The Houston Chronicle reports that the scores of police who responded to the Uvalde massacre did not try to open the doors of the classrooms where the shooter was killing children and teachers until more than an hour had passed. (The story was originally published in the San Antonio Express News.) The story is based on surveillance video.
When you read the story, you will see why Governor Greg Abbott and Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick are trying to block any public release of official investigations until after the state elections in November. More than 100 “good guys with guns”were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun. The more we learn, the more questions are raised about the training, competence, and courage of those who were supposed to protect the students and teachers.
Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally breached the door and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation.
Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source.
All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock automatically when they close and can only be locked or unlocked from the outside with a key, the source said. Police might have assumed the door was locked. Yet the surveillance footage suggests gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 and enter with assault-style rifle — perhaps because the door malfunctioned, the source said.
Another door led to classroom 112.
Ramos entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. that day through an exterior door that a teacher had pulled shut but that didn’t lock automatically as it was supposed to, indicating another malfunction in door locks at the school.
Police finally breached the door to classroom 111 and killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. Whether the door was unlocked the entire time remains under investigation.
Regardless, officers had access the entire time to a “halligan” — a crowbar-like tool that could have opened the door to the classrooms even if it was locked, the source said.
Two minutes after Ramos entered the building, three Uvalde police officers chased him inside. Footage shows that Ramos fired rounds inside classrooms 111 and 112, briefly exited into the hallway and then re-entered through the door, the source said.
Ramos then shot at the officers through the closed door, grazing two of them with shrapnel. The officers retreated to wait for backup and heavy tactical equipment rather than force their way into the classrooms.
When a custodian brought a large key ring, Arredondo said he tried dozens of the keys but none worked.
But Arredondo was not trying those keys in the door to classrooms 111 and 112, where Ramos was holed up, according to the law enforcement source. Rather, he was trying to locate a master key by using the various keys on doors to other classrooms nearby, the source said.
While Arredondo waited for a tactical team to arrive, children and teachers inside the classrooms called 911 at least seven times with desperate pleas for help. One of the two teachers who died, Eva Mireles, called her husband by cellphone after she was wounded and lay dying.
Drip by drip, we are learning the facts about what happened in the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde when a killer barged in. He could have been stopped. Lives could have been saved. But the incompetence of the police leadership caused an unconscionable delay in stopping the killer. Well-established protocols were ignored (stop the shooter asap, even if you don’t have enough men or equipment, stop the killer). As it happened, the police in Uvalde had more men than they needed and all the equipment they needed to stop the killer. But they didn’t.
The head of the state police called the response an abject failure. The pokice had shields and weapons. They did not need a key. They stood around and waited for 77 minutes.
AUSTIN, Texas — The head of the Texas State Police offered a pointed and emphatic rebuke of the police response to a shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, calling it “an abject failure” that ran counter to decades of training.
In his comments before a special State Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children inside a pair of connected classrooms on May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.
But, he said, the on-scene commander “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Mr. McCraw, speaking forcefully, said the same commander had delayed confronting the gunman because he “waited for a key that was never needed.”
Mr. McCraw said that the doors to the classrooms could be locked only from the outside. “There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside,” he said, adding that a teacher had made a request for the locks to be fixed, believing they were broken, before the shooting.
“I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said. “The door was unsecured.”
There were so many police officers present that no one knew who was in charge. It turns out that no one was in charge.
This is an instance where the planning was wholly inadequate.
100+ men with guns were unable to stop one bad guy with a gun.
They had the guns, the shields, and overwhelming force. And for 77 minutes, they stood by.
The Texas Tribune, an independent journal, has been first to report on the news about the Uvalde massacre. In this story, there are new revelations based on video footage from inside the school.
Some of our takeaways include:
The records show a well-equipped group of officers entered the school almost immediately. They pulled back once the shooter began firing inside the classroom. They waited for more than an hour to reengage.
There is no security footage that shows police officers attempted to open the classroom doors that the shooter hid behind. Law enforcement officials are skeptical, the Tribune has confirmed, that the doors were locked or that anyone physically tried to open them.
At least some officers on the scene seemed to believe that Arredondo was in charge inside the school, and at times Arredondo seemed to be issuing orders. That contradicts Arredondo’s assertion that he did not believe he was running the law enforcement response…
The officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary wanted to get inside classrooms 111 and 112 — immediately. One officer’s daughter was inside. Another officer had gotten a call from his wife, a teacher, who told him she was bleeding to death.
Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had opened fire on children and teachers inside the connected classrooms. A Halligan bar — an ax-like forcible-entry tool used by firefighters to get through locked doors — was available. Ballistic shields were arriving on the scene. So was plenty of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.
One such officer, a special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety, had arrived around 20 minutes after the shooting started. He immediately asked: Are there still kids in the classrooms?
“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said.
Another officer answered, “It is unknown at this time.”
The agent shot back, “Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” He added, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”
“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” came the reply.
WASHINGTON — U.S. Sen. John Cornyn was back in Texas Friday without a final bipartisan gun bill and set to address a state GOP party whose members are furious with him for working with Democrats on reforms they say will violate their “God given rights.”
Cornyn left D.C. on Thursday evening, telling reporters that “it’s fish or cut bait at this point” on the legislation after he and other negotiators spent days ironing out details behind the scenes. But they were unable to reach a final agreement as they ran up against a self-imposed deadline to get the bill written this week.
“Indecision and delay jeopardize the likelihood of a bill because you can’t write what is undecided and without a bill there is nothing to vote on,” Cornyn tweeted. “We are still talking and the clock is ticking…”
Meanwhile, committee members hashing out the Texas GOP platform at its biennialconvention in Houston advanced a resolutionThursday night rejecting the gun deal in its current form and rebuking 10 Republicans who have publicly supported it.
“All gun control is a violation of the Second Amendment,” the resolution says.
When it came Senator Cornyn’s turn to speak at the state GOP convention, he was booed repeatedly, amid shouts of “no gun control.”
