UVALDE, Texas – Police officials who responded to the deadly school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, “demonstrated no urgency” in setting up a command post and failed to treat the killings as an active shooter situation, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday that identifies “cascading failures” in law enforcement’s handling of one of the deadliest massacres at a school in American history.
The May 2022 mass shooting led to the murders of 19 students and two educators in the town of Uvalde.
The police response to the shooting has been widely criticized as a “failure.”
The Justice Department report, the most comprehensive federal accounting of the haphazard police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School, identifies a vast array of problems from failed communication and leadership to inadequate technology and training. Federal officials say these issues contributed to the crisis lasting far longer than it should have, even as terrified students inside the classrooms called 911 and agonized parents begged officers to go in.
“The victims and survivors of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School deserved better,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a statement. “The law enforcement response at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022 — and the response by officials in the hours and days after — was a failure.”
The former Mayor of Uvalde, Don McLaughlin, asked the DOJ to independently investigate the police response when contradictory information emerged within days of the murders.
Inaccurate information given by law enforcement ranged from officers getting into a shootout with the gunman before entering the school to an officer having the opportunity to shoot the gunman but hesitating to take the shot.
Family members of those wounded and murdered have long wanted an outside evaluation.
The DOJ launched its review in June 2022, and since that time, they have interviewed more than 200 individuals from 30 organizations and collected 13,000 pieces of evidence.
The Texas Department of Public Safety and Texas lawmakers have largely blamed former Uvalde CISD police chief, Pete Arredondo, for not taking command of the response.
Although Arredondo tried to communicate by phone with officers elsewhere in the school hallway, he told them not to enter the classrooms “because he appeared to determine that other victims should first be removed from nearby classrooms to prevent further injury.”
The DOJ’s report is the first outside evaluation of what happened that day.
Nearly 400 officers responded to the shooting, yet it took 77 minutes before members of Border Patrol’s BORTAC team entered the classroom and killed the gunman.
Police also erred by failing to urgently establish a centralized command post, creating confusion among officers and even first responders, the federal report said.
The report includes a series of comments by terrified children taken from a 911 call, including: “Help!” “Help!” “Help!” “I don’t want to die. My teacher is dead.”
By that point, the students and their teachers had been trapped in classrooms with the shooter for 37 minutes, and the call lasted for 27 minutes. Even though law enforcement officials were in the hallway and just outside the classrooms, it would be another 13 minutes after the call ended before the survivors were rescued.
Residents who lived across from the school told KPRC 2 it looked like responding officers were unsure of how to proceed once they arrived at the campus.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” said US Attorney General Merrick Garland.
The DOJ’s report cited police moved, in error, from an “active shooter response” to a “barricaded suspect” reponse. The report further states the lack of an established incident commander and poor communication caused more confusion among arriving officers.
“Thus, arriving personnel did not receive accurate updates on the situation or direction for how to support the response efforts. Many arriving officers—based on inaccurate information on the scene and shared over the radio or from observing the lack of urgency toward entering classrooms 111/112—incorrectly believed that the subject had already been killed or that UCISD PD Chief Arredondo was in the room with the subject,” the report read.
See the entire 610-page document below (670 pages in Spanish):
Retired Secret Service agent and former head of safety and security for Texas City ISD, Mike Matranga said this report shows the need for a more focused process when hiring those who may have to take charge of an active shooter incident. Matranga, who operates M6 Global, said simply going through training is not enough when it comes to a leadership position. Matranga points to the section of the report which states none of the law enforcement agencies in the Uvalde area ever trained with one another for an active shooter event.
“We all have the ability to climb on the back of a bull, but that doesn’t make us all bull riders,” said Matranga. “We have to start focusing on planning, operations, communications, designating who’s in charge, identifying who’s your primary responder, who’s your secondary responder, what the difference of those two, or what communications platform you’re communicating on. Where is your staging area, whether it’s medical or law enforcement. Where are your casualty collection points? That all needs to be understood not only at the campus level, but amongst the responding agencies, whether it be one responding agency or 400.”
The city of Uvalde released the following statement regarding the report:
“The City of Uvalde released the following statement after the U.S. Department of Justice released its review of the law enforcement response to the May 24, 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting:
“Just days after the May 24, 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, former Mayor Don McLaughlin requested the Justice Department conduct a review to provide an independent and complete account of all law enforcement actions, lessons learned, and best practices to help first responders prepare for and respond to active shooter events.
“The City has already implemented changes in leadership, new personnel, new training, and new equipment to enhance law enforcement’s ability to protect the safety of our community, and has enlisted an independent investigator to conduct a thorough, objective, and credible review of the City’s law enforcement response. We anticipate that independent investigation will be finished this month.
“At every level throughout the review process, the City of Uvalde cooperated and provided extensive information to the Justice Department to ensure a fulsome account of law enforcement’s response from the City’s perspective. At this time, we are reviewing the full Justice Department report and will provide additional comments on its findings, as appropriate, following our careful and thorough review process.”
Governor Greg Abbott released the following statement regarding the report:
“Following the horrific tragedy at Robb Elementary School, Texas took swift action to bolster security in our schools and in our communities, and I thank the U.S. Department of Justice for their critical incident review of the tragic shooting at Robb Elementary School. The State of Texas has already adopted and implemented some of the recommendations proposed by the DOJ in this review. We will continue to evaluate all possible means of making our schools safer, and we will carefully review all other recommendations the Department has offered to prevent future tragedies across our state.”
The Associate Press contributed to this report.