As more details emerge, the disaster at Uvalde grows ever more horrifying. The New York Times reported that more than 140 officers of the law converged on Robb Elementary School. They began to arrive only minutes after the killer started shooting children and teachers. Two officers tried to enter the classroom but were struck by gunfire. The school district’s chief of police—who commanded a force of six—decided not to storm the classroom, although the first rule in an active shooter situation is to confront the shooter immediately and disable him. Since Columbine, police training for school shootings emphasizes the importance of rushing the killer and stopping the shooting.
The chief decided that the shooter was barricaded in the classroom and that no one was in danger. He did not have a police radio. He called on a cell phone to ask for reinforcements. Children in the classroom with the killer repeatedly called 911 to plead for help. The police waited outside the door for more than an hour. When a tactical force from the Border Patrol stormed the classroom, the officer in charge told them to stay out. They disobeyed orders and killed the shooter.
The story begins:
UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.
The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.
But there were problems from the start.
Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.
Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a message that set the stage for what would prove to be a disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.
Rather than confront an actively shooting gunman immediately, as officers have been trained to do since the killings at Columbine High School in 1999, the ever-growing force of increasingly armed officers arriving at Robb Elementary held back for more than an hour….
A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a 10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of medical attention.
The story is horrifying. It is a story of missed opportunities, unnecessary deaths, fear, miscommunication, ignorance, and perhaps cowardice. The children risked their lives to call 911. Their messages were not relayed to the officer in charge at the scene. 140 police officers on hand, waiting for orders. No orders came other than to evacuate the children who were not in the classroom with the killer. The children in the classroom with the killer were on their own for over an hour while armed police waited for a key and an order.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Yesterday the post about Ohio reported on the idea of putting arms in the hands of teachers.
If police officers, both trained and experienced, can make horrific mistakes, how much worse would barely-trained civilians have acted?
I used to volunteer as a Capitan in a rural fire department. I got pretty good so long as I could spend 30-40 hours per week on it.
Then I started teaching and my training began to wane.
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Breathtakingly stupid and cowardly
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There are situations in which you can reasonably say, OK, you don’t know how you are going to react until you are in that situation. I faced one of these years ago when I was aboard an airplane whose door came open!
But this was not such a situation. There were lives of children at immediate and extreme risk, inside. In such a situation, any other consideration is unimportant.
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The door opened up mid-flight?
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Yes
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I don’t know whether it opened or simply cracked. I understand that the pressure on the outside of a door of an airplane in flight is enormous. Prior to takeoff, we were delayed. The attendant at the desk told us that this was because some maintenance was being done on a door. At any rate, the passenger cabin lost pressure inside. There was a tremendous whooshing sound. I don’t exactly recall, but I think that air masks fell down. Stuff was being thrown around. The plane went into nosedive. People were screaming and thrashing about and throwing up. I had no idea what was going on. I sat there, looked out the window (I had a window seat) and thought to myself, well, this is it. This is how I die. And my next thought was how surprised I was at how calm I was being about this. There wasn’t really time to think much. But it was a controlled dive. The incredibly quick-thinking pilot brought us down to just above the tree line, where the air was breathable, I guess, straightened out, and flew us on into Atlanta. That’s something I do remember clearly, looking out over the tops of trees, just below the plane. After we landed, I asked an airline employee in the disembarkation area what had happened. He told me that the door had cracked open. I left and got onto my next flight.
But for weeks thereafter, everything looked, smelled, tasted, felt, sounded to me heightened, slightly surreal, cleaner, the way a city looks after a rain. I was extraordinarily happy just to be breathing, walking around, alive.
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I had two long-term takeaways from this experience. One was to remind myself often just how wonderful it is to be alive and sensing things and able to enjoy and interact with others. Another that is whenever I am flying and the steward and the boarding area says that the flight is being delayed for maintenance, I march right back to the ticket counter to get another flight. At least that’s the rule I stated to myself. As it turned out, I never had to use it.
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At the time, I had just headed up the creation of a new literature programs for middle- and high-school kids, and I was flying constantly, going around the country, talking to teacher groups about the program. It didn’t disturb me much that I had had that experience. There, I think, having some basic understanding, from stat class, of probability served me well. I knew that my chances of getting killed in a car were much greater than those of dying in a plane crash.