Clearly, the Texas GOP wants no limits whatever on the right of any individual to buy a gun of any kind, any size, any caliber, no matter whether they are deranged or have a criminal background or are terrorists.
Since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, blame has been shifted to the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, who led a force with six officers. He didn’t have a radio, he didn’t know that children in the locked classrooms were calling 911 for help, he didn’t have a key to the classrooms. More than 100 local, state, and federal law officers converged on the scene, and it was assumed that he was in charge. My own guess, from very far away, was that there was no command structure, and no one knew who was in charge. Nineteen officers congregated outside the connected classrooms where the killer was left alone for more than an hour. The Texas Tribune, a small, independent journal, got the first interview with the school district police chief.
Only a locked classroom door stood between Pete Arredondo and a chance to bring down the gunman. It was sturdily built with a steel jamb, impossible to kick in.
He wanted a key. One goddamn key and he could get through that door to the kids and the teachers. The killer was armed with an AR-15. Arredondo thought he could shoot the gunman himself or at least draw fire while another officer shot back. Without body armor, he assumed he might die.
“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo said.
The chief of police for the Uvalde school district spent more than an hour in the hallway of Robb Elementary School. He called for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside, holding back from the doors for 40 minutes to avoid provoking sprays of gunfire. When keys arrived, he tried dozens of them, but one by one they failed to work.
“Each time I tried a key I was just praying,” Arredondo said. Finally, 77 minutes after the massacre began, officers were able to unlock the door and fatally shoot the gunman.
In his first extended comments since the May 24 massacre, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, Arredondo gave The Texas Tribune an account of what he did inside the school during the attack. He answered questions via a phone interview and in statements provided through his lawyer, George E. Hyde.
Aside from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which did not respond to requests for comment for this article, Arredondo is the only other law enforcement official to publicly tell his account of the police response to the shooting.
Arredondo, 50, insists he took the steps he thought would best protect lives at his hometown school, one he had attended himself as a boy.
“My mind was to get there as fast as possible, eliminate any threats, and protect the students and staff,” Arredondo said. He noted that some 500 students from the school were safely evacuated during the crisis.
Arredondo’s decisions — like those of other law enforcement agencies that responded to the massacre that left 21 dead — are under intense scrutiny as federal and state officials try to decide what went wrong and what might be learned.
Whether the inability of police to quickly enter the classroom prevented the 21 victims — 19 students and two educators — from getting life-saving care is not known, and may never be. There’s evidence, including the fact that a teacher died while being transported to the hospital, that suggests taking down the shooter faster might have made a difference. On the other hand, many of the victims likely died instantly. A pediatrician who attended to the victims described small bodies “pulverized”and “decapitated.” Some children were identifiable only by their clothes and shoes.
In the maelstrom of anguish, outrage and second-guessing that immediately followed the second deadliest school shooting in American history, the time Arredondo and other officers spent outside that door — more than an hour — have become emblems of failure.
As head of the six-member police force responsible for keeping Uvalde schools safe, Arredondo has been singled out for much of the blame, particularly by state officials. They criticized him for failing to take control of the police response and said he made the “wrong decision” that delayed officers from entering the classroom.
Arredondo has faced death threats. News crews have camped outside his home, forcing him to go into hiding. He’s been called cowardly and incompetent.
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Neither accusation is true or fair, he says.
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo said. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”
Arredondo’s explanations don’t fully address all the questions that have been raised. The Tribune spoke to seven law enforcement experts about Arredondo’s description of the police response. All but one said that serious lapses in judgment occurred.
Most strikingly, they said, by running into the school with no key and no radios and failing to take charge of the situation, the chief appears to have contributed to a chaotic approach in which officers deployed inappropriate tactics, adopted a defensive posture, failed to coordinate their actions, and wasted precious time as students and teachers remained trapped in two classrooms with a gunman who continued to fire his rifle.
Hyde, Arredondo’s lawyer, said those criticisms don’t reflect the realities police face when they’re under fire and trying to save lives. Uvalde is a small working-class city of about 15,000 west of San Antonio. Its small band of school police officers doesn’t have the staffing, equipment, training, or experience with mass violence that larger cities might.
His client ran straight toward danger armed with 29 years of law enforcement experience and a Glock 22 handgun. With no body armor and no second thoughts, the chief committed to stop the shooter or die trying.
77 minutes
One of Arredondo’s most consequential decisions was immediate. Within seconds of arriving at the northeast entrance of Robb Elementary around 11:35 a.m., he left his police and campus radios outside the school.
To Arredondo, the choice was logical. An armed killer was loose on the campus of the elementary school. Every second mattered. He wanted both hands free to hold his gun, ready to aim and fire quickly and accurately if he encountered the gunman.
Arredondo provided the following account of how the incident unfolded in a phone interview, in written answers, and in explanations passed through his lawyer.
He said he didn’t speak out sooner because he didn’t want to compound the community’s grief or cast blame at others.
Thinking he was the first officer to arrive and wanting to waste no time, Arredondo believed that carrying the radios would slow him down. One had a whiplike antenna that would hit him as he ran. The other had a clip that Arredondo knew would cause it to fall off his tactical belt during a long run.
Arredondo said he knew from experience that the radios did not work in some school buildings.
But that decision also meant that for the rest of the ordeal, he was not in radio contact with the scores of other officers from at least five agencies that swarmed the scene.
Almost immediately, Arredondo teamed up with a Uvalde police officer and began checking classrooms, looking for the gunman.
As they moved to the west side of the campus, a teacher pointed them to the wing the gunman had entered. As Arredondo and the Uvalde police officer ran toward it, they heard a “great deal of rounds” fired off inside. Arredondo believes that was the moment the gunman first entered adjoining classrooms 111 and 112 and started firing on the children with an AR-15 rifle.
Arredondo and the Uvalde officer entered the building’s south side and saw another group of Uvalde police officers entering from the north.
Arredondo checked to see if the door on the right, room 111, would open. Another officer tried room 112. Both doors were locked.
