Police Response at Uvalde School Massacre was a Catastrophic Failure

 

by Pa Rock

Citizen Journalist

The Texas House of Representatives issued a report last Sunday on the response of law enforcement to the May 24th school massacre at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.  That report is a stunning indictment of the police response to the shooting, calling it a "systemic failure and egregiously poor decision making" by nearly everyone at the scene who was in a position of power.

The House report revealed that there were at least 376 representatives of law enforcement at the school by the time the shooter was finally confronted and killed.  One-hundred-and-fifty of those officers were members of the US Border Patrol, ninety-one were with the state police, and the remainder were from the school's police force, the police department of the city of Uvalde, and representatives from neighboring police departments.  Some were outside of the building and many were inside.  

The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, had been purchasing and stockpiling ammunition for more than a month.  He bought one AR-15 from a local gun store a few days before the shooting on his 18th birthday, and returned to the same store the following day and bought a second AR-15.  He began his last day of life by shooting his grandmother in the face at the home he shared with her in Uvalde, and then taking his grandmother's pickup truck to the school where he ran it into a ditch before entering the school through an unlocked door.

Ramos went into a pair of adjoining fourth-grade classrooms (rooms 111 and 112), reportedly the same location where he had been bullied years earlier, and began shooting.  Nineteen fourth-graders and two teachers died in the gunfire, but several survived long enough to make 911 calls pleading for assistance from inside of the classroom.

Representatives of the school's police department were the first to arrive, but the shooter fired on them and they fled to the end of the hallway.  The shooter then closed himself into the classrooms and began the killing of the students and their teachers.

The report states that the Salvador Ramos had never fired a weapon before that day.  He fired at least 142 shots inside of the school on the day of the massacre.

The school police apparently stayed in their remote location within the school and never tried to broach the classroom and engage the shooter.  Other law enforcement quickly began arriving but there was no chain-of-command established and no one seems to have known who was in charge.   A response from the Border Patrol was stalled by the commander waiting on the arrival of a bullet-proof shield and a search for a key to the classroom door - even though no one had checked to see if it was even locked.  Seventy-seven minutes elapsed between the time the shooter entered the school and the time that a tactical unit from the US Border Patrol finally entered the classroom and killed him.  

In addition to the colossal inept response from law enforcement, the report also faulted the school for leaving at least three doors unlocked and having inadequate fencing.

The entire experience had been a clusterfuck of epic proportions.

All of that information was included in the report from the Texas House of Representatives.  At least a couple of other agencies as well as the US Justice Department are also investigating the mass shooting and law enforcement response, and other reports will undoubtedly follow.  

As news of the shooting quickly became public, Angeli Rose Gomez, a mother of a second grader and a third grader at Robb Elementary School, heard about it at her place of employment.  She immediately left work and drove forty miles to Uvalde.  When she arrived at Robb Elementary she was shocked to find police just standing around and "doing nothing."  She told reporters that the police "weren't going in there or running anywhere."

Ms. Gomez made such a ruckus at the scene that police temporarily handcuffed her.  When she was released a few minutes later, Angeli Gomez climbed over a fence and ran into the school where she retrieved her two children and brought them to safety.

As the local school board, city of Uvalde, state of Texas, and US Department of Justice all focus on what went wrong that day in Uvalde and begin planning for a more effective response, perhaps they should actively recruiting law enforcement officers who are cut from the same cloth as Angeli Rose Gomez.   She knew what she had to do - and she did it!