Texas State troopers accused of also holding back in Uvalde

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Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D) said there were as many as 13 Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers in a hallway during last month’s school shooting in Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead.
Gutierrez, citing a recent interaction with DPS Director Steven McCraw, said more than a dozen troopers were in the hallway at Robb Elementary School as law enforcement delayed its response to the mass shooting.

“He told me there was enough people and equipment to breach the door,” Gutierrez said of his encounter with McCraw, according to the San Antonio Express-News.

Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, has previously said that the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, who was overseeing officers at the scene, was never informed that children were calling 911 from inside the school.
He has also previously told The Associated Press that a state agency investigating the shooting found Arredondo was not carrying a police radio during the shooting.

“They’re cowards,” Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher at Robb Elementary School, said of police.

All of Reyes’s 11 students were killed in the shooting, and he was injured.

“They sit there and did nothing for our community,” Reyes said. “They took a long time to go in. … I will never forgive them”

It's not a popular opinion, but it's my ambition to never need the cops.

From what I hear a lot of people don't bother calling the cops because all it does is invite trouble

Some are more afraid of the cops than they are of criminals.

I debate whether Abbott's actions or inactions are worse.

So local police and state troopers are both saying there were OHS issues about saving lives again??

As with those who watched the homeless guy drown, all this does is lower respect the public have for their police in times of crisis. I mean during the 9-11 terror attacks did the cops stand around shrugging their shoulders saying "sheesh!" that's not in my contract. Let's go to the donut shop.

I compare them to the POS park rangers in the Gabby Petito case.
Their incompetence led to murder.

I remember that case. They have no shortage of excuses for why didn't save Gaby from a violent partner.

oming on the heels of a mass shooting event in Buffalo, New York, the massacre of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas just ten days later appeared to be yet another intolerable episode of mass gun violence in the United States. This specific sort of violence is, primarily, an American problem, and it is being addressed at a national level. Right now, a legislative framework prompted by this attack is in the crafting stages in the U.S. Senate. But this was not just another mass shooting. The more we learn about what happened in Uvalde, the less this event seems to lend itself to legislative remedies.

On Monday, the details of what occurred as this horrific episode unfolded changed yet again. Reportedly, Uvalde police officers and Texas state troopers, who were armed with rifles and ballistic shields, did enter the school building while the attack was ongoing. Radio transcripts and surveillance footage viewed by the Texas Tribune revealed that the responding officers lingered outside the one classroom in which the shooter was executing children, but they stayed there for nearly one hour before entering the room.

Police were not without the means to gain entry to that classroom. A forcible entry tool designed to breach locked doors was on the scene within minutes of law enforcement’s response, but no one brought the tool into the school for almost an hour. Instead, officers waited for someone to bring keys that would unlock the classroom door. “It took about six minutes for a set of keys to arrive, and the chief began testing them on a different classroom door,” the Tribune reported. Over the course of an agonizing, bloody hour, radio traffic indicates that responding officers loitered and argued over the need to have a “supervisor approve” of breaching the classroom in question. Finally, 77 minutes after the shooting started, a Border Patrol tactical team initiated forced entry and neutralized the gunman.

“The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside, yet there is no indication officers tried to open the door while the gunman was inside,” the Associated Press reported on Tuesday after Texas’s Department of Public Safety chief testified to the “abject failure” of law enforcement. “I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” Col. Steve McCraw said. “How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?” He added that “because terrible decisions” were made by law enforcement, it’s clear “not enough training was done in this situation.”

This isn’t the first time that local law enforcement’s version of events has evolved. DPS initially claimed that the shooter “was engaged by law enforcement” outside the school before he “unfortunately” gained entry to the building. Later, we learned that was not the case. Indeed, school district police chief Pete Arredondo stopped treating the active shooter scenario as an “active shooter scenario” after determining that the gunman barricaded himself inside a classroom, judging that there was “no risk to other children.” McCraw initially blamed school staff for propping open a door to the building with a rock, only to later “verify” that the door in question was closed.

This wasn’t just another mass shooting, as awful as that would be. It was another mass shooting and a breathtaking display of negligence by police, which has been subsequently compounded by law enforcement’s dissimulation. At present, a bipartisan framework—championed by the Senior U.S. Senator from Texas and billed as a national “post-Uvalde” reckoning—is in the works. The tentative deal includes stricter background checks, incentives for states to pass “red flag” laws, and funds for additional security measures for school and mental-health resources. But nothing in that framework would address the conditions that ensured this attack was so deadly. Indeed, how could it?

Texas police officer spotted the Robb Elementary gunman as he strode toward the school building and was "sighted in to shoot the attacker" but didn't take the shot, a new report found.

A Texas State University report about the May 24 shooting at the elementary school in Uvalde that killed 19 children and two teachers spotlighted circumstances in which the gunman could have potentially been stopped before he entered the building.

In one case, according to the report, a police officer spotted the gunman, Salvador Ramos, carrying a rifle toward the school after Ramos crashed his truck near the scene that morning.

The officer, who was about 148 yards away, "sighted in to shoot the attacker" and asked a supervisor for permission to pull the trigger, the report said. He never got a response, so the officer turned to try to get confirmation from his supervisor.

“When he turned back to address the suspect, the suspect had already entered” the building, the report said.

Robb Elementary School teacher Arnie Reyes could hear the police officers outside his door. For an hour, as he lay dying, he listened to them do nothing.

“I was thinking, you know, come on, come in, come in. Like he’s in here. Just come in here, come save us,” he told CNN in a new interview out Wednesday night.

“And they weren’t. I didn’t find that out until after the fact when I saw other videos where they’re standing in the hallways and that even makes me more upset, just knowing you’re a few feet away from me and you’re not helping me. You’re not helping anybody.”

Reyes, who worked in a connected classroom to Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, who were both killed, told his students to play dead as suspect Salvador Ramos, 18, rampaged through the rooms.

The gunman shot him twice: once in the arm and once in the back.

They forgot us. They saved everybody else except us,” he said. “I mean, they probably thought that we were all dead or something, but if they would have gone in before, some of ‘em probably would have made it.”

All 11 students in his classroom died, along with eight students next door and the two teachers.