Arredondo remembers the gunman fired a burst of shots from inside the classroom, grazing the police officers approaching from the north. Some of the bullets pierced the classroom door, and others went through the classroom wall and lodged in the wall adjacent to the hallway, where there were other classrooms. The officers on the north end of the hallway retreated after being shot, but they weren’t seriously injured and returned shortly after to try to contain the gunman.
Because the gunman was already inside the locked classroom, some of the measures meant to protect teachers and students in mass shooting situations worked against police trying to gain entry.
Arredondo described the classroom door as reinforced with a hefty steel jamb, designed to keep an attacker on the outside from forcing their way in. But with the gunman inside the room, that took away officers’ ability to immediately kick in the door and confront the shooter.
Arredondo believed the situation had changed from that of an active shooter, to a gunman who had barricaded himself in a classroom with potential other victims.
Texas Department of Public Safety officials and news outlets have reported that the shooter fired his gun at least two more times as police waited in the hallway outside the classrooms for more than an hour. And DPS officials have said dispatchers were relaying information about 911 calls coming from children and teachers in the classrooms, begging the police for help.
Arredondo said he was not aware of the 911 callsbecause he did not have his radio and no one in the hallway relayed that information to him. Arredondo and the other officers in the hallway took great pains to remain quiet. Arredondo said they had no radio communications — and even if they’d had radios, his lawyer said, they would have turned them off in the hallway to avoid giving away their location. Instead, they passed information in whispers for fear of drawing another round of gunfire if the shooter heard them.
Finding no way to enter the room, Arredondo called police dispatch from his cellphone and asked for a SWAT team, snipers and extrication tools, like a fire hook, to open the door.
Arredondo remained in the hallway for the rest of the ordeal, waiting for a way to get into the room, and prepared to shoot the gunman if he tried to exit the classroom.
Arredondo assumed that some other officer or official had taken control of the larger response. He took on the role of a front-line responder.
He said he never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building. DPS officials have described Arredondo as the incident commander and said Arredondo made the call to stand down and treat the incident as a “barricaded suspect,” which halted the attempt to enter the room and take down the shooter. “I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo said. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”
Officers in the hallway had few options. At some point, Arredondo tried to talk to the gunman through the walls in an effort to establish a rapport, but the gunman did not respond.
With the gunman still firing sporadically, Arredondo realized that children and teachers in adjacent rooms remained in danger if the gunman started shooting through the walls.
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“The ammunition was penetrating the walls at that point,” Arredondo said. “We’ve got him cornered, we’re unable to get to him. You realize you need to evacuate those classrooms while we figured out a way to get in.”
Lights in the classrooms had also been turned off, another routine lockdown measure that worked against the police. With little visibility into the classroom, they were unable to pinpoint the gunman’s location or to determine whether the children and teachers were alive.
Arredondo told officers to start breaking windows from outside other classrooms and evacuating those children and teachers. He wanted to avoid having students coming into the hallway, where he feared too much noise would attract the gunman’s attention.
While other officers outside the school evacuated children, Arredondo and the officers in the hallway held their position and waited for the tools to open the classroom and confront the gunman.
At one point, a Uvalde police officer noticed Arredondo was not wearing body armor. Worried for the chief’s safety, the Uvalde officer offered to cover for Arredondo while he ran out of the building to get it.
“I’ll be very frank. He said, ‘Fuck you. I’m not leaving this hallway,’” Hyde recounted. “He wasn’t going to leave without those kids.”
Without any way to get into the classroom, officers in the hallway waited desperately for a way to secure entry and did the best they could to otherwise advance their goal of saving lives.
“It’s not that someone said stand down,” Hyde said. “It was ‘Right now, we can’t get in until we get the tools. So we’re going to do what we can do to save lives.’ And what was that? It was to evacuate the students and the parents and the teachers out of the rooms.”
Tools that might have been useful in breaking through the door never materialized, but Arredondo had also asked for keys that could open the door. Unlike some other school district police departments, Uvalde CISD officers don’t carry master keys to the schools they visit. Instead, they request them from an available staff member when they’re needed.
Robb Elementary did not have a modern system of locks and access control. “You’re talking about a key ring that’s got to weigh 10 pounds,” Hyde said.
Eventually, a janitor provided six keys. Arredondo tried each on a door adjacent to the room where the gunman was, but it didn’t open.
Later, another key ring with between 20 and 30 keys was brought to Arredondo.
“I was praying one of them was going to open up the door each time I tried a key,” Arredondo said in an interview.
None did.
Eventually, the officers on the north side of the hallway called Arredondo’s cellphone and told him they had gotten a key that could open the door.
The officers on the north side of the hallway formed a group of mixed law enforcement agencies, including U.S. Border Patrol, to enter the classroom and take down the shooter, Arredondo said.
Ten days after the shooting, The New York Times reported that a group of U.S. Border Patrol agents ignored a directive spoken into their earpieces not to enter the room. The Times has since reported that Arredondo did not object when the team entered the room.
Hyde said if a directive delaying entry was issued, it did not come from Arredondo, but the Times reported that someone was issuing orders at the scene. Hyde said he did not know who that person was. The Border Patrol declined to comment.
At 12:50 p.m., as the officers entered the classroom, Arredondo held his position near the south classroom door in the hallway, in case the gunman tried to run out that door.
At last, the shooter, Salvador Ramos, 18, was brought down. A harrowing standoff rapidly became an effort to find the wounded and count the dead.
Once the officers cleared the room, Border Patrol agents trained to render emergency medical service assessed the wounded. Arredondo and other officers formed a line to help pass the injured children out of the hallway and to emergency medical care.
Expert analysis
A police officer intentionally ditching his radio while answering a call? “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life,” said Steve Ijames, a police tactics expert and former assistant police chief of Springfield, Missouri.
The discarded radio, the missing key and the apparent lack of an incident commander are some of questions raised by experts about the response of Arredondo and the various agencies involved.
