Which, given the hours of YouTube shooting competition I’ve seen, should have been much more than adequate.
This was not a weak hand 2,000 yard head shot in a gusting cross-wind after all.
Yep, thanks, I saw that when I got a chance to read the report tonight.
No, but it was a teacher and not the shooter. As I said above, the public jumps all over police when the shoot the wrong person or don’t care about who is behind the target. This guy is being jumped on for doing exactly what we want officers to do.
Finally read the full report. I suggest you read it yourself, it has a lot of detail, too much to comment on at one time. The following are the conclusions listed by the committee. Again, the report has a lot more detail and is an easy read.
-
Uvalde CISD and Robb Elementary
a. Communications and lockdown alerts:
i. Poor wi-fi connectivity in Robb Elementary likely delayed the
lockdown alert through the Raptor application.
ii. Once the alert was sent, not all teachers received it immediately for a
variety of reasons including wi-fi coverage, whether the teacher used
the Raptor phone application (as opposed to logging in through a web
browser), and whether the teacher was carrying a phone at the time.
iii. No one used the school intercom as another means to communicate
the lockdown.
iv. As a result, not all teachers received timely notice of the lockdown,
including the teacher in Room 111.
b. Effect of bailouts:
i. The frequency of less-serious bailout-related alerts in Uvalde diluted
the significance of alerts and dampened everyone’s readiness to act on
alerts.
ii. In response to the May 24, 2022, lockdown alert at Robb Elementary,
the initial reaction of many administrators, teachers, and law
enforcement responders was that it likely was a less-dangerous bailout.
c. Doors and locks:
i. Robb Elementary had recurring problems with maintaining its doors
and locks.
ii. In particular, the locking mechanism to Room 111 was widely known
to be faulty, yet it was not repaired. -
The Robb Elementary principal, her assistant responsible for
entering maintenance work orders, the teacher in Room 111,
other teachers in the fourth grade building, and even many
fourth grade students widely knew of the problem with the
lock to Room 111. -
Nevertheless, no one placed a work order to repair the lock—
not the principal, her secretary, the teacher to Room 111, or
anyone else.
iii. Robb Elementary had a culture of noncompliance with safety policies
requiring doors to be kept locked, which turned out to be fatal. -
Exterior doors.
a. Teachers at Robb Elementary often used rocks to prop
open exterior doors.
b. The west door to the west building was supposed to be
continuously locked. When the attacker approached on
May 24, 2022, it was unlocked, and he was able to enter
the building there.
c. If the door had been locked as policy required, the
attacker likely would have been slowed for some period
of time as he either circumvented the lock or moved
to another point of entry into the building. -
Interior classroom doors.
a. Teachers at Robb Elementary commonly left interior
doors unlocked for convenience, and they also used
magnets and other methods to circumvent door locks.
b. The doors to Rooms 111 and 112 were required to be
locked at all times, and in a lockdown, the teachers were
supposed to check that they were locked.
i. A teacher in Room 112 was seen locking her
classroom door after the lockdown alert.
ii. The door to Room 111 probably was not
locked. The teacher in Room 111 does not
recall hearing the lockdown alert. The door
required special effort to lock it, and the
teacher has no memory of having done so. The
attacker apparently did not have to take any
actions to overcome a locked door before
entering the classrooms.
c. If the door to Room 111 had been locked, the attacker
likely would have been slowed for some time as he
either circumvented the lock or took some other
alternative course of action. -
Information that was known or knowable about the attacker
a. Home and family:
i. The attacker had an unstable home life with no father figure and a
mother struggling with a substance abuse disorder.
ii. The attacker’s family moved often and lived in relative poverty.
iii. The attacker developed sociopathic and violent tendencies, but he
received no mental health assistance
iv. Various members of the attacker’s family were aware during the time
leading up to the attacker’s 18th birthday that he was estranged from
his mother and that he had asked for help in buying guns through straw
purchases that would have been illegal. Family members uniformly
refused to buy guns for him.
v. During the week between his 18th birthday and the events of May 24,
2022, the attacker expressed suicidal ideation to a cousin, who talked
to him and did not believe he was an imminent suicide risk.
vi. During the week between his 18th birthday and the events of May 24,
2022, the attacker’s grandparents and other family members became
aware that the attacker had bought guns. The grandparents demanded
that the guns be removed from their home.
b. School:
i. The attacker struggled academically throughout his time in school.
