It was a horrific scene in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School. Salvador Rolando Ramos entered the school and murdered 19 students and two teachers. Ramos had shot his grandmother before this senseless rampage, where he was able to purchase an AR-15 rifle despite listing his grandparents’ address on the ATF’s 4473 form. Ramos’ grandfather is a convicted felon, and he can’t be near firearms, a point he told ABC News in the aftermath of this attack. Now, after months of investigating, the Department of Justice has their review of the shooting, and it’s a brutal assessment for all responding parties involved.
At first, you’d thought that police and other first responders reacted to this incident with professionalism and urgency. Neither turned out to be the case. Texas police changed their narrative at least a dozen times. The Uvalde police chief, Pete Arredondo, who was also the incident commander, ditched his radio when responding to the shooting, which prevented a line of communication that was essential in coordinating a proper response.
The DOJ review touches upon what over investigations from the media and those by the state; Texas has already adopted some of the recommendations by the Justice Department, but its contents are a jarring reminder that not every police department is adequately trained for these situations, despite what happened at Columbine in 1999.
The individuals at the top of the command structure had no active shooter training. Police officers were reportedly afraid to confront the shooter due to having an AR-15 rifle. The lack of communication prevented first responders from implementing life-saving procedures—no one knew who was in charge, which led to instances where gunshot victims were loaded into buses instead of ambulances. Two students and a teacher, who were discovered to have a pulse, later died due to this oversight.
The decision to treat this shooting as a “barricaded suspect incident” is the one that’s received the most attention and outrage, where police were caught waiting in the halls of the school, using hand sanitizer, and waiting around while Ramos continued to murder students inside a classroom which wasn’t locked as initially reported (via Texas Tribune):
The report’s findings about the failure to follow protocol and the lack of sufficient training to prepare officers for a mass shooting largely mirrored the flaws revealed in a Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE investigation published last month that found that states require students and teachers to receive far more training to prepare them for a mass shooting than they require for the police. At least 37 states require schools to conduct active-shooter-related drills, nearly all on an annual basis. But Texas is the only state that mandates that all of its police officers complete repeated training, at least 16 hours every two years. That requirement was implemented after the Uvalde shooting.
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The Uvalde report was far more critical, finding failures in leadership, command and coordination.
It stated that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded suspect incident instead of one in which a shooter was an active threat to children and teachers. Officers should “never” treat an active shooter with access to victims as a barricaded suspect — especially in a school, where there is a “high probability” of potential victims and innocent civilians being present, the report stated.
Officers had multiple indicators that should have made it clear they were facing an active shooter, including 911 calls from children and teachers pleading for help, a dispatcher’s announcement minutes after officers arrived that students were likely in the classroom with the shooter, and an Uvalde school police officer announcing that his wife had called to tell him she had been shot, according to the report.
[Associate AG Vanita Gupta] condemned the medical response, saying that after police breached the classroom and killed the gunman, dead victims were placed in ambulances while children with bullet wounds were put on school buses. Many of those findings were revealed in a 2022 investigation by the Tribune, ProPublica and The Washington Post that determined medical responders did not know who was in charge and that two students and a teacher who later died still had a pulse when they were rescued from the school.
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In its blistering criticism of responding officers, the report said that supervisors from various law enforcement agencies “demonstrated no urgency” in taking control of the incident, which exacerbated communication problems and added to overall confusion.
Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was listed as the incident commander in the district’s active-shooter plan, had the “necessary authority, training and tools” to lead the response but did not provide “appropriate leadership, command and control,” the report found. Arredondo could not be reached for comment Thursday through his attorney. He has previously defended his actions and those of others involved in the response.
Beyond that, no leader from any of the other responding agencies “effectively questioned the decisions and lack of urgency” demonstrated by Arredondo and Uvalde Police Department Acting Chief Mariano Pargas, who both arrived at the school within minutes of the first round of gunfire. The report listed Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco, Uvalde County Constables Emmanuel Zamora and Johnny Field, and an unidentified Texas Ranger as examples of such leaders.
The report also found that key officers, including Pargas, had no active shooter or incident command training despite, in some instances, having decades of law enforcement experience. Nolasco, the sheriff, also had no active shooter training and “minimal” incident command training.
To boot, you could probably already guess this detail about Ramos: he was known to law enforcement and had a history of disturbing social media posts, one of which involved him holding a bag of dead cats.
The Tribune added that the DOJ did not comment on whether any responding officers would be charged, saying that was out of its jurisdiction, but Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell plans to make her case before presumably impaneling a grand jury. It could be this year—we don’t know. Mitchell wanted to present her case in late 2023 but continued investigating the incident. In another issue, the Texas Department of Public Safety and Mitchell’s office have fought the release of the records relating to the Robb Elementary Shooting, which led to a lawsuit from media outlets. The Tribune was part of the legal effort, adding that a judge ruled in favor of the news organizations, but Texas DPS appealed.
To say the law enforcement’s response to this heinous attack constituted nothing but a series of “cascading failures” is an understatement.