Officers are trained never to abandon their radios, their primary communication tool during an emergency, said Ijames. That Arredondo did so the moment he arrived on scene is inexplicable, he said.
Ijames added that it is “inconceivable” that Arredondo’s officers did not have a plan to access any room or building on campus at any moment, given that the school district makes up the entirety of the tiny force’s jurisdiction.
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The experts, which included active-shooting researchers and retired law enforcement personnel, homed in on the moment officers entered the school and found the doors to rooms 111 and 112 locked. Three said this moment afforded Arredondo a chance to step back, regroup and work with other officers to devise a new strategy.
“It takes having someone who has the wherewithal to come up with a quick, tactical plan and executing it,” said former Seguin police Chief Terry Nichols. “It may not be the best plan, but a plan executed vigorously is better than the best unexecuted plan in the world.”
Nichols, who teaches classes on active-shooter responses, said he understands the instinct for command staff to want to confront a gunman themselves. But he said commanders must not lose focus of their role in an emergency.
“We have to — as leaders, especially as a chief of police — step back and allow our men and women to go do what they do, and use our training and experience where they’re needed, to command and control a chaotic situation,” Nichols said.
Active-shooter protocols developed after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School, where a slow police response delayed medical care that could have saved several victims, train police to confront shooters immediately, without waiting for backup and without regard for their personal safety. An active-shooting training that Uvalde school district police attended in March stressed these tactics, warning that responders likely would be required to place themselves in harm’s way.
“The training that police officers have received for more than a decade mandates that when shots are fired in an active-shooter situation, officers or an officer needs to continue through whatever obstacles they face to get to the shooter, period,” said Katherine Schweit, a retired FBI agent who co-wrote the bureau’s foundational research on mass shootings. “If that means they go through walls, or go around the back through windows, or through an adjoining classroom, they do that.”
Bruce Ure, a former Victoria police chief, said drawing conclusions about police conduct during the shooting is premature since the authorities have not completed their investigations. He said he believes Arredondo acted reasonably given the circumstances he faced.
Ure disagreed that Arredondo should have retreated into a command role once other officers arrived, since most active-shooter events last mere minutes. He argued that no amount of ad-hoc planning outside would have changed the outcome of the massacre once the shooter got inside the classrooms.
He said attempting to breach windows or open classroom doors by force were unrealistic options that would have exposed police and children to potentially fatal gunfire with little chance of success. Officers’ only choice, he said, was to wait to find a key, which he agreed should not have taken so long.
Hyde said attempting to enter through windows would have “guaranteed all the children in the rooms would be killed” along with several officers. He said this “reckless and ineffective” action, when police could not see where the shooter was, would have made officers easy targets to be picked off at will.
Ure, who as an attendee was wounded in the hand during the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting that killed 60 people, acknowledged the post-Columbine wisdom that immediately confronting shooters is paramount. But he said the scene inside Robb Elementary presented a “perfect storm” of an active shooter barricaded with hostages.
“There’s no manual for this type of scenario,” Ure said. “If people need to be held appropriately accountable, then so be it. But I think the lynch-mob mentality right now isn’t serving any purpose, and it’s borderline reckless.”
Questions over command
The day after the shooting, Arredondo and other local officials stood behind Gov. Greg Abbott and DPS Director Steve McCraw as they held their first major news conference to address the slaughter.
Abbott lauded law enforcement agencies for their “amazing courage” and said the actions of police officers were the reason the shooting was “not worse.” McCraw said a school resource officer had “engaged” the shooter outside the building but was unable to stop him from entering.
To Arredondo, that information did not ring true. Arredondo turned to a DPS official, whom he declined to identify, and asked why state officials had been given inaccurate information.
In a stunning reversal at a news conference the next day, the DPS regional director for the area, Victor Escalon, retracted McCraw’s initial claim and said the gunman “was not confronted by anybody” before entering the school.
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At a third news conference the following afternoon, Abbott said he was “livid” about being “misled” about the police response to the shooting. He said his incorrect remarks were merely a recitation of what officers had told him.
Hyde said the inaccurate information did not come from Arredondo, who had briefed state and law enforcement officials about the shooting before the first press conference. Abbott on Wednesday declined to identify who had misled him, saying only that the bad information had come from “public officials.”
McCraw also told reporters that Arredondo, whom he identified by his position rather than his name, treated the gunman as a “barricaded suspect” rather than an active shooter, which McCraw deemed a mistake. In the news conference, McCraw referred to Arredondo as the shooting’s “incident commander.”
Hyde said Arredondo did not issue any orders to other law enforcement agencies and had no knowledge that they considered him the incident commander.
The National Incident Management System, which guides all levels of government on how to respond to mass emergency events, says that the first person on scene is the incident commander. That incident commander remains in that charge until they relinquish it or are incapacitated.
Hyde acknowledged those guidelines but said Arredondo’s initial response to the shooting was not that of an incident commander, but of a first responder.
“Once he became engaged, intimately involved on the front line of this case, he is one of those that is in the best position to continue to resolve the incident at that time,” Hyde said. “So while it’s easy to identify him as the incident commander because of that NIMS process, in practicality, you see here he was not in the capacity to be able to run this entire organization.”
With no radio and no way to receive up-to-date information about what was happening outside of the hallway, Hyde said, another one of the local, state and federal agencies that arrived at the scene should have taken over command.
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Nichols, the former Seguin police chief, dismissed the idea that another officer would seamlessly adopt the incident commander role simply because Arredondo never did. He said decisive commanders are especially important when multiple agencies respond to an incident and are unsure how to work together.
“You know the facility. You’re the most intimately knowledgeable about this,” Nichols said of Arredondo. “Take command and set what your priorities need to be, right now.”
On May 31, officials with DPS, which is investigating the Uvalde shooting, told news outlets that Arredondo was no longer cooperating with the agency. The agency’s investigative unit, the Texas Rangers, wanted to continue talking with the police chief, but he had not responded to the agency’s request for two days, DPS officials said.