ii. The school made no meaningful intervention with the attacker before
he was involuntarily withdrawn for poor academic performance and
excessive absences.
iii. The attacker had few disciplinary issues at school, but he was
suspended once for a fight.
iv. Due to his excessive absences, there apparently was no information
actually known to the school district that should have identified this
attacker as a threat to any school campus.
c. Law enforcement: There apparently was no information actually known to local
Uvalde law enforcement that should have identified this attacker as a threat to
any school campus before May 24, 2022.
d. Friends and acquaintances: Some of attacker’s social media contacts received
messages from the attacker related to guns, suggesting that he was going to do something they would hear about in the news, and even referring to attacking
a school.
e. Social media:
i. Reports suggest that some social-media users may have reported the
attacker’s threatening behavior to the relevant social media platforms.
The social media platforms appear to have not done anything in
response to restrict the attacker’s social media access or report his
behavior to law enforcement authorities.
ii. The services used by Uvalde CISD to monitor social media for threats
did not provide any alert of threatening behavior by the attacker.
f. Firearms and ammunition sellers: There was no legal impediment to the attacker
buying two AR-15-style rifles, 60 magazines, and over 2,000 rounds of
ammunition when he turned 18. The ATF was not required to notify the local
sheriff of the multiple purchases. -
Law enforcement response on May 24, 2022
a. There was no law enforcement officer on the Robb Elementary campus when
the attacker came over the fence and toward the school.
b. Citizens at the scene quickly alerted local law enforcement about a vehicle
accident, a man with a gun, and shots fired near the Robb Elementary campus.
c. As initially reported by Uvalde Police dispatch and as understood by most
initial responders, the incident began off-campus and as one that would have
been in the jurisdiction of the Uvalde Police Department. Uvalde Police
officers were among the first, if not the first, law enforcement responders on
the scene as a man firing a gun moved toward Robb Elementary School.
d. As the situation developed and responders received more information, it
became apparent that the threat moved on to the school campus and within
the jurisdiction of the Uvalde CISD Police Department.
e. Multiple law enforcement officers arrived at Robb Elementary within a few
minutes of the attacker coming over the fence.
f. A Uvalde Police Department officer saw a person dressed in black and thought
it might have been the attacker. From a distance of over 100 yards, that officer
requested permission to shoot. Subsequent analysis suggests that the person
in black was a school coach, and the officer did not have an opportunity to
stop the attacker by shooting him before he entered the west building.
g. Robb Elementary School Coach Yvette Silva acted heroically and almost
certainly saved lives by alerting the school to the attacker’s advance. Most
fourth grade classes successfully locked down as a result of her quick response.
h. After entering through the unlocked west door, the attacker had about three
minutes in the west building before first responders arrived at the building,
including approximately two and a half minutes during which the attacker is
estimated to have fired over 100 rounds.
i. The initial responders to the west building heard gunfire and encountered a
hallway with a fog of drywall debris, bullet holes, and empty rifle casings. They
converged on Rooms 111 and 112, which they identified as the location of the
attacker. They acted appropriately by attempting to breach the classrooms and
stop the attacker. The attacker immediately repelled them with a burst of rifle
fire from inside the classrooms.
j. The responders immediately began to assess options to breach the classroom,
but they lost critical momentum by treating the scenario as a “barricaded
subject” instead of with the greater urgency attached to an “active shooter”
scenario.
k. It actually was an “active shooter” scenario because the attacker was preventing
critically injured victims from getting medical attention.
i. An active shooter scenario differs from a barricaded-subject scenario
in that law enforcement officers responding to an active shooter are
trained to prioritize the safety of innocent victims over the safety of
law enforcement responders.
ii. At first, the first responders did not have “reliable evidence” about
whether there were injured victims inside Rooms 111 and 112,
although circumstantial evidence strongly suggested that possibility,
including the fact that the attacker had fired many rounds inside
classrooms at a time when students were in attendance.
iii. The ALERRT training “reliable evidence” standard does not align with
the “reasonable officer” standard applied by ALERRT in its
preliminary and partial report.
l. Uvalde CISD’s active shooter policy called for Uvalde CISD Police Chief
Arredondo to be the incident commander in any active shooter response.
i. Chief Arredondo was one of the first responders to arrive at the west
building.
ii. In the initial response to the incident, Chief Arredondo was actively
engaged in the effort to “stop the killing” up to the point when the
attacker was located in Rooms 111 and 112, and the attacker fired on
responding officers.
