Texas Department of Safety Director Steven McCraw tore into the Uvalde police for their handling of the school shooting at Robb Elementary School:
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said Friday, when asked why police at Robb Elementary School didn’t engage the shooter sooner, said “the on-scene commander at the time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject.”“A decision was made on the scene – I wasn’t there — that this was a barricaded subject situation, there was time to retrieve the keys and wait for a tactical team with the equipment to go ahead and breach the door and take on the subject,” he continued. “At that point, that was the decision, that was the thought process.”McCraw later said “from the benefit of hindsight from where I am sitting now, that of course it was not the right decision, it was a wrong decision, very, there was no excuse for that.”“I wasn’t there but I’m just telling you from what we know, that we believe there should have been an entry as soon as you can,” he added.
A teacher propped open a door, which Ramos used to enter the school. We do not know why the teacher opened the door.
Ramos barricaded himself in a fourth-grade classroom. He shot at least 100 rounds on Tuesday.
The school resource officer was not on campus at the time. McCraw could answer why he was not there. The officer drove by the shooter who knelt down next to a vehicle.
We also learned that local police officers went into the school, and fired at Ramos, but pulled back when Ramos fired back.
McCraw also said that Ramos belonged to a group chat where they all discussed him being a school shooter. We can add that to the list of disturbing trends someone should have reported.
Here are some more snippets from McCraw’s press conference.
***Previous Reporting…
The Uvalde police look worse than the Parkland police. The timeline provided shows the police had plenty of time to stop gunman Salvador Ramos before he entered Robb Elementary School.
From The Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine):
Local residents voiced anger Thursday about the time it took to end the mass shooting at an elementary school here, as police laid out a fresh timeline that showed the gunman entered the building unobstructed after lingering outside for 12 minutes firing shots.Victor Escalon, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, gave a new timeline of how the now-deceased gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, walked into Robb Elementary School, barricaded himself in a classroom and killed 19 children and two teachers.Mr. Escalon said he couldn’t say why no one stopped Ramos from entering the school during that time Tuesday. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes after he entered the school, Mr. Escalon said.People who arrived at the school while Ramos locked himself in a classroom, or saw videos of police waiting outside, were furious.
Twelve minutes.
Escalon also admitted that, despite prior reports, no armed officer confronted Ramos because the school did not have “an officer readily available and armed.”
The timeline:
Angeli Rose Gomez noticed the police doing nothing when she arrived at the school: “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
Gomez encouraged the police to go into the school nicely at first and kept pushing.
The U.S. Marshals put Gomez in handcuffs “for intervening in an active investigation.” She also saw someone tackle a father to the ground and pepper spray another father.
What active investigation? They were all standing outside!
A U.S. Marshals spokesman insisted they did not put anyone in handcuffs.
Bob Estrada and his wife live across the street. They could not believe they saw police not entering the school: “They were trying to cover something up. I think the cops were waiting for backup because they didn’t want to go into the school.”
Jay Martin disputed the police timeline because it’s different than what he saw outside the school: “Nothing is adding up. People are just really frustrated because no one is coming out and telling us the real truth of what went down.”
Then we have this dude telling CNN that the cops were more concerned about their welfare than the kids.
And so on Thursday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer had some pressing questions for Texas DPS Lt. Chris Olivarez.“Don’t current best practices, Lieutenant, call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?” Blitzer asked.“Correct,” Olivarez replied. “In the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life. But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots,” Olivarez said.“At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and at that point that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school,” he continued. “So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings.”
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