Hyde said Arredondo participated in multiple interviews with DPS in the days following the shooting, including a law enforcement debriefing the day of the attack and a videotaped debriefing with DPS analysts and the FBI the day after.
He’d also briefed the governor and other state officials and had multiple follow-up calls with DPS for its investigation.
But after McCraw said at a press conference on May 27 that Arredondo made the “wrong decision,” the police chief “no longer participated in the investigation to avoid media interference,” Hyde said.
The Rangers had asked Arredondo to come in for another interview, but he told investigators he could not do it on the day they asked because he was covering shifts for his officers, Hyde said.
“At no time did he communicate his unwillingness to cooperate with the investigation,” Hyde said. “His phone was flooded with calls and messages from numbers he didn’t recognize, and it’s possible he missed calls from DPS but still maintained daily interaction by phone with DPS assisting with logistics as requested.”
Hyde said Arredondo is open to cooperating with the Rangers investigation but would like to see a transcript of his previous comments.
“That’s a fair thing to ask for before he has to then discuss it again because, as time goes by, all the information that he hears, it’s hard to keep straight,” Hyde said.
Children visited the memorial at Robb Elementary on May 28. Hundreds of people waited in line holding flowers and one another to pay their respects there. Credit: Kaylee Greenlee Beal for The Texas Tribune
“They loved those kids”
When the gunman was dead, police had another grim task: moving the tiny bodies of injured children out of the room and getting them emergency medical care as soon as possible.
A line was formed to gently but quickly move them out. Each child passed through Arredondo’s arms.
Later that night, Arredondo went to the Uvalde civic center, where families waited desperately for news that their loved ones had survived, or had at worst been taken to the hospital for treatment.
For Arredondo, his lawyer said, telling families that “no additional kids were coming out of the school alive was the toughest part of his career.”
The chaotic law enforcement response to the shooting by local, state and federal agencies is under investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice and the Texas Department of Public Safety. It is the subject of an investigative committee of the Texas Legislature and will be the source of months of scrutiny by public officials, survivors and the families of the deceased. Survivors and the families of victims have started contacting lawyers for potential legal action.
Arredondo’s role will be central to all of those probes.
For now, he is avoiding the public eye, having left his home temporarily because it is under constant watch by news reporters.
But he’s also been unable to mourn with his community.
Arredondo grew up in the community and attended Robb Elementary as a boy. He started his career at the Uvalde Police Department and spent 16 years there before moving to Laredo for work.
He returned to his hometown in 2020 to head up the school district’s police department. He and his police officers loved high-fiving the schoolchildren on his visits to the schools, Hyde said.
“It was the highlight of his days,” Hyde said. “They loved those kids.”
Arredondo’s ties to the shooting are also familial. One of the teachers killed by the gunman, Irma Garcia, was married to Arredondo’s second cousin, Joe Garcia. Garcia died suddenly two days after his wife’s death.
Arredondo grew up with Joe Garcia and went to school with him. But when the funeral services started, Arredondo said he opted against attending because he didn’t want his presence to distract from the Garcias’ grieving loved ones.
His small police department is also suffering.
Eva Mireles, another teacher killed by the gunman, was married to Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police officer Ruben Ruiz.
“They lost a person that they consider family,” Hyde said.
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To relieve his grieving officers, Arredondo has picked up extra shifts at the police department.
And he’s received death threats and negative messages from people he does not know.
“Those are people who just don’t know the whole story that are making their assumptions on what they’re hearing or reading. That’s been difficult,” he said. “The police in Uvalde, we’re like your family, your brothers and sisters. We help each other out at any cost, and we’re used to helping out the community, period, because that’s what most public servants are about.”
Arredondo said he remains proud of his response and that of his other officers that day. He believes they saved lives. He also believes that fate brought him back home for a reason.
“No one in my profession wants to ever be in anything like this,” Arredondo said. “But being raised here in Uvalde, I was proud to be here when this happened. I feel like I came back home for a reason, and this might possibly be one of the main reasons why I came back home. We’re going to keep on protecting our community at whatever cost.”
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WASHINGTON — Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old in fourth grade who survived the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, said she covered herself in another student’s blood to trick the shooter into thinking she was already dead.
Cerrillo, wearing a sunflower tank top and her hair pulled back into a ponytail, spoke softly as she answered questions for 2 minutes on video about what she endured that day in the classroom, just a few weeks after she witnessed her friends and teacher die in a deadly school shooting.
“He shot my teacher and told my teacher good night and shot her in the head,” she said in the prerecorded video. “And then he shot some of my classmates and the white board.”
Cerrillo was the youngest of a small group of Uvalde survivors and family members who testified at a House hearing Wednesday about the devastation wrought by gun violence in their communities.
On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman armed with two assault rifles entered the school building killing 19 children and two teachers and injuring 17 others.
That day Cerrillo said she and her classmates were watching a movie. Her teacher received an email and then got up to lock the door — that’s when made eye contact with the gunman in the hallway, Cerrillo said.
At that point, the teacher told the students to “go hide.” Cerrillo hid behind her teacher’s desk among the backpacks. The shooter then shot “the little window,” presumably part of the door to the hallway. She said the gunman entered a neighboring classroom and was able to access her classroom through an adjoining door. That’s when he started shooting.
One of the students who was shot, a friend of hers, was next to her among the backpacks.
“I thought [the gunman] was going to come back to the room, so I grabbed the blood and I put it all over me,” she said.
She said she “stayed quiet” and then she grabbed her teacher’s phone and called 911.
“I told [the operator] that we need help and to send the police [to my] classroom,” she said.
Cerrillo added that she did not feel safe in school and did not “want it to happen again.” An off-camera questioner asked if she thought a shooting like this will happen again and Cerrillo affirmatively nodded.
Cerrillo was calm and quiet. She didn’t cry. But some of the adults from Uvalde who testified wept before the committee, including her father, Miguel Cerrillo, who traveled to Washington to testify in person.
“I come because I could have lost my baby girl, but she’s not the same baby girl I used to play with,” he said, adding that “schools are not safe anymore.”