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If this had happened to me I think I would have eschewed motorized flight forever. Heck with the probability, I would have been unable.
I had a cousin who witnessed a DC-10 fly out of O’Hare, flip on its back, and crash. He never flew again.
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It’s true that no one knows how they are going to react when something horrible happens.
“The perception of threat activates the sympathetic nervous system and triggers an acute stress response that prepares the body to fight or flee. These responses are evolutionary adaptations to increase chances of survival in threatening situations.”
That happened to me more than once when i was in the Marines in Vietnam back in 1966.
One time, we were coming in from a night patrol when we heard the spoon on a grenade pop and the grenade landed in front of one of the Marines near the front of the patrol. He froze, standing there staring at the grenade inches in front of him. The rest of us didn’t.
In the time between that grenade hitting the dirt and me being aware I was in a ditch a dozen feet away in a prone position, with my weapon ready and the safety off, with two other members of that patrol with me in the same ditch, I do not remember anything in that brief instant after the grenade landed. I don’t remember running. I don’t remember thinking what I should do. My body just reacted.
Incidents like that happened other times in Vietnam and my automatic reaction was always the right one that saved me from being wounded or killed.
And yet, to this day, I don’t know what my body is going to do when another life threatening incident happens like those.
We never know.
So, when it goes down, we don’t know if we are going to fight or flee but a few seconds or minutes later we have more control over what we do. Once we are aware of what’s going on, we can make rational decisions and plan what to do next.
That district police chief had about an hour to recover from the fight or flight shock if he ever had that reaction. Since he wasn’t there when it started, he probably didn’t have that uncontrollably reaction where your body’s survival instinct takes over briefly.
He had about an hour to think rationally and he didn’t. He is apparently an arrogant, competent fool to have held on to other power to be in charge and continue to make stupid decisions like he did.
He was the police chief for a public school district. He was in charge of CPOs, campus police officers. Soon after the incident happened, others with much more experience started to arrive. He should have handed control over to one of them. A SWAT commander or someone leading a rapid response team has a lot of training and experience we won’t find with most CPOs. I wonder if this CPO chief was related to a district administrator or school board member and he got that job because of that connection.
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Well said. And thank you, Lloyd for that story.
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Great example of the disingenuous sophistry right here. Our commentator asks a question he knows could easlily be determined by himself (lawyers, after all, are expected to a minimal amount of research skills?), so one must ask, why does he ask it this forum? Enquiring minds want to know.
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“Great example of the disingenuous sophistry right here. Our commentator asks a question he knows could easlily be determined by himself (lawyers, after all, are expected to a minimal amount of research skills?), so one must ask, why does he ask it this forum? Enquiring minds want to know.”
Greg, to be clear, you are angry that I asked Bob whether the door on his plane opened up mid-flight? That question was “disingenuous sophistry”? And I could have “easily determined” the answer to that question myself?
What is the matter with you, Greg? Why do you need to clutter every comment thread that I’m on with weird personal attacks?
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I suspect, Greg, that Flerp was doing what he is trained to do as a lawyer, seeing an improbability and pouncing on that and asking a question requiring clarification, and that was, in fact, the result. I had to clarify what I actually know about this incident, which was not, as I originally stated, that the door came open but that a) we were delayed before boarding because they were doing maintenance on a door; b) we lost pressure in the passenger cabin during flight, forcing the pilot to descend rapidly and fly at a low altitude for the remainder of the flight; and c) that an airline employee told me that a door had cracked open. What, precisely, happened? What were the details? I have no idea. I was in the middle of a business trip, flew on to my destination, and gave my presentations, had my business dinners, and so on. Other matters to attend to, though I did have something fascinating to tell my wife about that evening on the telephone. And the feeling afterward, that hallucinatory articulation and luminousness of everything just because I had survived, was alive–that really stuck with me.
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Bob, I was just asking if the door actually opened up in the middle of the flight! It’s a terrifying sounding thing and I wanted to hear the story. For Christ’s sake.
