Sources told ABC News that the Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde Independent School District stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety’s probe into the school shooting at Robb Elementary School.
The gunman killed 19 children and two adults.
The sources indicated the cooperation stopped when DPS Director Col. Steven McCraw criticized the police for their inaction during the shooting. He said they made the “wrong decision,” delaying entry into the classroom with the gunman.
On Tuesday, DPS confirmed to ABC News: “The Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde CISD Police have been cooperating with investigators. The chief of the Uvalde CISD Police provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago.”
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo insisted he is still cooperating: “I’ve been on the phone with them every day.”
The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas (CLEAT), the largest police labor organization in Texas, urged the Uvalde police and school district to cooperate. From The Houston Chronicle:
“At this time, The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas, or CLEAT, is advising our members to cooperate fully with all official governmental investigations into actions relating to the law enforcement response to the Uvalde mass shooting,” said a statement issued late Tuesday by the group.—CLEAT officials on Tuesday joined critics of the Uvalde law enforcement’s response, saying there has been “a great deal of false and misleading information” about what happened.“Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement,” the statement said. “Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false. This false information has exacerbated ill-informed speculation which has, in turn, created a hotbed of unreliability when it comes to finding the truth.”
It seems like details change every day. We learned a teacher did not prop open a door.
Dan Flanary, the teacher’s lawyer, said the teacher witnessed the car accident involving the gunman. She ran back inside to grab her cell phone to report the accident:
“She saw the wreck,” Flanary said. “She ran back inside to get her phone to report the accident. She came back out while on the phone with 911. The men at the funeral home yelled, ‘He has a gun!’ She saw him jump the fence, and he had a gun, so she ran back inside.“She kicked the rock away when she went back in. She remembers pulling the door closed while telling 911 that he was shooting. She thought the door would lock because that door is always supposed to be locked.”Flanary added that the teacher even remembers pulling and holding onto the door — which has a horizontal push bar — while on the phone with 911. At one point as she headed back to her classroom, the 911 call dropped and she texted family that the gunman was inside the building and then that she could hear police.
McCraw told the press that the gunman remained in a classroom for over an hour before border patrol agents “broke in and killed him.”
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