Kimberly Rubio, a newspaper reporter and the mother of 10-year-old Lexi Rubio, who died that day, described dropping her children off at the school and attending end-of-school-year awards ceremonies that morning.
“I left my daughter at that school and that decision will haunt me for the rest of my life,” she said, as she testified in a video recording sitting next to her stone-faced husband, Felix Rubio.
She called for a ban on assault rifles, high-capacity magazines, raising the age to purchase certain guns, keeping guns out of the hands of people deemed to be a risk to themselves or others, stronger background checks and to repeal gun manufacturers’ immunity from liability.
“We understand for some reason to some people, to people with money, to people who fund political campaigns, that guns are more important than children,” Rubio said. “So at this moment we ask for progress.”
Dr. Roy Guerrero, a pediatrician, Uvalde native and graduate of Robb Elementary School, described in the hearing room his encounter with the bodies of two deceased children that arrived at his hospital.
The children’s bodies were “pulverized,” “decapitated” and “ripped apart.” The bullets did so much damage to their bodies that the “only clue as to their identities was a blood-splattered cartoon clothes still clinging to them, clinging for life and finding none.”
He added that he and other hospital personnel braced that day for an onslaught of carnage, but it never came because so many of the victims were already dead.
As Salvador Ramos approached Room 112 in Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, the teacher and her students heard gunshots.
She told the fourth-graders to get down on the floor or under their desks, and she went to the door to make sure it was locked. Then Ramos fired at the door handle. Rounds from his assault-style rifle shattered the door window and struck the teacher, fatally injuring her as she tried to protect her kids.
“It’s time to die,” Ramos declared as he entered the classroom. “You guys are mine.”
Ramos at one point asked if anyone needed help, and when one child stood up, he shot him.
These details of the first minutes of the May 24 rampage are from a 10-year-old boy who was in the classroom and who has described the scene to his mother and to law enforcement officials.
“Creepy music” blared from Ramos’ phone as the 18-year-old high school dropout opened fired on the class, the boy recalled. His mother, Corina Camacho, said shrapnel struck her son in the leg.
Then Ramos walked to the connected classroom next door, Room 111, and opened fire again.
“He was like going back and forth, playing music,” the mother told the San Antonio Express-News.
The terror continued for over an hour. It would be more than 75 minutes after the first 911 calls before members of a Border Patrol tactical unit went into the classrooms and killed Ramos. By then, 19 students and two teachers — Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia — were dead. Seventeen other people were injured. It isn’t clear which teacher was killed when Ramos shot through the door.
The Express-News’ account of the early minutes of the rampage is based on interviews with law enforcement sources, state lawmakers, Corina Camacho and civil lawyers who represent surviving children and teachers.
Camacho’s son told his story to the FBI recently. He is one of several witnesses who were interviewed by the FBI, the Texas Rangers or the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The information from the lawyers and law enforcement sources helps shed light on the tragedy and the disastrous police response that followed. Key details remain unknown to investigators as they try to reconcile incomplete or contradictory statements from witnesses and law enforcement officers.
The massacre in the rural town of more than 15,000 is the second-worst mass shooting at a school, after the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which killed 26. President Joe Biden visited Uvalde last week to comfort the families, and in a televised speech days later, he renewed calls for tighter gun restrictions, including a ban on assault-style rifles.
Frozen with fear
The morning of Tuesday, May 24, began like any day near the end of the school year. Some classes at Robb Elementary had just come in from recess. Others had just let out for lunch. Summer break would begin in two days.
Teacher Emilia Marin had propped open a door with a rock to help a co-worker bring in food for an end-of-the-year party from a car in the school parking lot. Then Marin saw a truck crash outside the school’s perimeter fence, said her lawyer, Don Flanary.
Marin went back inside the school to get her phone and report the crash to 911.
When she came back outside, still on the phone, she saw her co-worker flee and heard people at a funeral home across the street yell, “He’s got a gun!”
Marin saw Ramos jump over a fence. She kicked the rock away, pulled the door shut and ran into the school. She huddled under a counter in a classroom.
She heard gunshots, first outdoors, then inside the school. Her 911 call dropped. She grabbed chairs and boxes to hide behind. Frozen with fear, she tried to be still.
Marin received a text from her daughter asking if she was safe.
“There’s a shooter,” Marin typed back. “He’s shooting. He’s in here.”
Then Ramos approached Room 112.
Camacho and one of her lawyers, Stephanie Sherman, said her son described how Ramos shot his way into the classroom and how police at one point opened the door and retreated after he fired at them. Law enforcement sources disputed the latter part of the boy’s account, saying no officer went into the classroom during the initial response.
The officers “were all in the hallway, and when shots were fired, they all ran back to another hallway or outside,” one source told the Express-News.
Another lawyer for the family, Shawn Brown, said the boy related different details to his grandfather. He told the grandfather that his teacher shielded him with her body as he lay on the floor and that Ramos fired at her, killing her and striking him in the leg.
Brown also said the boy told his grandfather that Ramos, after pacing from one room to the other, asked if anyone needed help — acting in the guise of a police officer.
“When one kid stood up, he shot him with the AK,” Brown said, quoting the grandfather. “That may be the reason he thought an officer had come in.”
Investigators are trying to unravel discrepancies in the accounts provided by the traumatized children. Camacho’s son’s account differs somewhat from what other children have told investigators. The inconsistencies could reflect differing vantage points — whether the children were lying facedown or were facing away from Ramos.
Some saw most of the massacre unfold. As their memories return, the children have revealed progressively more and sometimes contradictory details to investigators and family members.
“The kids’ interviews, they’re bad,” said one law enforcement source, referring to the graphic details. “I can’t even imagine the nightmare … that those kids went through.”
Brown said the differing versions simply reflect trauma.
“It’s because of the shock and because of the stress that they went through,” Brown said. “They’re remembering bits and pieces as they go, and it may not be in sequential order. It was such a traumatic experience that their brains are trying to block it out.”
