has not released those records, even though a judge ruled in favor of the news organizations in March, citing objections from Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell.
In June, a Uvalde County State District Court judge ordered the Uvalde School District and Sheriff’s Office to release records related to the shooting to news outlets, but because the case is still in the appeals phase, those records have not been made available.
More: “Failure”: The US Department of Justice’s damning report on the Uvalde school shooting criticises the law enforcement response
Law enforcement officials who converged on Robb Elementary School after the shooting began were sharply criticized for waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman. Surveillance video footage, first obtained by the Statesman and Austin ABC affiliate KVUE nearly seven months after the massacre, shows in vivid detail dozens of heavily armed officers from local, state and federal agencies in helmets and body armor pacing down a school hallway.
Some left the camera’s frame and then reappeared. Others can be seen pointing their weapons at the classroom, talking, talking on the phone, texting, and looking at floor plans, but not attempting to enter the classrooms.
Even when at least four more shots were heard from the classrooms 45 minutes after police arrived at the scene, the officers waited.
“We are here to help”
Two Uvalde School police officers, including former police chief Pete Arredondo, were charged with botching the response to the shooting.
In a 10-count indictment unsealed in June, prosecutors allege 10 missteps against Arredondo. According to the documents, Arredondo is accused of failing to protect survivors of the attack, including Khloie Torres, then 10, who called 911 during the attack and begged for help. The documents also name Samuel Salinas, who was also 10 at the time and said in interviews that he “played dead” to survive the attack.
The indictment states that Arredondo “failed to respond to a shooting spree as trained … and thereby delayed the response of law enforcement officers to the gunman who chased and shot one or more children in Room 112 of Robb Elementary School.”
On Friday, Arredondo’s attorney, Paul Looney, said during a news conference in Houston that the former police chief was not responsible for the flawed response and instead blamed police protocols. He said the responsibility for setting up a command post did not lie with Arredondo because he was one of the first officers to respond to the shooting and worked to save lives.
“Every single law enforcement officer that shows up is competent and trained to set up a command post,” Looney said. “The people who are on the front lines and are close to where they might be involved in the shooting are not tasked with setting up a command post. Protocols say that someone outside the door, outside the fire zone, is the best person to do that.”
Looney said that despite school shooting regulations requiring Arredondo to serve as incident commander, the former police chief was under the impression that another officer had taken command to lead the on-scene responders because “when you’re in the danger zone, you’re not the incident commander,” he said.
However, body camera footage released by the city on Saturday shows Arredondo giving instructions over the phone from inside the school and telling others to “film this when we’re done. We need to film the whole school. The whole grounds. So nobody gets in anywhere.”
About a minute later, officers from another agency introduce themselves to Arredondo and say, “Hey, chief! You know our captain? We’re here to help.” “Thanks, brother,” Arredondo replies.
Looney said of the delayed response: “The situation needs to be investigated. It needs to be worked on and we need to figure out how to do these things. … The protocols need to be better worked out. This needs to be put together better so it’s more automatic. Apparently there wasn’t enough training for these things because it didn’t happen automatically.”
The other officer charged in the case, Adrian Gonzales, faces a 29-count charge of child abandonment/endangerment. Prosecutors allege that he had time to respond to the shooter but instead chose “not to engage, distract, and delay the shooter and failed to otherwise act to impede the shooter until he entered rooms 111 and 112 of Robb Elementary School,” the indictment states.
