UVALDE, Texas — Nearly 400 law enforcement officials responded to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but “extremely poor decision-making” led to more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who claimed 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to in a damning investigative report released Sunday. The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement and not just local authorities in the South Texas city for the bewildered inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman opened fire inside two fourth-grade classrooms. class at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers. Taken together, the report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy was the most comprehensive yet of one of the worst school shootings in US history. Some families slammed the police as cowards and called for resignations. “At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to comply with their active shooter training and failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety,” the report said. The gunman fired about 142 rounds into the building — and it is “almost certain” that at least 100 shots came before any officers entered, according to the report, which detailed multiple misses. Between them: — No one took command despite the fact that many officers were on the scene. — The commander of a Border Patrol tactical team expected a bulletproof shield and a working classroom master key, which he may not even need, before entering the classroom. — An officer with the Uvalde Police Department said he heard about 911 calls coming from inside the classroom and understood that officers on one side of the building knew there were victims trapped inside. However, no one tried to break the order. The report — the most comprehensive account yet of the haphazard and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre — was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives. Quickly, the findings set at least one outcome in motion: Lt. Mariano Pargas, an officer with the Uvalde Police Department who was the city’s acting police chief at the time of the massacre, was placed on administrative leave. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said an investigation would be launched to determine whether Pargas should have taken over the scene. He also revealed for the first time that some officers had left the force after the shooting, but did not give an exact number, saying it was up to three. “It’s a joke. It’s a joke. They have no business wearing a badge. None of them do,” Vincent Salazar, the grandfather of 11-year-old Laila Salazar, who was among the dead, said Sunday. Anger flared in Uvalde even over how the report was released: Tina Quintanilla-Taylor, whose daughter survived the shooting, yelled at the three-member Texas panel as they left a news conference after the findings were released. Commission members had invited the victims’ families to discuss the report privately, but Quintanilla-Taylor said the commission should have taken questions from the community, not just the media. “I am angry. They have to come back and give us their undivided attention,” he said later. “These leaders are not leaders,” he said. According to the report, 376 law enforcement officers converged on the school. The vast majority of respondents were federal and state law enforcement agencies. That included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials. “Apart from the perpetrator, the Commission did not find any ‘bad guys’ during its investigation,” the report said. “There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or evil motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and extremely poor decision-making.” The report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than school district police — who the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state’s police force, had previously accused of not entered. the room earlier. Investigators said it was not their job to determine whether the officers should be held accountable, saying those decisions are up to each law enforcement agency. Before Sunday, only one of the hundreds of officers on the scene — Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief — was known to be on leave. “Everybody who came on the scene talked about this being chaotic,” said Texas state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican who led the investigation. Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety and the US Border Patrol did not immediately return requests for comment Sunday. The report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement at the scene of the shooting. No officer has come under as much scrutiny since the shooting as Arredondo, who also resigned from his newly appointed position on the City Council after the shooting. Arredondo told the panel that he treated the shooter as a “barricade ambush,” according to the report, and defended that he never treated the scene as an active shooter situation because he did not have eye contact with the gunman. Arredondo also tried to find a key to the classrooms, but no one bothered to see if the doors were locked, according to the report. “Arredondo’s search for a key consumed his attention and lost valuable time, delaying the classroom breach,” the report states. The report criticized the approach of the hundreds of officers who surrounded the school as “deficient” and said they should have recognized that Arredondo’s stay at the school without reliable communication was “inconsistent” with the scene commander. The report concluded that some officers waited because they relied on bad information, while others “had enough information to know better”. Hours after the report was released, Uvalde officials separately released for the first time body camera photos from city police officers who responded to the attack. It includes video of several officers responding to a dispatcher’s report about 30 minutes after the shooting started that a child in the room had called 911. “The room is full of victims. Kid’s phone 911,” says an officer. Another body cam video from Uvalde Staff Capt. Eduardo Canales, head of the city’s SWAT team, shows the officer approaching the classrooms when shots rang out at 11:37 a.m. canales asks him if he’s bleeding and later says he’s bleeding from his ear. A minute later, Canales says, “Man, we gotta get in there. We have to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We have to get in there.” Another officer can be heard saying “DPS is sending their people.” It is 72 minutes later, at 12:50 p.m., when the officers finally break ranks and kill the assailant. Calls for police accountability have grown in Uvalde since the shooting. The report is the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including another led by the Justice Department. A report earlier this month by tactics experts at the University of Texas claimed that a Uvalde police officer had the opportunity to stop the gunman before he entered the school armed with an AR-15. But in an example of the conflicting statements and disputed accounts after the shooting, McLaughlin said that never happened. Officers told the committee that the person they thought was the gunman was actually a school coach. The earlier report was made at the request of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which McLaughlin has increasingly criticized and accused of trying to minimize the role of its troopers during the massacre. Texas DPS Chief Steve McCraw called the police response an abject failure. The commission did not “receive medical evidence” that police disruption of the order earlier would have saved lives, but concluded that “it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait an additional 73 minutes for rescue. “ Michael Brown, whose 9-year-old son was in the cafeteria at Robb Elementary the day of the shooting and survived, came to the commission’s news conference Sunday holding signs that read “We want accountability” and “Fire Pete Arredondo.” Brown said he hasn’t read the report yet, but already knows enough to say police “have blood on their hands.” “It’s disgusting. Disgusting,” he said. “They’re cowards.”
Weber reported from Austin, Texas. Associated Press writer Jamie Stengle contributed from Dallas.
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