First responders’ body cam footage provided to CNN also gives a closer look at how law enforcement handled the harrowing 77 minutes at Robb Elementary, which ended as the second-deadliest K-school shooting ever 12 in the US. The report comes after finger-pointing by law enforcement agencies after the shooting, as well as local officials who complained about a lack of transparency, and victims’ families are learning in pieces what more could have been done to save their loved ones.
Law enforcement shares ‘systemic responsibility’
The report found that “law enforcement as a whole and their training, preparation and response share systemic responsibility for many missed opportunities.” According to the report, police who entered knew shots had been fired, evidenced by a “debris cloud” in the hallway, bullet holes in the walls and gun casings on the floor. But there was no indication that the officers had “any contemporaneous understanding, as they arrived at the building, that teachers and students had just then been shot inside the classrooms.” It would be more than an hour before the police finally burst into the classroom, killing the assailant. According to the committee’s report, first responders “lost critical momentum” by treating the situation as a “blocked subject” scenario, which requires a more measured response compared to an active shooter. “Correcting this error should have created a greater urgency to immediately disrupt the order by any means possible, to subdue the attacker and to provide immediate assistance” to the victims, the report said. Had they recognized the situation as an active shooter scenario, they should have prioritized “rescuing innocent victims over valuable time spent searching for door keys and shields to enhance the safety of law enforcement responders,” the report said. Of the 376 who responded to the scene, 149 were from the United States Border Patrol, 14 from the Department of Homeland Security and 91 from the Texas Department of Public Safety. The report did not say when officers from each responding agency arrived at the scene. CNN has reached out to Texas DPS, the U.S. Border Patrol, the Uvalde School District, the city’s police department and the Uvalde district attorney for comment, among others.
“Lack of effective incident command”
In a hearing before a Texas Senate committee last month, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steven McCraw called authorities’ response a “gross failure,” laying the blame at the feet of the commander on the ground, whom state authorities have recognized as a school. area police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo; But Arredondo, who was placed on administrative leave by the school district, did not consider himself the commander of the incident, the report said, repeating comments he made to the Texas Tribune last month. “My approach and my thinking corresponded to being a police officer. And I didn’t label myself that way,” Arredondo said in the investigative report. The report also noted that others could have taken over. Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training “teaches that any law enforcement officer can take command, that someone has to take command, and that an incident commander can shift responsibility as an incident unfolds,” he says. “This did not occur at Robb Elementary, and the lack of effective incident management is a major factor that caused other vital measures to be canceled,” according to the report.
Break in communication
The report attributed some of the response failures to a breakdown in communication, in which information known to some outside the school may not have been communicated to those inside. “In particular, no one ensured that responders making key decisions inside the building received information that students and teachers had survived the initial burst of gunfire, were trapped in (classrooms) and had called for help,” the report said. Arredondo previously told the Texas Tribune that he left his two radios outside the school because he wanted his hands free to hold his gun. Robb Elementary had its own problems, according to the investigative report, which found that poor WiFi “likely delayed the lockdown notification” on the day of the shooting. Not all teachers received the report immediately and the school’s intercom was not used for communication during the lockdown. “As a result, not all teachers received timely notification of the lockdown,” the report said. In addition, the school had what the report calls “recurring problems” with doors and locks, including the locking mechanism in Room 111, which was “widely known to be defective, but not repaired.” “Robb Elementary had a culture of noncompliance with security policies that required doors to remain locked, which proved fatal,” the report states.
New video captures the confusion and chaos
Dramatic body camera footage first provided to CNN by Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin provides a close-up view of law enforcement’s response to the unfolding carnage. The video was released to CNN on Sunday, the same day the interim report was released. It shows officers smashing windows and pulling children from other classrooms at the school as well as down a hallway fumbling for keys and unable to open a door near where a gunman was in control of two classrooms full of dead, dying and terrified children and teachers. The video shows close-ups from just outside Rooms 111 and 112 and reveals conversations between officers and appeals to the attacker. CNN watched hours of body camera footage, including the revelation of new faces by the Uvalde officer. Daniel Coronado, who was one of the first on the scene at 11:35 a.m., and UPD Officer Justin Mendoza. According to the video, Coronado identifies the shooter as a “male subject with an AR” at 11:39 a.m., minutes after the gunman first entered the ranks and shortly after he opened fire on responding officers. There is initial confusion as to whether the gunman was in an office, but a call comes in at 11:42 a.m. that it is the classroom of Eva Mireles, a teacher who called her husband, Uvalde police officer Ruben Ruiz, that she had been shot. The body camera from Mendoza around 12:11 p.m. shows officers learning that BORTAC — a Border Patrol rapid response team — is still 30 minutes away. Around the same time, Coronado’s camera picks up someone yelling at the shooter in English and Spanish to surrender. A dispatcher in Mendoza’s video can be heard saying there’s a kid on the line from “Room 12” talking about a “room full of victims,” which relayed to acting Uvalde PD Chief on scene Lt. Mariano Pargas, who does any audio commentary. On Sunday, the city of Uvalde announced that Pargas was placed on administrative leave to further investigate his role in the law enforcement response. CNN reached out to Parga for comment and has not received a response.
New shooter background details
The report did not name the shooter or show his picture, “so as not to glorify him,” it said, but provided information about his past, both at home and at school as a student in the Uvalde Unified Independent School District. Although he had “few disciplinary problems”, he struggled academically, having only completed the ninth grade at 17. And the school made “no meaningful intervention” before he was eventually involuntarily withdrawn from the school for poor performance and excessive absences. October. Because of those absences, the report says, “no information was actually known to the school district that would have identified this perpetrator as a threat to any school campus.” But the shooter sent messages about guns to some of his social media contacts, the report says, and would suggest “doing something” they’d hear about on the news. Some users may have reported the behavior to social media platforms, the report said, but the platforms “appear to have done nothing in response.” Before the shooting, various family members of the gunman knew he had “requested assistance in making straw gun purchases that would be illegal,” the report said. “Family members uniformly refused to buy him guns.” CNN’s Travis Caldwell, Matthew J. Friedman and Elizabeth Joseph contributed to this report.