The official account of what happened inside the school has not been fully disclosed because of a criminal investigation by the Texas Rangers, assisted by the FBI, that is being overseen by Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee…
First on the scene
According to law enforcement sources, Uvalde police and Uvalde CISD officers were among the first to arrive. Because it was school district property, responding officers deferred to Arredondo.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez of San Antonio, whose district includes Uvalde, said last week that Arredondo was not aware of 911 calls from students inside the classroom, who were begging to be rescued.
Arredondo’s six-officer department does not have its own radio communications system. The 911 calls were routed to the Uvalde Police Department, Gutierrez said. Why Arredondo would not have known about the desperate calls from the students is unclear, given that numerous officers equipped with radios were at the scene.
One source said interviews with officers indicated that Arredondo did not have a police radio with him. Another law enforcement source said security video from the school confirms Arredondo did not have a radio.
“He made some phone calls to Uvalde PD” to get information and may have missed the 911 calls from the students, a source said.
Also, the fortified, concrete walls of the school interfered with reception of the radios carried by other officers, law enforcement sources said.
At one point, 19 officers were in a hallway outside the classrooms where Ramos had cornered his terrified victims.
“There’s not as much radio traffic as you would think there would be,” one law enforcement source said. “Those inside may not have heard the kids’ 911 calls.”
Because some officers were off-duty or rushed in, they didn’t have body cameras or did not set them to record, further complicating matters for investigators.
Arredondo appears to have been inside the building with some school police officers and Uvalde police officers. Investigators have collected reports from some first responders indicating that Arredondo tried early on to negotiate with the gunman by cellphone, but Ramos did not answer.
As officers planned strategy in the hallway, Arredondo believed the victims were all dead and Ramos had barricaded himself, investigators said. He held officers back to wait for reinforcements and specialized equipment, and the officers on the scene stood down, according to sources.
DPS Director Steve McCraw has said there was “no excuse” for that decision and that the 19 officers should have stormed in and killed Ramos early on to end the bloodshed and give aid to the wounded.
Outside, other officers cordoned off the school and barred agitated parents from going inside.
While the school was under attack, Mireles, one of the fourth-grade teachers who was killed, called her husband, Ruben Ruiz. He is a school district police officer, and he rushed to the scene, Uvalde County Judge Bill Mitchell said. Like the students’ parents, he was prohibited from entering the building.
Mireles and Ruiz talked by phone as the fatally wounded teacher took her last breaths.
“She’s in the classroom and he’s outside. It’s terrifying,” Mitchell told reporters after being briefed by Uvalde County sheriff’s deputies who were at the scene.
Radio traffic shows that officers from several federal law enforcement agencies responded, including the Drug Enforcement Administration and the U.S. Marshals Service.
Ultimately, members of a Border Patrol tactical unit shot Ramos, who apparently was locked inside one of the classrooms.
Brown, the lawyer for the family of the 10-year-old boy, said the child described how he and a couple of other students got up when they were rescued.
“He said he saw the other kids on the floor,” Brown said, choking back emotion. “He told the grandfather, ‘I got up. My friends didn’t.’”
‘Really bad’ for police
Why the outer door Ramos used to get into the school didn’t lock when the teacher pulled it shut is unknown. One law enforcement source said officials plan to remove that door and the classroom doors for inspection.
A team from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University went to the school this past week to conduct an assessment of what happened.
The U.S. Justice Department is carrying out a separate review of the police response, at the request of Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr.
“The report is not going to be good,” one source said. “This is really bad for law enforcement.”
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.
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.
I was born in Uvalde, Tex., lived there recently and love its complex history and people. Like most, I’ve been struggling under the weight of grief to understand the violence that left 19 children, two teachers and a young killer dead last week. But I’m not surprised.
First, you would be challenged to find a more heavily armed place in the United States than Uvalde. It’s a town where the love of guns overwhelms any notion of common-sense regulations, and the minority White ruling class places its right-wing Republican ideology above the safety of its most vulnerable citizens — its impoverished and its children, most of whom are Hispanic.
Second, at news of the shooting, I was struck to hear the words “Robb Elementary” because I knew of its centrality to the struggle in Uvalde over the past half-century to desegregate its schools. Robb sits in the city’s southwest quadrant. So I knew the victims of the shooting would largely be Hispanic. They have been locked into that school for decades. In Uvalde, simply put, everything north of Highway 90 is primarily White Republican, and everything south is mostly Hispanic Democrat. The city has about 15,000 residents; more than 80 percent identify as Hispanic or Latino.
Most of Uvalde’s political leadership and the heads of the largest employers are White. At the center of town on the courthouse grounds, you’ll find a monument to Jefferson Davis, the Confederate president — installed when the Ku Klux Klan dominated Uvalde politics. (Some of us tried to get the monument removed after the murder of George Floyd, but that’s a story for another day.)
In the run-up to the 2022 primaries and election, they made a big show of “protecting the children.”
They obsessed about the danger of transgender children, even insisting on criminalizing parents’ efforts to get medical help for their children. They obsessed about teachers allegedly “grooming” children for lives of deviant sexual behavior. They obsessed about “obscene” books that might normalize sexual behavior they—these men of high righteousness— deplored. They obsessed about “critical race theory” and demanded the banning of books that taught children about racism, whether past or present, or anything about human sexuality.
Yes, the children of Texas would be protected from any teaching about race or sexuality.
But they would not be physically protected. They would not be protected from an 18-year-old with two AR15s.
When the bad man with a powerful weapon came into their classroom, the children were left to fend for themselves while 19 police officers stood in the hallway. The bad man killed their teachers. He killed children. Little girls called 911 and begged for help. One said 8 or 9 children were still alive. But the police remained in the hallway.
The parents in the schoolyard pleaded with the police to save their children, but the police had their instructions: keep the parents away.
Almost an hour passed before the police broke into the classroom and shot the murderer.
