UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Two months after the Uvalde school massacre, Texas State Police announced Monday an internal review of the actions of dozens of troopers who were at Robb Elementary during 73 minutes of stunning inaction by law enforcement when a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers.
The announcement appeared to widen the fallout from an exculpatory 80-page report released over the weekend by the Texas House that revealed lapses at all levels of law enforcement and identified 91 state troopers at the scene — more than all Uvalde employees combined. It also amounted to a public shift from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which until now has largely criticized local authorities for failing to confront the shooter sooner.
The report, released Sunday, showed for the first time how massive a presence state police and the U.S. Border Patrol had on the scene during one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.
“You have 91 soldiers on the scene. You have all the equipment you could want and you listen to the local school cop?” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district includes Uvalde and who accused DPS of seeking to minimize its role in the response.
Findings that Border Patrol agents and state troopers made up more than half of the 376 law enforcement officers who rushed to the South Texas school on May 24 spread the blame for the slow and botched response far more widely than previous reports have emphasized the mistakes of Uvalde employees.
The report found that “extremely poor decision-making” by authorities outnumbered local law enforcement in Uvalde, who ended up being outnumbered 5-to-1 by state and federal officers at the scene. Other local police from the area around Uvalde also responded to the shooting.
The report places new emphasis on the roles of state and federal agencies whose leaders, unlike local governments, were not required to attend meetings where they were confronted by the angry parents of the dead children.
Of the nearly 400 police officers who converged on the school, only two are currently known to be on leave pending an investigation into their actions: Pete Arredondo, Uvalde Consolidated School Police Chief, and Lt. Mariano Pargas, an employee of the Uvalde Police Department, who was the city’s acting police chief at the time of the massacre.
State police previously said no officers were on the scene. On Monday, Texas Republican Gov. Greg Abbott said the report’s findings “are beyond troubling,” but did not name any agencies.
Texas DPS has not put a timeline on when the review will be completed. It said the actions of every trooper, state police agent and Texas Ranger at a crime scene would be reviewed “to determine if any violations of policy, law or doctrine occurred.”
Col. Steve McCraw, the director of Texas DPS, had previously placed much of the blame for the response on Arredondo, identifying him as the incident commander and criticizing him for treating the classroom shooter as a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter.
The new report — the most comprehensive account yet of the tragedy — also says Arredondo wasted critical time during the shooting by searching for a classroom key and not treating the shooter more urgently. But it also emphasized that all law enforcement agencies at the scene failed to respond.
“There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or bad motives. Instead, we found systemic errors and extremely poor decision-making,” the report said.
Abbott said there were “critical changes needed,” but did not say in a statement whether officials or agencies should be held accountable.
In Uvalde, city council and school board meetings in the eight weeks since the shooting turned into recurring scenes of residents yelling at elected leaders for police accountability, which continued after the report was released.
“It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting,” said Michael Brown, whose 9-year-old son was in the school cafeteria the day of the shooting and survived. “They’re cowards.”
According to the report, the shooter fired an estimated 142 shots inside the school — and it is “almost certain” that at least 100 shots came before any staff member entered, according to the commission, which exposed numerous errors.
Among them: No one took command despite multiple officers on the scene, and no officer immediately tried to break into the classroom, even though a dispatcher relayed a 911 call that there were victims in the room.
The report also criticized the Border Patrol tactical team, saying it waited for an armored shield and a working master key for a classroom door that was likely never locked before entering. In total, the report put nearly 150 Border Patrol agents at the scene.
Cecilia Barreda, a spokeswoman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection, said Monday that a review of the agency’s response is still ongoing and has not reached final conclusions.
Hours after the report was released, Uvalde officials separately released for the first time hours of body camera footage of city police officers who responded to the attack
A video by Uvalde Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales, the head of the city’s SWAT team, showed the officer approaching the classroom when shots rang out at 11:37 a.m.
A minute later, Canales said, “Dude, we gotta get in there. We have to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We have to get in there. Another officer can be heard saying “DPS is sending their people.”
It was 72 minutes later, at 12:50 p.m., when officers finally entered the classroom and killed the shooter.
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Weber reported from Austin, Texas.
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