A lot of uniformity and little uniformity. The police officers who responded to the massacre at a school in Uvalde, Texas, could have stopped the gunman much sooner. The agents who responded, however, “demonstrated no urgency” in acting against the aggressor, who was holed up in one of the classrooms. It took them 77 minutes to decide, valuing their own existences much more than those of the people they had to protect. “Lives would have been saved,” he says.
This is indicated by the 575-page report that the United States Department of Justice published this Thursday, almost two years after the tragedy in which 19 children and two teachers died on May 24, 2022. “There was a cascade of errors” in the security forces, the document highlights when facing the chaos at Robb Elementary, one of the largest massacres recorded at a school in the United States.
“Every second counts in a mass shooting,” Merrick Garland, Secretary of the Department of Justice, insisted this Thursday in the presentation of this report held in Uvalde, where he put his finger on the wound for the many mistakes that were made. “The victims deserved better,” he said.
“The response was a total disaster,” highlights this report, the most in-depth investigation into a case that shocked the country due to the dimension of the tragedy and the dangerous and negligent police response, which caused the agents to even have to contain parents who, in view of the indolent inefficiency, tried to enter the school and subdue the gunman.
There had already been a lot of talk about the questionable conduct of the uniformed officers who came to rescue and eliminate the gunman, Salvador Ramos, who was 18 years old at that time, but rarely have the police received a blow of this magnitude from a federal government.
The succession of errors ranged from a lack of communication and leadership to inadequate technology and training, circumstances that contributed to the crisis lasting much longer than it should have been.
The document provides a chronology of the events, from when the shots were heard, the first fired by Ramos before entering the premises, as well as the rapid arrival of the agents. However, once they entered the building, they stopped and did not enter the classroom where the aggressor was and where he killed four children and an educator.
It took more than an hour and a quarter for them to decide to force the door. There are videos in which, sadly, they are seen hiding rather than trying to end the massacre.
“The agents on the scene should have recognized the magnitude of the incident when there was an active gunman in that location, intervened and gone immediately and continuously to neutralize the threat and eliminate it,” highlights the Department of Justice. “This did not happen,” he remarks.
Instead of this urgency, they simply lowered the level of intensity in their response and characterized the situation as if it were just a case of a barricaded suspect. They chose to negotiate rather than act. But there were children inside and some used their cell phones to warn of their fear and the seriousness of the situation. These messages reached the police, who remained inoperative despite knowing the extent of the matter. “It was the most critical tactical failure this team made,” the document insists.
“Leadership in security forces is absolutely essential, especially in times of challenge,” the report reiterates. “It requires courage when facing actions and stability in a chaotic environment. “Leadership was absent for a long time in the response of the officers at Robb Elementary,” she says.
“The entire team that entered the school assumed that the doors to classrooms 111-112 were closed, according to the information they had received from the uniformed officers who had been inside the longest. But, throughout the event, they assumed that circumstance and no one tried to check if the doors were really closed,” he says.
“Our analysis indicates that eight interior doors in the west wing of the building were not locked and officers only discovered this during the evacuation,” it continues. The search for the keys, ultimately unnecessary, is part of the cause of the significant delay in eliminating the threat and ending the massacre and deaths in those classrooms,” the document concludes.
The Department of Justice, with its head Merrick Garland fully involved (on Wednesday he was already with the families), indicates that its objective in conducting this review is “to provide an independent account of the actions and responses of security forces, identify the lessons to learn and provide a guide for the safety of communities and their involvement before, during and after incidents of this nature.”
The “after” too, Garland said at the press conference. Those released were put on buses, without receiving medical attention. And incorrect information was spread. Some families were told that their children were alive when the opposite was true. “This did not increase the pain,” lamented the US attorney general.
Despite this clarity, parents of victims continue to wait for answers to many of the questions that still arise, more specific things and concrete names of those who created this context of helplessness for schoolchildren and teachers. They know that some of their children could still be alive today if the uniformed officers had carried out their work as expected of their oath. But, for now, there have been no charges (the federal government has no jurisdiction after the gunman died) and relatives complain that those same police officers continue patrolling their streets, as if nothing had happened.