The Governor called a press conference , where he commended the police for their courage and bravery. He commended the men who waited in the hallway for almost an hour, while the children were dying, one after another.
Hooks writes:
Texas, a friend used to say, is hard on women and little things. That would come to mind over the years when reporting seemed to bear it out. In 2015, I watched a foster mother testify in court, via telephone from her daughter’s hospital bedside, that state cuts to the Medicaid acute therapy program were having disastrous consequences for her child’s incurable, debilitating genetic disorder. In 2021, an eleven-year-old boy in Conroe suffocated from carbon monoxide poisoning after seeing snow for the first time, as his family tried to keep their home warm after the collapse of a horribly mismanaged electrical grid. And then there were the perennial horror stories from the state’s spike-pit child welfare system—a three-year-old found dead, bleeding from the ears, after his day care repeatedly warned state agents about signs of abuse by his foster parents; a teenage girl who killed herself the moment she could despite orders that she was never to be left alone; and countless others who survive through the heavy prescription of psychotropic meds before being kicked out to the streets at the age of eighteen.
Each revelation of new misery brings a new wave of revulsion, but—I hate to say this—as you learn more about how the social safety net works in Texas, the revulsion starts to fade, and it becomes a dull undercurrent to an awareness of the world instead of something sharp that pokes through. As it fades, so comes the realization that it has faded in the same way for those in power—and that nothing gets fixed because leaders have been immunized from caring to an even greater degree. The grid remains unsteady; children in foster care still get abused. Legislators make a show of passing partial, temporary fixes and resist looking at problems head-on. The Texas Legislature, with all its self-regard and jocularity and pride in itself as an institution, turns out to be suffused with a very dull and banal kind of evil.
On Tuesday, though, something poked through. For me, it wasn’t the knowledge that there had been another school shooting. Who could be surprised by that? Every detail was familiar. A once-bullied eighteen-year-old, two AR-15s, 22 dead, and 19 injured. The thing that shocked was the pictures of the dead when they lived. They were so little! Do you remember what it was like to have a body that small? A round fired by an AR-15 at close range enters the human body at three times the speed as those fired by a handgun, disintegrating and liquefying bones and organs around it. “It’s like a grenade goes off in there,” one trauma surgeon told Wired. Parents had to submit DNA samples so their kids could be accurately identified.
This spectacular violence, it sometimes feels, has not left much of us. At his initial press conference, Governor Greg Abbott wore his traditional white disaster-response shirt and offered details of the massacre as if reading a weather report. At a press conference the next day, where the governor sat alongside Texas senator Ted Cruz and Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick, Abbott told Texans that the disaster “could have been worse,” and the primary flash of anger shown by elected officials came when Beto O’Rourke, who appeared in the crowd, tried to talk over them.
Appearing on Newsmax TV the day of the shooting, state attorney general Ken Paxton suggested that more armed guards at schools would help, “because it’s not going to be the last time.” Can you believe that, as a response from one of the most powerful elected officials in the state to a massacre of fourth graders? “It’s not going to be the last time.” There used to be at least a perfunctory mourning period, some hugs given in front of cameras, before those in power turned to one another other and shrugged. But in truth, leaders are only handling this the way they think about the foster care system they oversee, and every other death trap run by the state. The revulsion dulls, the novelty fades, and it becomes normal.
The shooting took place on the day of the Texas primary runoff. The composition of the Legislature and the rest of state government for the next two and a half years was set that night, barring extraordinary circumstances, by the conclusion of the Republican primary, which in Texas is more influential than the general election. Paxton, who had shrugged off the Uvalde shooting on Newsmax while wearing a campaign T-shirt, won renomination and almost certainly a third term in office.
It is a grotesque and cruel irony that the Republican primary this year, and several years of political activity before it, have been dominated by an all-consuming and comically misdirected argument about the “protection” of children and by a war on public schools. There was essentially no policy contested in the GOP primary that could affect the practical and economic circumstances of all Texans. (There rarely is.) There was, however, ceaseless argument about the well-being of children, their morals, their internal lives.
The most acute panic was over transgender children. In February, Paxton’s office issued a formal opinion holding that the prescription of puberty blockers to transgender children represented “child abuse.” Shortly after, Abbott tasked the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services, an overworked and underfunded agency he had overseen for close to eight years, with investigating the families of transgender children for child abuse.
The more widespread crisis concerned books. The panic was conjured by parents and elected officials in equal measure. The first target was books with “divisive” material about race. Then, elected officials began to panicabout “pornography” in schools, a category that mostly included literature featuring queer characters and sexuality. Lawmakers proposed lists of books to be banned. In November, Abbott ordered the Texas Education Agency to investigate cases of “obscene material” in public schools and prosecute those responsible “to the fullest extent of the law,” because, as he wrote, it had to be a top priority to “protect” Texas students.
Public school teachers and children’s librarians—two professions that offer a strongly beneficial service to society for little pay—became villains for parents and candidates alike. They were called “groomers” and pedophiles on social media. In a press release, Abbott called for criminal charges to be brought if librarians were found to have put “pornography” in front of children. In Granbury, southwest of Fort Worth, half a year later, one woman lodged a criminal complaint against the librarians of Hood County ISD, prompting a police investigation. At a subsequent school board meeting, she condemned the fact that a committee brought together to review troublesome books had “too many” librarians instead of “people with good moral standards.”
The deterioration spread. A record number of public school teachers, already weary from the pandemic and now faced with a sort of siege, started quitting en masse—and forfeiting their licenses, indicating they probably wouldn’t come back. “I’m tired of getting punched. It shouldn’t be like this,” ninth grade math teacher Gloria Ogboaloh told Texas Monthly. As more teachers left, the quality of life for remaining educators got worse. Then, just four months after ordering that libraries be investigated, Abbott ordered the TEA to create a task force to investigate why so many teachers were quitting.
Hooks goes on to describe politicians who are liars, braggarts, cruel, indifferent to the safety of children, callous. How long can they continue to fool people with their charade and their fake concern? They don’t care about thechildren
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