iii. By this time, there were dozens of officers on the scene, but Chief
Arredondo did not assume his preassigned responsibility of incident
command, which would have entailed informing other officers that he
was in command and also leaving the building to exercise command,
beginning with establishing an incident command post.
iv. Instead, he remained in the hallway where he lacked reliable
communication with other elements of law enforcement, and he was
unable to effectively implement staging or command and control of
the situation.
m. Over the course of the next hour, hundreds of law enforcement officers
arrived at the scene.
i. The scene was chaotic, without any person obviously in charge or
directing the law enforcement response.
ii. To the extent any officers considered Chief Arredondo to be the
overall incident commander, they also should have recognized that was
inconsistent with him remaining inside the building.
iii. There was an overall lackadaisical approach by law enforcement at the
scene. For many, that was because they were given and relied upon
inaccurate information. For others, they had enough information to
know better.
n. Despite obvious deficiencies in command and control at the scene which
should have been recognized by other law enforcement responders, none
approached Chief Arredondo or any of the officers around him or
subordinate to him to affirmatively offer assistance with incident command.
o. Chief Arredondo and the officers around him at the south end of the building
were focused on gaining access to the classrooms (through use of a breaching
tool, a key, or other means) and protective equipment for officers (through
rifle-rated ballistic shields, flashbangs, etc.).
p. Meanwhile, dozens of law enforcement officers were assembling in the hallway
on the north side of the building, stacking up for an assault on the classrooms,
and mostly waiting for further instructions pending the arrival of protective
gear and breaching equipment.
q. While 911 received communications from victims inside Rooms 111 and 112,
Chief Arredondo did not learn about it because of his failure to establish a
reliable method of receiving critical information from outside the building.
r. Eventually, Chief Arredondo came to understand there probably were
casualties inside Rooms 111 and 112. Even if he had received information of
surviving injured victims in the classrooms, it is unclear that he would have
done anything differently to act “more urgently.”
s. U.S. Marshals provided a rifle-rated shield and it arrived around 12:20 p.m.,
approximately 30 minutes before the classroom was finally breached.
Robb Cmte Rpt • 76 of 77
t. While officers acted on the assumption that the doors to Rooms 111 and 112
t. While officers acted on the assumption that the doors to Rooms 111 and 112
were locked, as they were designed to be, nobody tested that assumption.
u. Room 111’s door probably was not effectively locked shut.
v. Chief Arredondo did not actually exercise tactical incident command over the
BORTAC team, nor did the BORTAC team seek instruction from Chief
Arredondo.
w. By the time the BORTAC team breached the classrooms, the tactical command
inside the building had been de facto assumed by BORTAC.
x. Acting on effectively the same information available to Chief Arredondo,
including an assumption of injured victims in the room, the BORTAC
commander on scene waited until arranging a rifle-rated shield and obtaining
a working master key before attempting to breach the classrooms.
y. The Committee has not received medical evidence that would inform a
judgment about whether breaching the classroom sooner than the
approximately 73 minutes that passed between the first responders’ initial
arrival at the west building and their eventual breach of the classrooms could
have been saved lives or mitigated injuries.
i. As described above, it is likely that most of the deceased victims
perished immediately during the attacker’s initial barrage of gunfire.
ii. However, given the information known about victims who survived
through the time of the breach and who later died on the way to the
hospital, it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they
had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.
Not to pick on you, but after reading the last few posts here I found myself wondering, “Why?” It is pretty clear that this shooter - and others like him - ought not have such ready access to such firepower. And it is pretty clear the cops ought to have gone in immediately. But there is little chance the first is going to be meaningfully changed anytime soon, and the second? I’m not sure how much quicker on the trigger I want cops to be (as a general matter).
I’m often impressed at the desire of folk to pick apart minutiae in cases such as this. It seems to be a widely shared human nature. I ask this respectfully, why do you feel the need to do so? Is it to assign blame? To prevent similar situations? Something else?
Sure, but once shots start being fired, then you definitely do want officers to be quick.
Agreed. So, it seems pretty clear what went wrong here, no? Whatever cop(s) was/were first on the scene, they shoulda gone in promptly. Pretty much what I as a private citizen have understood to be the basic approach since Columbine, yet these fuckwads don’t even try the door handle?
And whoever was top cop on the scene oughta have made their command clear, no? Hell, if I’m head of ANY organization, and something takes place on my turf, oughtn’t I PRESUME I’m in charge until someone who is clearly my superior shows up and clearly assumes command?
