“A failure that should not have happened”: the Department of Justice attacks the disastrous police response to the Uvalde school shooting

“A failure that should not have happened.”

This is the overwhelming conclusion of an exhaustive report that the Department of Justice made public this Thursday on the response of Texas authorities to the shooting inside the Robb school in Uvalde.

The almost 600-page document details minute by minute the response, marked by “a lack of urgency,” in which dozens of corporations responded to the events that occurred on May 24, 2022, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered.

“Victims and survivors deserved better,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Garland this week visited the community of Uvalde, which was left broken after one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.

Especially because the response of the 380 agents from different corporations moved away from the lessons that the Columbine massacre in 1999 left for the country.

“After Columbine, tactical experts from security agencies testified that the new paradigm for responding to crises like this is rapid deployment,” the report states.

This places a great responsibility on the first uniformed officers who arrive at the scene of a shooting.

“These are instructed to go towards the shooter, if necessary, passing over the wounded and putting themselves at risk,” adds the extensive document, which is also available in Spanish.

That was what the police officers who arrived at the Texan elementary school, located in a Latino community of 15,000 people, southwest of San Antonio, avoided doing.

In the account of the events, the document states that the first police officers arrived only three minutes after the shooter entered the school.

The aggressor, Salvador Ramos, 18, met them with shots from his powerful AR-15 rifle.

The shrapnel caused the officers to seek cover.

“The agents did not approach the doors again until they entered the classroom, more than an hour later,” indicates the text, which dedicates 20 pages to remembering the victims, mostly children under 9 and 10 years old.

The Justice Department is critical of the 43 minutes it took to evacuate the school, a decision made by Pete Arredondo, the school district's police chief.

During this time, the shooter posed an active threat inside two classrooms, where he had already left victims and injuries.

“This was a large factor that delayed entry to rooms 111 and 112,” the report states.

During the evacuation, Arredondo learned that Ramos was locked in a space with students.

The police officer tried to negotiate with the murderer, telling him that they were “innocent children.”

The shooter didn't pay attention.

Minutes before he had shot his grandmother in the head.

Arredondo's role is severely criticized.

This agent, who was fired three months after the massacre, became the de facto commander of the response on the morning of the tragedy.

His mistakes were reflected early, when he responded to the emergency without a radio because he “wanted to have his hands free.”

His communication with dozens of uniformed officers was verbal or through calls to mobile phones.

“Many of the officers who arrived, based on imprecise information shared on the radio and observing a lack of urgency at the entrance to the classrooms, incorrectly believed that the attacker had already been killed or that Arredondo was inside the classrooms with the subject” , indicates the report.

No one among the hundreds of uniformed officers present knew clearly who was in charge of the emergency.

Time passed and the police did not decide to attack Ramos, whose name is not mentioned once in the 575 pages of the document.

Arredondo, who had arrived at the scene around 11:37, had spent valuable minutes looking for the keys that would open the doors to the rooms attached to classrooms 111 and 112. “Time is on our side.

I know there are children in there, but we must also save the lives of others,” Arredondo, who was also waiting for the arrival of weapons, was heard saying.

He was afraid that the aggressor's firepower would exceed that of the authorities.

“We need a lot of weapons,” said the police chief, who assured that “they only had short weapons.”

Arredondo gave up looking for the keys that corresponded to the locks.

He finally ordered the evacuation of room 109 through the classroom window.

The space contained several students, one of them wounded in the face and a teacher who had been shot in the abdomen.

“They had been inside room 1091 bleeding and drowning their cries so as not to be detected by the aggressor,” the document indicates.

Calls to emergency services were more serious.

At 12:10, one of the minors in room 112 says that his room is full of victims.

The communication lasts 16 minutes, until shots force the call to be cut off at around 12:21.

Around that time, the Border Patrol special team arrives at the school, who would be the ones to finally kill Ramos.

This, however, would still happen 28 minutes later.

The disaster was not only the responsibility of the police.

The doctors who attended to the tragedy have also been accused of their errors.

Vanita Gupta, one of the Justice Department prosecutors, condemned the actions of the paramedics, who after the shooting carried the bodies of the deceased to ambulances and the injured children to school buses.

This caused two children and a teacher to die from their injuries within an hour of being rescued.

The report was prepared by compiling 14,100 pieces of evidence.

Among these, several hours of video recorded by the agents' body cameras and the interview of 260 people, including agents from the more than 30 corporations that were linked to the event, relatives of the victims and school personnel.

The authors of the report visited Uvalde nine times and spent a total of 54 days among the community.

They believe that the errors shown that morning are a product of lack of training (several agents had never participated in a drill) and the complete absence of planning for situations like this.

Among the recommendations that the official document leaves is that in emergencies of this type, shooters who are in a room with potential victims should never be treated as barricaded subjects or with hostages.

It remains to be seen whether the United States can avoid repeating the expensive mistakes Uvalde left behind.

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