For the amount of time they took to stop the gunman, police officers in Uvalde (Texas) responded to a mass shooting that left 19 children in fourth grade and two adults dead.
A recent report stated that Uvalde Police, along with other law enforcement officers first in, waited longer than 75 minutes.
A top Texas officer in law enforcement is now adding to the controversy by claiming that officers might have engaged and stopped the 18-year old gunman. “minutes.”
They didn’t was an “abject failure”They are, however, in agreement with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” said Col. Steve McCraw, the department’s director.
“Three minutes after the subject entered the West building, there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject,”McCraw continued.
“The only thing stopping the hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,”He went on.
“One error; 14 minutes and eight seconds,”Director spoke of young students in waiting for the police to rescue them from a classroom.
McCraw continued to say that the officers were, at times, still waiting for an arrest. “key that was not needed.”
“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,”He testified. “How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
“Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-site commander,”McCraw said Tuesday that he was shaming the officer responsible during his testimony before a Senate state committee.
Other parents and others also strongly criticized officers who arrived on the scene first for failing to respond quickly enough to the shooting. McCraw’s testimony appears to justify their anger.
A mother claimed she was temporarily handcuffed while trying to pass officers in order to gain entry to the school for her sons. She was released by the officers and did exactly what they asked.
“The police were doing nothing,” mother Angeli Rose Gomez accused, according to The Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
Gomez said “she was one of the numerous parents waiting outside the school who began encouraging— first politely, and then with more urgency — police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner,”This is the Journal’s report.
“After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation,”The paper was added.
The mother was desperate to be able reach her children and she said that she managed to persuade local Uvalde officers, whom she knew, to free her from her handcuffs.
“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,”This report provides more details. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”
According to the WSJ a spokesperson representing the marshals claimed that none of the parents were cuffed.
The San Antonio Express published earlier this week that surveillance footage from Robb Elementary School showed that officers waited 77 minutes to even attempt opening two classroom doors.
The New York Post added:
According to the report, it was not clear if Ramos locked the door while he was shooting. However, police didn’t even try and open the lock despite being able to access a Halligan tool that could have opened the door.
Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo was in charge of the operation. According to him, he had previously stated to The Texas Tribune that the custodian gave keys to his classroom to help open it.
The post ‘Abject Failure’: TX Police Commander Lights Up Local Officers, Claims It Could’ve Been Stopped ‘Minutes’This article was first published on Conservative Brief.
Check out the complete article here