So much of the rest of the details seem almost irrelevant, and sorta smacks of violence voyeurism. And, kinda irrelevant, so long as we choose to live in a country where every disturbed teenager has ready access to powerful weapons.
Yeah, all the stuff about how the teachers failed to take responsibility for ensuring their (checks notes) elementary school was secured as a fortress impregnable from attack strikes me as being totally demented, except for the pesky reality that everyone apparently now accepts that schools should be maintained as such.
Eh, some level of security is necessary even without the possibility of violent attackers, because little kids sometimes do things like wandering off on their own, and you definitely want to prevent that. This might mean, for instance, that most of the doors have an alarm that goes off if they’re opened outside of certain hours… which in turn means that those doors have to be kept closed.
I’m fond of saying that the US loves to privatize profit and socialize loss.
Think about this one: the cost to the average taxpayer to ‘fortify’ – basically – every public school and public building … rather than start to reduce the availability of firearms.
Classic redistribution of wealth … along with every other innumerable flavor of massively screwed up public policy that it is.
Within the last couple of months NPR’s “Planet Money” had a bit on the business of school security. Tons of people/businesses eager to make a buck off the $$$ the country is throwing at this “unsolvable problem.” Hey, maybe the Uvalde School Police SWAT Team could buy some new combat gear…
For actual information, not speculation. There is a lot more to this than the two items you mention. This was a total clusterfuck from the word go. Everyone from the teachers at the school up to the highest ranking police officers, local state and federal, did not do their jobs. If you are not interested in what contributed to this, I suggest you are in the wrong thread. The thread title is self explanatory.
How is it not relevant that the teachers, with the approval of the administration, routinely bypassed the security features that were in place? They even told one off substitute teachers how to defeat the security. If they had simply locked the outside doors, odds are the shooter could have been confronted outside because the first officers arrived in under 4 minutes.
This is why you should read the report because what you wrote has no relation to reality. The only thing teachers had to do was lock all doors everyday, not just during an active shooter incident. Myself, I don’t think that is too much to ask of a teacher. The fact is they not only propped open outside doors with rocks, they actually put in the effort to obtain magnets that were powerful enough to defeat the magnetic self locking doors. The purposely defeated a simple security measure that could have stopped this. And they did it day after day. All this so they could run out to their car if they forgot something. Every single outside door in the building was unlocked. Locked outside doors was pretty common in elementary schools 45 years ago when I attended. I don’t know why it’s an impossible task for teachers now.
Except that it is not expensive to fortify schools. All that is really needed is locks that work and school staff that follows protocol. One of the things that happened in this case, besides teachers defeating locks, was the lack of working locks on some doors, including the classroom he entered.
Instead of replacing all the locks in the school and having an adequate number of keys, plus master keys that fit every lock in the school available to those who may need them, the school used their grant money to buy bullet resistant white boards. Just how students were supposed to get behind these whiteboards is not clear. Rolling ones would be too small and I don’t know what they would do with ones affixed to walls. Maybe they were to prevent bullets going thru walls.
Luckily for Texas, Dallas has learned valuable lessons from this shooting.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/07/18/us/dallas-school-district-requires-clear-backpacks/index.html
But the students still have to enter and exit the school at the beginning and end of each school day, and a large number of them will still ride (concentrated) on buses.
Up-armored buses ? Ballistic backpacks for all ? Arm primary school kids ?? Bulletproof classroom (and bus) windows … even in hot climates with no money for a/c ??
It’s lethal Whack-a-Mole.
None of that has anything to do with making the actual schools secure.
Thanks for giving the next nut job the idea to just shoot up school busses, tho. Teens these days have probably never seen the original Dirty Harry. I’m sure they would never have thought of it on their own, so at least we have you to blame when it happens. 
Isn’t this thread about the police response, not that of the teachers?
Was that meant to be ironic? Because clear backpacks wouldn’t have done anything here: The shooter didn’t belong at this school at all.
Clear backpacks might catch some other shooters, who bring in a handgun to shoot up their own school. If they don’t just do something trivial like wrapping it in their gym clothes before putting it in their bookbag.
At least it’s less trouble than the more common measure of banning bookbags entirely, though.
It’s been both since the beginning because the first news reports said a teacher propped the outside door open. I’m not sure you can separate the two because the police response was worked out with the schools. They worked out the entire plan together. Remember that the school had it’s own police force as being in charge in this situation, that’s why they got stuck with Chief Pete fucking things up. IIRC, second choice was the Uvalde City Chief, who also did nothing, not even relay updates on the shooters to anyone inside. Third was a school official.
