In a press conference Friday, Texas’ Director of Public Safety Colonel Steven McCraw said that 19 police officers stood outside the classroom for an hour as the gunman had his victims trapped and did nothing because they thought everyone inside was already dead.
As information about Tuesday’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, continues to come to light, reports of police action paint a very bleak picture. Mobile phone videos show police retraining — and even using pepper spray — on parents who attempted to enter the school as police appeared to do nothing. This admission from McGraw appears to give credibility to accounts that police were not doing all they could to save the children inside the classroom with the gunman.
McGraw delivered the news with difficulty — breaking down and crying at times. What he said was hard for anyone to hear; It would truly be any parent’s nightmare. He said the decision to wait outside the room for that hour was “the wrong decision” and was based on Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo wrongly believing that all of the kids in the classroom had already been killed.
He said, “The incident commander thought at that time there was no more children at risk,” adding, “Obviously there were children that were at risk.” As police stood outside the room, 18-year-old Salvador Rolando Ramos — a troubled young man who was heavily armed and had barricaded himself in the classroom with students and two teachers — fired at the door to keep police from gaining entry to the room.
Ramos had crashed his truck outside the school and then walked to the school where — just after 11:30 a.m. — he gained entry through a door a teacher had propped open just long enough to grab his phone from his car. He entered the classroom — adjoining rooms 111 and 112 occupied by an unknown number of students and two teachers — and locked the door. He immediately began shooting, firing more than 100 rounds in the first few minutes.
The first three officers in the building approached the door and Ramos fired, causing those officers to be wounded by grazing shots. They backed away from the door. As other officers arrived, Ramos continued to shoot sporadically. Police said they thought he was firing at the door again to keep them away. This is when Chief Arredondo assumed Ramos had killed everyone in the room, but that assumption is at odds with the fact that 911 calls were coming from students who identified themselves as being in the room.
According to reports, by 12:03 p.m., there were as many as 19 police officers in the hallway. At that time, 911 received a call from a girl who whispered that she was in room 112. She called back at 12:10 p.m. to say there were “multiple dead” in the room. She called again three minutes later and then again three minutes later. She called a fifth time at 12:16 p.m. and said there were between eight and nine students alive in room 112. At 12:19 p.m., a different girl called 911 and said she was in room 111. She hung up when another student told her to so the gunman would not hear her. Two minutes later, the Ramos fired again. One of the girls called 911 again and said Ramos shot at the door. She stayed on the line with 911 and at 12:43 p.m., said, “Please send the police now.”
All that while, 19 police officers were right outside the door.
At 12:50 p.m., police unlocked the door with the janitor’s key and shot and killed Ramos.
While it is easy to armchair quarterback police actions, it should be remembered that in the types of situations in which police find themselves, mistakes can be irreversible. Perhaps only people who work in emergency situations — paramedics, emergency room doctors, police, etc. — can understand what it is like to make mistakes that cost people their lives. If your mechanic or plumber overlooks something or makes a bad call, you may wind up needing a new car or having water damage to your home. When police make mistakes, the consequences can be deadly.
In this instance, it is hard to say what Chief Arredondo was thinking or why he did not send his men into the room. McGraw said that Arredondo made the wrong call on this. “With the benefit of hindsight, from where I am sitting now — of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,” McGraw said, adding, “There is no excuse.”
McGraw added that police officers — including him — “take an oath to protect and serve,” but he said they failed to do that Tuesday.
All armchair quarterbacking aside, he is right. Whether the failure was because of ineptitude, cowardice, inexperience, or just plain old honest human error, the fact remains that children were left in danger for their lives for the better part of an hour while police were right outside the door, doing nothing. It is not known yet whether Ramos killed anyone else during that time.
And while the liberal establishment will plaster this all over the Internet as an example of the worthlessness of police, it should be noted that these are the same people who always find something to blame the police for. Maybe there is blame here and maybe there isn’t. Instead of blame, what America needs is an answer. How can this kind of tragedy be avoided — or at least lessened — next time?
Jacob Albarado — an off-duty Border Patrol agent who borrowed a shotgun from a barber and rushed to the school to save his child who was in the building — does not believe that kids in classrooms need to be sitting ducks for would-be murderers who target gun-free zones. Posting to Facebook, he wrote, “I’m so angry, saddened and grateful all at once. Only time will heal their pain and hopefully changes will be made at all schools in the U.S. and teachers will be trained & allowed to carry in order to protect themselves and students.”
The idea of allowing teachers to be trained and armed is not new, but it may be catching on. Breitbart reports:
The commission that investigated the February 14, 2018, Parkland high school shooting noted that armed teachers could have made a difference in the outcome of that heinous incident.
Breitbart News observed that Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri, head of the Parkland commission, said the investigation of the Parkland attack had changed his views on armed teachers — he went from opposing the idea to supporting it. He noted, “People need to keep an open mind to it, as the reality is that if someone else in that school had a gun it could have saved kids’ lives.”
As this tragedy shows, police can make mistakes. They are human, and people mess up. Sometimes it is mild; Sometimes it is deadly. Consider this: A police officer shows up to a crime in progress. All he knows is what dispatch told him. All dispatch knows is what the 911 caller told them. It sometimes happens that the officer on the scene makes a mistake about who the criminal is. Sometime police show up too late. Sometimes they show up and shoot the good guy while the bad guy gets away. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen.
Now consider this: At the scene of a violent crime — say a school shooting — does the victim know who the criminal is? Yes. It’s the guy shooting people. Is the victim sure of the crime that is being committed. Yes. He sees it happening. Is the victim going to arrive too late? No. He is already there.
Arm the teachers. Train them. They are already on site and they know the building. They know who belongs there and who doesn’t. If one of the teachers in classroom 111 /112 had been armed, this tragic story could have had a very different ending. It was never going to end well, but 19 children and two teachers did not have to die like this.
