Members of a special Texas House investigatory committee hold a press conference in Uvalde on Sunday at 4 p.m. (KSAT-TV Channel 12 ABC affiliate in San Antonio, Texas coverage of the investigatory committee begins at 14:35). YouTube Tips ⓘ
The Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary School Shooting released an Interim Report on Sunday, July 17, 2022 regarding the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde Texas on May 24, 2022.
The School
Robb Elementary did not adequately prepare for the risk of an armed intruder on campus.
The school’s five-foot tall exterior fence was inadequate to meaningfully impede an intruder.
There was a regrettable culture of noncompliance of locked exterior doors by school personnel, who frequently propped doors open and deliberately circumvented locks.
An interior door (to Room 111 where students were “victimized”) could be locked, but an extra effort was required to make sure the latch engaged. Many knew Room 111’s door had a faulty lock, and school district police had specifically warned the teacher about it. The problem with locking the door had been reported to school administration, yet no one placed a written work order for a repair.
In violation of school policy, no one had locked any of the three exterior doors to the west building of Robb Elementary. As a result, the attacker had unimpeded access to enter. Once inside, the attacker continued into the adjoining Rooms 111 and 112, probably through the door to Room 111, and apparently completely unimpeded. Locking the exterior and interior doors ultimately may not have been enough to stop the attacker from entering the building and classrooms. But had school personnel locked the doors as the school’s policy required, that could have slowed his progress for a few precious minutes—long enough to receive alerts, hide children, and lock doors; and long enough to give police more opportunity to engage and stop the attacker before he could massacre 19 students and two teachers.
There was relaxed vigilance on campus was the frequency of security alerts and campus lockdowns resulting from a recent rise of “bailouts”—the term used in border communities for the increasingly frequent occurrence of human traffickers trying to outrun the police, usually ending with the smuggler crashing the vehicle and the passengers fleeing in all directions. The frequency of these “bailout”-related alarms—around 50 of them between February and May of 2022—contributed to a diminished sense of vigilance about responding to security alerts.
Low quality internet service, poor mobile phone coverage, and varying habits of mobile phone usage at the school all led to inconsistent receipt of the lockdown notice by teachers. If the alert had reached more teachers sooner, it is likely that more could have been done to protect them and their students.
Because of these failures of facilities maintenance and advance preparation, the attacker fired most of his shots and likely murdered most of his innocent victims before any responder set foot in the building. Of the approximately 142 rounds the attacker fired inside the building, it is almost certain that he rapidly fired over 100 of those rounds before any officer entered.
The Responders (Law Enforcement)
At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.
Law enforcement committed numerous mistakes in violation of current active shooter training, and there are important lessons to be learned from each faulty assumption
and poor decision made that day. Despite the immediate presence of local law enforcement leaders, there was an unacceptably long period of time before police officers breached the classroom, neutralized the attacker, and began rescue efforts. We do not know at this time whether responders could have saved more lives by shortening that delay. The first wave of responders to arrive included the chief of the school district police and the commander of the Uvalde Police Department SWAT team.
Uvalde CISD (Consolidated Independent School District)
Until recently, the Uvalde Police Department was responsible for security in the Uvalde public schools. In 2018, Uvalde CISD established its own police department, headquartered at Uvalde High School. With nine different schools and a budget for six police officers, Uvalde CISD oversees more campuses than it has officers, and it has assigned no officer specifically to Robb Elementary.
Instead, officers would regularly visit the Robb campus for a walk-through several times per week, usually lasting from 15–45 minutes. Uvalde CISD Police Chief Pete Arredondo and his second-in-command, Lt. Mike Hernandez, also testified that they visited campuses and walked halls to “rattle doors” to confirm they were locked.
Uvalde CISD police officers commonly carried two radios: one for the school district, and another “police radio” which transmitted communications from various local law enforcement agencies. While the school district radios tended to work reliably, the police radios worked more intermittently depending on where they were used.
The chief of police of Uvalde was one of the first responders on the scene. But as events unfolded, he failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander. The Chief’s was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in a written pre-plan (The Uvalde CISD’s active shooter plan), which directed its police chief to assume command and control of the response to an active shooter. The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon.
Notably, nobody ensured that responders making key decisions inside the building
received information that students and teachers had survived the initial burst of gunfire, were trapped in Rooms 111 and 112, and had called out for help. Some responders outside and inside the building knew that information through radio communications. But nobody in command analyzed this information to recognize that the attacker was preventing critically injured victims from obtaining medical care. Instead of continuing to act as if they were addressing a barricaded subject scenario in which responders had time on their side, they should have reassessed the scenario as one involving an active shooter. Correcting this error should have sparked greater urgency to immediately breach the classroom by any possible
means, to subdue the attacker, and to deliver immediate aid to surviving victims.
Recognition of an active shooter scenario also should have prompted responders to prioritize the rescue of innocent victims over the precious time wasted in a search for door keys and shields to enhance the safety of law enforcement responders.
Command Outside the Hot Zone. An effective incident commander located away from the drama unfolding inside the building would have realized that radios were mostly ineffective, and that responders needed other lines of communication to communicate important information like the victims’ phone calls from inside the classrooms. An offsite overall incident commander likely could have located a master key more quickly—several people on campus had one. An offsite overall incident commander may have suggested checking to see if officers could open the door without a key—in hindsight, they probably could have. An offsite overall incident commander who properly categorized the crisis as an active shooter scenario should have urged using other secondary means to breach the classroom, such as using a sledgehammer as suggested in active shooter training or entering through the exterior windows.
Uvalde CISD and its police department failed to implement their active shooter plan and failed to exercise command and control of law enforcement responding to the tragedy. But these local officials were not the only ones expected to supply the leadership needed during this tragedy.
No backup law enforcement responder seized the initiative to establish an incident command post upon witnessing the lack of organization by the first law enforcement officers on the scene. Despite an obvious atmosphere of chaos, the ranking officers of other responding agencies did not approach the Uvalde CISD chief of police or anyone else perceived to be in command to point out the lack of organization and the need for a command post, or to offer that specific assistance. According to the committee, several analysts of the incident response failure will suggest they the secondary law enforcement responders were misled by false or misleading information they received as they arrived; however, the “chaos” described by almost all of them demonstrates that at a minimum, responders should have asked more questions. According to the committee, this suggests a training deficiency, in that responding officers failed to adequately question the absence of command. Other responders failed to be sufficiently assertive by identifying the incident commander and offering their assistance or guidance, or by assuming command in the absence of any other responder having expressly done so. In this sense, the entirety of law enforcement and its training, preparation, and response shares systemic responsibility for many missed opportunities on that tragic day.
Background
The Interim Report describes the background and history of the investigation, and includes an overview of Robb Elementary School security and a CISD facilities overview.