HOUSTON — Days after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, leaders of the grieving city fumed during a closed-door meeting with Stephen McCraw, the state’s top police official.
They took issue with Mr. McCraw’s public criticism of the city’s police officers’ response to the May 24 massacre, which killed 19 children and two teachers, and in a one-page document set out their own version of events, which praised officers for initially rushes to the shooting and saves hundreds of other children at the school.
The document, prepared by Uvalde officials and labeled a “narrative,” was obtained by The New York Times following a public information request. His account of events differed in significant ways from that described by Mr. McCraw’s agency, the Department of Public Safety, which is leading the police investigation into the shooting and the law enforcement response.
Uvalde officials pushed the document across Mr. McCraw’s desk, asking him to publicly endorse it, according to a state police official who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the June 2 meeting. Mr. McCraw refused.
The heated meeting at Uvalde’s town hall, which has not been reported until now, was among the earliest indications of a simmering feud between state and local officials that has since erupted into the public arena over who should be blamed for the 77 minutes that took of heavily armed officers to kill the gunman after he first entered Robb Elementary School.
Competing accounts have clouded police actions and angered victims’ families, who have pleaded for reliable information. The clearest picture yet is expected to emerge Sunday, when a Texas House committee reports the results of its investigation, one of several overlapping probes into what happened.
The panel’s report was expected to spread blame beyond Chief Pete Arredondo, head of the Uvalde school district’s small police force, whom Mr. McCraw said was largely responsible for the law enforcement response, which he called a “senseless failure.”
Instead, the panel was expected to find fault broadly among the several law enforcement agencies and officials who responded, including dozens of officers from the U.S. Border Patrol, the local sheriff’s office and the Department of Public Safety, according to a person familiar with the investigation.
The conclusion, the person said, would be that the delayed response was not the failure of one person, but rather of dozens of trained employees and supervisors. No one knew what was going on and no one tried to take responsibility, the person said, citing failures of inaction and communication by agencies.
Such a finding would echo what others have already concluded after studying the sometimes conflicting versions of events offered by state and local officials.
“There was no incident commander, that’s the truth of the matter — it was a complete system breakdown,” said state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who represents the area and has been critical of the version presented by state police, which has no other law enforcement agencies responsible. “Why didn’t they take command and control of the situation?” he asked.
Mr. McCraw had said Superintendent Arredondo was in charge of the scene and made the “wrong decision” by treating the shooter as barricaded in a classroom — a situation that would have required a more careful, tactical approach — rather than someone who was actively was shooting and who officers are trained to deal with immediately. Chief Arredondo has not spoken publicly, but said in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he did not see himself as the incident commander.
In the narrative Uvalde officials laid out in their narrative, they focused on the quick arrival of officers at the school and their success in containing the shooter in a pair of connected classrooms while clearing the children from the rest of the school. They described a scene that was dangerous for officers and a response that was not chaotic but aimed at getting the children to safety.
“There was no hesitation on the part of these officers, they moved directly toward the shooting,” the document said, only to be pushed back when the gunman fired at them. Two of the officers were bruised by debris from the shooting.
“The total number of people saved by the heroes that are local law enforcement and other assisting agencies is over 500 at UCISD,” the document said, citing Chief Arredondo’s department, the police force of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District. “But if UPD and UCISD had been on the scene IMMEDIATELY, this shooter would have had free range of the school.”
The document also says specially trained Border Patrol agents insisted on clearing the other classrooms first. “BORTAC insisted that all rooms be cleared ie. all children and teachers to be removed BEFORE using the shields and breaching room 112,” the document said.
“In the absence of shields, every UPD officer was of the opinion that the door entry was a suicide, and every Texas Ranger or DPS agent who took their statements agreed,” the document states. “Not a single officer present, including DPS troopers and Texas Rangers, believed they could save lives by walking up to that door and being killed one by one.”
That description contradicts Mr. McCraw’s account of police officers not following standard training developed after the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in 1999, which required officers to quickly confront a gunman and stop the shooting. At a hearing at the state Capitol last month, Mr. McCraw said the officers had enough firepower to engage the shooter within three minutes of entering the school, but were prevented from doing so by Chief Arredondo.
Uvalde officials in their document did not mention the lack of keys as a reason for the delayed confrontation with the gunman, which Chief Arredondo had said in his interview was another major reason for the delay.
Instead, they defended the protracted response, saying the extended period of time before confronting the shooter “was not wasted, but every minute was used to save the lives of children and teachers.”
Some of the footage from the scene of the accident raises questions about the city’s account.
Video from the hallway at Robb Elementary — which was reviewed by The Times last month and published by The Austin American-Statesman this week — clearly showed that the shields began arriving in the hallway outside the classrooms long before staff moved in.
And several Border Patrol agents expressed frustration at the lengthy delay in getting permission to enter the classroom, a person briefed on the investigation told The Times.
The gathering at Uvalde City Hall was arranged by Gov. Greg Abbott’s office because of growing tensions between Uvalde officials, including Mayor Don McLaughlin and District Judge Bill Mitchell, and state police officials.
By now, more than a week after the shooting, Mr. McLaughlin had asked the Justice Department to conduct its own review of the shooting, an indication that he did not trust the state police to impartially review the officers’ actions.
And several key points about the shooting and the police response have already been changed during a series of state-convened press conferences. For example, Mr Abbott, speaking in Uvalde the day after the massacre, said “the reason it’s not worse is because the law enforcement officers did what they did” and praised their “quick response”. The governor later said he had been “misled” about the facts.
After the hallway video emerged, Mr Abbott told reporters on Thursday that “none of the information in that video was shared with me that day”.
Local District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busby and the Uvalde City Attorney also attended the June meeting. The mayor, county judge and local district attorney did not respond to requests for comment. A state police spokesman declined to comment.
Mr Abbott’s chief of staff attended the meeting, as did his chief adviser, who was keen to play the role of mediator.
But things quickly went off the rails, the senior official said.
Uvalde officials expressed their strong displeasure with Mr. McCraw. At the start of the hour-long meeting, the city attorney presented the document, which was the result of interviews with police officers who responded to the scene, the senior official said. Uvalde officials wanted Mr. McCraw to have another press conference to present the narrative from the document. He told them he disagreed with his summary, the senior official said.
Ms. Busby, the district attorney, also opposed his release and argued with the city attorney, the senior official said. Some in the room raised their voices.
“I objected to the release of any information given that the Texas Rangers had only just begun their investigation and there was no way to judge whether this account was accurate,” Ms. Busby said in an email. “I was concerned about the release of inaccurate or incomplete information that would have adversely affected the investigation and further traumatized the families.”
The document was not in the public domain at the time.
Add Comment