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I wasn’t attacking you, Flerp. The question made me think about this all again and about what I actually know about the event and what I don’t. So, it was an interesting exercise.
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I know you weren’t, Bob. I was referring to the nonstop line of increasingly weird attacks from Greg today.
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I consider Greg a friend, and I’m fine with spirited debate. Goes with the territory in a democracy. Greg has strong feelings about some matters. He’s also brilliant.
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Not sure I agree that someone who thinks that asking what happened to the door during your flight is “disingenuous sophistry” or that I could have determined what happened to the door by doing some “research” is brilliant. But we all have our talents.
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FLERP and Greg,
No one is interested in reading your hostile responses to one another.
Please stop.
I will regretfully put you both in moderation and delete all personal exchanges.
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“I don’t know whether it opened or simply cracked. I understand that the pressure on the outside of a door of an airplane in flight is enormous”
Actually, except if the plane cabin has lost all pressurization, the pressure on the INSIDE of a plane in flight is always going to be HIGHER than the pressure outside. The cabin pressure is normally kept at about 10 to 12 psi (a little less than atmospheric pressure at sea level). But since the pressure outside the aircraft at a cruising altitude of 30,000 to 40,000 feet is only 4 to 3 psi, the inside pressure is usually around 6 to 9 psi GREATER than the outside pressure.
So there is significant pressure on the door in the OUTWARD direction.
Sounds like disaster waiting to happen if the door locks fail, right?
Well. No.
Here’s why. Even if the locks on the door have failed for some reason there is pretty much zero chance of the door opening midflight because the doors are designed to essentially be “plugs” which effectively close (and normally seal) when they are pushed outward.
Even the aircraft doors that eventually open outward must FIRST be moved inward. Only after they have been moved inward, usually by a few inches can they then be swung outward. And on many aircraft doors only swing inward (never outward)
And not incidentally, it is also virtually impossible for a person to open an aircraft door midflight because the force they would first have to exert (INWARD) is very large . If the inside pressure is greater than outside pressure by 8psi for example (pretty typical for a cruising aircraft), you’d first have to pull the door inward with a force of several tons. Even Ahhnold couldn’t open that door,unless maybe he had two very large guns.
Finally, unless the aircraft has lost ALL it’s internal cabin pressure, there would still be an outward pressure on the door that would keep it shut even if all locks failed.
My guess is that in your case , the rubber seal around the door somehow failed or perhaps the door was just not closing “squarely” which prevented a good seal, which then tended to depressurize the cabin. The whooshing noise would actually have been air rushing OUT of the plane thru a probably small crack around the door. My guess is also that the locks on your door were probably still working.
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Thank you, SomeDAM, for that explanation.
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One more thing😀
In the case where the aircraft cabin is not pressurized, if the plane were not moving, the pressure would be equal outside and inside the plane.
But when the plane is flying, the air is rushing over the exterior surface , including door. This air movement tends to reduce the pressure on outside relative to pressure inside because of something called the Bernoulli effect. *
Hence, even if the cabin were not pressurized, the door would still be pushed outward — into the closed position.
*Essentially, the fact that the air is moving over the outside of the door faster than the air inside (which is not moving at all if door is shut) reduces the pressure on the outside. This effect is actually what makes flight possible, albeit when it is operating on airplane wings, not doors.
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In short: there was little chance that the door would actually open midflight.
The “suicide” rear doors , which opened backwards, that they once put on Ford Thunderbirds are a different story entirely.
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I assumed Bob was probably talking about a commercial jets.
But i probably should have prefaced that whole thing with “this applies to doors on most commercial jets”.
There are undoubtedly lots of doors on small aircraft that don’t work that way (many that actually just swing outward like car doors)
And maybe even some doors on some commercial jets that don’t.
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I did know about the difference in pressure above and below the wing being the reason for lift. Thanks, again, SomeDAM, for the light you threw on this.
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Here’s a video of the 737 door operation which demonstrates the inward/outward opening design. It’s actually very clever, but you have to wonder how many doors were blown out before they came up with that solution.
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The Bernoulli effect shows up in lots of unexpected places
Here’s a future Nobel physics laureate giving a classic demonstration of the principle
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This is lovely, SomeDAM. Thanks for sharing it.
