Uvalde police officers equipped with ballistic shields lingered outside the classroom where a gunman was murdering children at Robb Elementary School for nearly an hour before breaching the door, apparently confused as to who was in charge of the scene, radio transcripts and surveillance footage reviewed by the Texas Tribune reveal.
While reports have indicated police were waiting for a master set of keys to enter the classrooms, an officer said a Halligan bar, an ax-like forcible-entry tool, arrived within the first minutes of the law enforcement response. Authorities did not use the tool, which was not brought into the school until an hour after the first officers entered the building, and instead waited for keys that took just six minutes to arrive after school district police chief Pete Arredondo requested them, according to the report.
The first of four ballistic shields arrived 58 minutes before officers finally entered the classrooms, while the last arrived 30 minutes before.
Some officers on-scene were questioning why law enforcement was not entering the rooms.
A special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety arrived 20 minutes after the shooting began and asked if there were still kids in the classrooms, saying “if there is, then they just need to go in.”
Another officer said it was unknown. When the agent again said, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there,” someone replied, “Whoever is in charge will determine that.”
As the gunman fired shots at at 11:40 a.m., 11:44 a.m., and 12:21 p.m., officers still did not attempt to gain entry to the rooms.
Officers had rifles, a Halligan and at least one ballistic shield by noon but did not try to enter the classrooms for 50 minutes.
Records and footage reviewed by the Texas Tribune reveal a “well-equipped” group of local officers entered the school “almost immediately” that day but then pulled back when the 18-year-old shooter began firing from inside the classroom. Officers waited for more than an hour to reengage the shooter who was inside a pair of adjoining four grade classrooms.
Arredondo previously told the Tribune that he and another group of officers tried to open the doors to classrooms 111 and 112 but that the doors were reinforced and impenetrable.
However, no security footage shows any attempts to open the doors and some law enforcement officials are skeptical that the doors were locked, according to the report. The San Antonio Express-News similarly reported that there is no evidence that officers tried to open the doors.
Though the classroom doors are supposed to lock automatically the shooter could be seen walking into the room easily and then entering and exiting at least three times.
While Arredondo previously said he did not believe he was the on-scene commander, the Texas Tribune reported that “at least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school.” Arredondo also seemed to be issuing orders directing officers to evacuate students from other rooms, according to the report.
When Arredondo called Uvalde police dispatch, at least 11 officers had entered the school, at least two of whom are seen in video carrying rifles. Arredondo requested a SWAT team saying “we don’t have enough firepower right now.”
“It’s all pistol and he has an AR-15,” he said. “If you can get the SWAT team set up, by the funeral home, OK, we need — yes, I need some more firepower in here because we all have pistols and this guy’s got a rifle.”
Community members in Uvalde, Texas, called on Arredondo to resign or be fired at a school board meeting Monday night nearly a month after a shooting at Robb Elementary School killed 19 students and two teachers.
“Having Pete still employed, knowing he is incapable of decision-making that saves lives is terrifying,” said Brett Cross, whose nephew died in the shooting, according to ABC News. “Innocence doesn’t hide, innocence doesn’t change its story, but innocence did die on May 24.”
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said last month that local officers waited too long to enter the school and engage the shooter because Arredondo believed the situation was “no longer an active shooting” but a “barricaded subject” under the assumption that all the children inside the two connected classrooms were dead, despite students inside the room still calling 911 for help.
“At one point or another you’re going to have to draw a line in the sand to decide if you hold one of your own accountable,” Jesus Rizo Jr. said at the meeting, according to ABC. “Pete, Mr. Arredondo, is also my friend. I’m sure we all got along with him. At one point or another, we’re going to have to decide if we hold them accountable. And I pray that you make the right decision.”
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo previously told the Tribune on June 9. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”