Uvalde Police May Have Shot Attacker Before He Entered School, Report Says

This is how the investigation in Uvalde goes one month after the massacre 2:39

(CNN) --

An Uvalde police officer armed with a rifle asked his supervisor for permission to shoot Salvador Ramos — the shooter who later killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School — before entering the building. the school, but "the supervisor didn't listen or responded too late," says a new assessment of law enforcement's response to the school shooting.

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"The officer turned to get confirmation from his supervisor and when he turned to address the suspect, he had entered the west hallway without stopping," said the report, released Wednesday by the Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center. Advanced Law (ALERRT, for its acronym in English), adding that "the agent commented that he was concerned that if he missed his shot, the bullets could have penetrated the school and injured the students."

ALERRT is a nationally recognized police training center at Texas State University.

The report's authors toured the scene and viewed video from the school, third-party video, body cameras, radio records, verbal testimony from officers, and verbal statements from investigators.

According to the report, once fully armed police officers entered the school, including some carrying rifles, they lost momentum because they did not return fire when they were shot and it took over an hour for them to regain that momentum and gain access to the school. where people were seriously injured.

Uvalde Police Chief is on administrative leave 1:30

"It is not surprising that officers who have never been shot before are overwhelmed by targeted fire. This is especially the case if they have not consistently trained to deal with these types of threats," the report says, and then lists other threats. potential actions that the police could have taken during the incident.

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"The simplest plan would have been to push the team down the hall and try to control the classrooms from the door windows," the authors write.

Another missed opportunity for police to stop Ramos before his shooting began occurred outside the school, according to the report.

One of the first responders, a police officer from the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District who drove through the parking lot at high speed, "could have seen the suspect and attacked him before the suspect entered the building," the officer says. report.

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"If the officer had slowed down or parked his car on the edge of the school property and approached on foot, he could have seen the suspect and attacked him before he entered the building."

While previous reviews of the shooting, including by the Texas Department of Public Safety, identified Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo as the incident commander and blamed him for the botched law enforcement response, the ALERRT report notes that no effective incident command was established.

"The lack of effective command likely handicapped the Stop the Killing and Stop the Dying portions of the response," the report states.

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