A preliminary report launched Sunday by a Texas House of Representatives investigative committee discovered “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” by regulation enforcement and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District in the wake of the May 24 mass shooting that killed 19 children and two lecturers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
The 77-page report specifies that past the gunman, no different particular person is responsible for the shooting.
“There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” the report notes.
While 376 officers responded to the scene, a scarcity of clear management and path contributed to officers’ “overall lackadaisical approach,” the report discovered.
Many responding officers “were given and relied upon inaccurate information,” and others “had enough information to know better,” the report concludes.
“The scene was chaotic, without any person obviously in charge or directing the law enforcement response,” the report notes.
When the gunman first arrived on the scene, there was no regulation enforcement officer on the campus, based on the report. A coach at the school, Yvette Silva, “acted heroically and almost certainly saved lives by alerting the school to the attacker’s advance,” the report notes, including that “most fourth grade classes successfully locked down as a result of her quick response.”
When officers did arrive on the scene, the report notes, their response rapidly broke down.
Officers who first arrived on the scene about three minutes after the gunman entered the school “acted appropriately by attempting to breach the classrooms and stop the attacker,” based on the report. At that time, the embattled Police Chief Pete Arredondo — a key focus of the report — “was actively engaged in the effort to ‘stop the killing’,” the report states.
But after gunman returned hearth on the officers, they “lost critical momentum by treating the scenario as a “barricaded subject” instead of with the greater urgency attached to an “active shooter” scenario.”
Arredondo additionally didn’t tackle what the report characterizes as “his preassigned responsibility of incident command,” which might have required letting the different officers know he was in cost and leaving the constructing to arrange an incident command put up. Instead, he remained in the hallway, and in doing so, he was unable to speak with different regulation enforcement officers and “effectively implement staging or command and control of the situation,” based on the report. He additionally did not learn about the 911 calls coming from inside the classroom “because of his failure to establish a reliable method of receiving critical information from outside the building,” based on the report.
“Even if he had received information of surviving injured victims in the classrooms, it is unclear that he would have done anything differently to act ‘more urgently,'” the report provides of Arredondo.
Arredondo, who’s on administrative depart from his function as police chief and resigned from his seat on the Uvalde City Council a month after being sworn in in the wake of widespread criticism over his response at the scene, beforehand told the Texas Tribune he by no means thought of himself the incident commander and as a substitute acted as a front-line responder.
The officers’ positions had been additionally not tactically coordinated inside the school, the report discovered.
While Arredondo and different officers had been clustered round the south finish of the constructing, centered on getting into the school rooms the gunman was in and securing protecting gear for officers, dozens of different officers had been in the hallway on the north aspect of the constructing “stacking up for an assault on the classrooms, and mostly waiting for further instructions pending the arrival of protective gear and breaching equipment,” the report states.
The report additionally locations blame on different regulation enforcement officers for the breakdown in the police response.
Other officers on the scene ought to have acknowledged “obvious deficiencies in command and control” and approached Arredondo or different officers round him to supply help with incident command, based on the report.
Officers additionally assumed the classroom doorways had been locked with out seeing if that was true, based on the report, which notes that the door of Room 111, one of the two in which the shooter was energetic, “probably was not effectively locked shut.”
When the United States Border Patrol Tactical Unit, often known as BORTAC, arrived on the scene, Arredondo didn’t direct them, nor did they search instruction from him, based on the report. BORTAC Acting Commander Paul Guerrero waited to attempt to enter the school rooms till acquiring a working grasp key and placing a rifle-rated defend in place.
The report concludes that “it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue,” however notes that the majority of the victims in all probability died immediately upon being shot and that the committee “has not received medical evidence” to make a definitive judgment about whether or not a faster response from officers at the scene may’ve saved lives.
The report additionally blames the school’s infrastructure for communication failures, noting that no one used the school intercom to speak the lockdown and poor wi-fi seemingly delayed an alert that went out to lecturers.
Family members of the victims obtained the report Sunday, and officers are anticipated to carry a press convention to debate its findings on Sunday afternoon. Printed copies of the report had been hand-delivered to Uvalde and Texas officers on Saturday evening in an try to stop the report from being leaked to the media earlier than the relations had an opportunity to evaluation it, CNN reported.
The report notes that the committee’s investigation into the shooting stays ongoing, however that it “believes this interim report constitutes the most complete telling to date of the events of and leading to the May 24, 2022, tragedy.”
“We do not have access to all material witnesses. Medical examiners have not yet issued any reports about their findings, and multiple other investigations remain ongoing,” the report states.
The report excludes each the identify and picture of the gunman “so as not to glorify him,” it notes. The committee dedicates the report to the victims.
“This report is meant to honor them,” it states.
This is a creating story. Please examine again for updates.