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Kids bring a lot to the ballgame. Would that school did a LOT better job harnessing their differing proclivities. Love the demeanor of this kid, who takes what she is doing so very seriously. Yay!!!!
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Diane, I tried to bury the hatchet with Greg, but he will not stop. He is either incapable of stopping or he just refused to.
As before, I will not say anything hostile to him unless he starts it up again, which unfortunately I expect to be shortly.
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Do not respond. I say the same to him. Others are not interested in your disagreements.
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cowardly and strategic: move the focus of blame onto personnel inside the schools, not on
outside officers
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“The children risked their lives to call 911. Their messages were not relayed to the officer in charge at the scene.”
Do we actually know that?
How do we know it?
Call me skeptical.
I hope the DOJ does a thorough investigation of this because much of it makes absolutely zero sense even if you assume extreme incompetence: eg, that the chief had no communications even though he was undoubtedly surrounded by police officers with radios and phones.
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How does it happen that over a period of almost an hour, the 911 calls being made do not get relayed to SOME officer at the scene, who could then tell the police chief about them? This makes no sense.
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And absolutely anyone of those 140+ Officers who converged on Robb Elementary could & should have handed The Public School Cop
Pete Arredondo a radio, a walkie-talkie, a Speakerphone Broadcast of the REPEATED 911 calls coming in from the children. That they did not do any of this, speaks to a deliberate and decades old Uvalde bigotry fueled by cowardice and corruption. It also stinks of a blame game conveniently pinned on the Public School.
Teacher Eva Mireles called her husband Ruben Ruiz to tell him she was dying. He is on the School Police Force. The other officers had to physically restrain him from running inside. By then it probably was too late. The point is, everybody knew and nobody believes Officer Pete was that stupid or that EVIL.
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It might make no sense because everyone involved dropped the ball.
Or it might make no sense simply because it’s not actually true.
We actually have good reason for questioning “information” in this case, because several initial claims about the event turned out to be false.
But only a truly unbiased, independent investigation can reveal which is the case.
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It’s worth noting that, even though “I made extremely poor decisions because I didn’t know” doesn’t sound particularly good, it sounds considerably better than “I made extremely poor decisions despite being informed”
But I’ll reserve judgement until I see the report of an unbiased third party investigation.
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There are two guys who should be held accountable for the total failure of law enforcement:
1. Steve McGraw, DPS Director
2. Pete Arredondo, Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief
They shouldn’t be holding the position they are in. They should be fired. McGraw made up an initial story about the police encounter of shooting, and then changed the story several times when confronted with journalists and media press. He and his spokespeople lied and covered up the gum-up job of police officers. He even falsely accused a local school teacher of removing a rock nearby the back door. That was completely a lie.
Even more troubling is CISD. Its newly appointed chief Arredondo decided to hold up 19 officers outside the school building for + 80mins. Not only that, his department failed to respond to 911 calls from the kid in the classroom. Even worse, his team threatened to arrest parents who were yelling at police officers to get into the building to nab the gunman. One of the parents was handcuffed at the scene. And now, they are giving Arredondo a shelter to cover his ass from public scrutiny he deserves for criminal neglect of duty.
I have no words to describe their ineptitude and disregard of accountability. If Abbott and Paxton didn’t bother investigating the DPS and CISD’s blowjob, they should disqualify themselves as responsible adults to take care of children in Texas.
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Good comments, Ken.
I am not understanding some reports about “negotiating in a hostage situation” & the obvious hold back on parents & law enforcement who did want to storm the room.
There is NO “negotiating” w/an active shooter in a school. There are only dead children & whoever else has gotten in the way.
Even a dumb retired teacher like me understands that.
&, no, NO arming teachers/school personnel…EVER.
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The Uvalde police chief was wrong to assume that the children were dead so no longer at risk and grievously wrong to think that he could negotiate with a mass murderer. Worst of all, the children were pleading for the police to save them, but the chief never got the message.
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The best way to stop a bad guy with a gun is 75.4 million Millennials with a vote. –Jenna Blum
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Just horrible what happened there.
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Yes!!!!
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