Officers could have stopped Uvalde gunman three minutes after he entered school,

Police had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they never checked a classroom door to see if it was locked, the head of the Texas state police testified Tuesday, pronouncing the law enforcement response an “abject failure.”

Police officers with rifles instead stood and waited in a school hallway for nearly an hour while the gunman carried out the May 24 attack at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two teachers dead. The 18-year-old gunman used an AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle.

The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside, yet there is no indication officers tried to open it while the gunman was holed up, Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing. Instead, he said, police waited around for a key.

“I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” McCraw said of the door. “How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
 
Delays in the law enforcement response have become the focus of federal, state and local investigations.

McCraw lit into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who was in charge, saying: “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”

“Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-site commander,” McCraw said. He said investigators have been unable to “re-interview” Arredondo.

The public safety chief presented a timeline that said three officers with two rifles entered the building less than three minutes after the gunman. Several more officers entered minutes after that.

The decision by police to hold back went against much of what law enforcement has learned in the two decades since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado in which 13 people were killed, McCraw said. 

“You don’t wait for a SWAT team. You have one officer, that’s enough,” he said. He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw.

Also, eight minutes after the shooter entered, an officer reported that police had a “hooligan” crowbar that they could use to break down the classroom door, McCraw said.