High school dropout Salvador Ramos killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary School in Texas on May 24. A 77-page report was released Sunday detailing what happened, after reports it took more than an hour to bring down the 18-year-old Ramos. It showed that blame lay with almost every agency that attended, pointing to “systemic failures” and “ultimately poor decision-making” by officers both inside and outside the school. There was no general command, “chaos” and lack of unity in decision-making. And he also singled out the school for mistakes — saying security doors weren’t properly locked and some “active shooter” protocols weren’t followed. There was an overall “lackluster approach,” he said, adding, “At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training and failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
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But he also went on to say that there were no individual “bad guys.” “Apart from the perpetrator, the commission did not find any ‘bad guys’ during its investigation,” it said. “There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or bad motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and extremely poor decision-making.” Read more: Uvalde school gunman could have been subdued ‘in three minutes’ Every US state affected – maps reveal scale of gun violence in America Image: CCTV shows a police officer stopping to get hand sanitiser – 20 minutes before the gunman stopped The report was written after a Texas commission of inquiry was asked to look into the incident. She is the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in Uvalde, for inaction at the school. About 40 people testified in camera, including members of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Unified School District’s police chief and officers, the district’s superintendent, the school’s principal, a teacher and custodial staff. For the first time, it was detailed how many officers were at the scene by the end of the shooting – 376. That included 149 Border Patrol agents, 91 state troopers, 25 Uvalde police offices and several U.S. Marshals and Drug Enforcement Administration personnel. Image: The gunman’s victims It calls for accountability The report is the result of one of several investigations into the shooting, including another led by the Justice Department. Another earlier this month, by tactics experts at the University of Texas, claimed a Uvalde police officer had a chance 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, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said that never happened. A nearly 80-minute runway surveillance video published by the Austin American-Statesman this week showed publicly for the first time a hesitant and haphazard tactical response, which the Texas police chief has condemned as a failure and some Uvalde residents have called timid. . Calls for police accountability have grown in the small town since the shooting. So far, only one officer from the scene of the deadliest school shooting in Texas history is known to be on leave. A teacher who survived the school shooting said he will never forgive police for taking more than an hour to enter his classroom after the gunman first opened fire.