More sarcastic since it even says in the article that other schools that tried this eventually abandoned the plan. They mention Stoneman-Douglas tried this after their school shooting. Not to mention their timing of the announcement.
Absolutely, that’s part of why I mentioned instead of insuring that all the doors had functioning locks, they spent money on ballistic whiteboards.
I think bulletproof bus windows are a no-go from the start. Buses are way more likely to be in accidents where they need to be able to break windows to get children out of the bus.
Right now, I would settle for them doing what they are supposed to do in the first place. If we can’t depend on people to do what they sign on to do and train for, there is no chance of getting ahead of this that I can see. It’s a nice thought, tho.
Actually, some of it did.
I also think it’s pretty legit subject matter to talk about the idea of hardening public schools and buildings in the context of what the goal in doing so would be, and whether or not it would likely be effective.
I’m more concerned about whether or not the good guys are considering this kind of thing than I am about whether or not the bad guys are (ETA: because the bad guys are highly motivated and will seek whatever avenue is effective and accessible to them).
It’d be nice to be a few steps ahead every once in a while instead of being rather far behind.
This just in-
Robb Elementary students were used to lockdowns. From February to May, the school in Uvalde, Texas, had been secured or locked down 47 times.
When a lockdown alert came May 24 – the day an 18-year-old shooter killed 19 students and two teachers – many administrators, teachers and law enforcement responders initially assumed it was like the 47 other lockdowns, according to a report by the Texas House of Representatives outlining the most grievous failures during the shooting response.
Lockdowns fostered a culture of complacency at the school, the report said. Almost all – 90% – of the security alerts earlier in the year came from “bailout” situations, when vehicles smuggling migrants lead authorities on high-speed chases that end when the vehicle crashes and the occupants scatter, the report said.
Little late with that. I mentioned that earlier and it’s in the committee conclusions I posted above.
Part of the problem is that schools are sometimes reluctant to provide teachers with exterior keys, because either they don’t trust them or its just more keys out there mean more get lost means more expensive rekeyings. Card entry systems, where every employee can have a card that works as a key, are far superior, but districts are reluctant to spend the money. I completely agree that external doors need to be locked, and there is really no excuse for it, but when only 10% of the adulta in the building are given keys, it is going to happen.
Interior doors are a bigger problem. Part of the problem is dress code. Most teachers are women, and it’s difficult for women to find professional clothes with pockets. I mean, you can, but it means really limiting your choices and lots of women don’t. So there’s nowhere to carry keys. Years ago, lots of female teachers kept them on those phone-cord style bracelets, but those have fallen out of fashion because you have to take them off to type, and we type a lot now. So you find yourself in the hall without your keys all the time, which is a huge inconvenience, because you have to go to the office to borrow a key. My honest solution to this problem is to start wearing, um, black denim slacks, everyday and I get away with it, but that wouldn’t fly at some schools.
The other issue with keeping internal doors locked is that it is insanely disruptive. People come and go out of classrooms endlessly. Having to stop instruction multiple times to open the door is maddening, and people knocking during tests or other quiet times is very distracting.
I don’t know why single-action locks that anyone can lock woth the flip from the inside are unheard of in schools. I specuate above it is to avoid giving kids the chance to lock the teacher out, but that wpuld be like requiring a key on fire alarms to stop kids from pulling them. There are better ways to manage that problem.
47 times between February and May? That’s every other day or so. I don’t understand why they lock the school down whenever migrants scatter - there’s no mention of any particular risk caused by the migrants scattering, other that they might come on campus. ( It seems like the high-speed chases are more dangerous to the public than the migrants scattering but maybe that’s just me).
There comes a point where procedures are self-defeating - if there is a door in the hallway outside my office that goes directly to where my car is parked, I’m going to prop the door open if the alternative is to walk around the to the front of the building. If fire alarm systems go off regularly when there is not a fire , people don’t react the way they should - the last time the alarms went off in my office, it was not a drill or a test , but I had to chase people out who were going back to their desks to grab coats and bags, or who decided to stop in the restroom on their way out. If I have to remember 27 different passwords with different rules , there is going to be a list somewhere. And if a building gets locked down every two or three days for what turns out to be “nothing” , people will stop responding to the lockdown the way they are supposed to.