School police chief Arredondo speaks
“Everybody knows” that the cowardly Uvalde cops sat in the hall for over an hour while children were being shot and school police chief Arredondo gave the order to stand down, although of course the officers could have gotten the key or breached the doors or shot through the doors without hurting any children.
Except that we don’t know those things, although there certainly have been reports in the MSM stating them as facts or as obvious conclusions – much or all of the specific information coming from anonymous sources.
I would say that probably the vast majority of people who’ve followed this story believe a lot of things that haven’t been proven and that originate with unnamed sources talking to the MSM, or “experts” or pundits not paying attention to what we actually know and what we don’t. Haven’t we learned from previous experience not to trust those initial reports, especially anonymous ones, and to suspend harsh judgment until a lot more is known? And doesn’t that take time?
I’ve been asking a lot of questions as I try to sort it out. One of the things I’ve been waiting for is to hear from school police chief Arredondo. Well, now wait no more. You are free to think he’s lying through his teeth in his description of the ordeal, of course. But I think he just might be telling the truth.
There should be other witnesses to this and I hope we hear from them. So far I’m not sure of the extent of the video evidence, but I recall reading that there was a hall video that was of very poor quality and investigators are studying it and trying to enhance it.
Here’s the story that emerges based on Arredondo’s interview [emphasis mine]. You shouldn’t be surprised to hear that it differs from the story we “know” in many key details, as well as expanding on some parts of that story (such as getting the key):
[The classroom door] 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.
So according to Arredondo he was willing to die, but couldn’t get in. But what about getting body armor, and getting the all-important key? Why did that take so long? I think a lot of people have gotten the impression from the coverage so far that the Uvalde cops weren’t even trying to get the key, and that it was the BorTac officers who overrode that order to stay put, and that it then was a simple matter to get it from the janitor. Arredondo says not so (and you’ll read more about those keys later, in another quote):
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.
I assume that “tactical gear” is body armor and/or ballistic shields. But Arredondo is saying they would have gone in without them had they been able to get the door open.
Also:
He noted that some 500 students from the school were safely evacuated during the crisis…
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.
Devastating and heartbreaking, but not surprising. It doesn’t sound as though many children could have been saved even if the police could have gotten in sooner, but it would be good to know and we don’t know. But – was it possible to have gotten in sooner?
We still need to know so much more. It’s not difficult, though, to imagine the extreme frustration and desperation that was being experienced by the police themselves – some of whom had children in those classrooms. That was one of the reasons the “cowardly and uncaring police sitting on their asses” narrative never made sense to me and still doesn’t.
More:
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.
I’m not impressed by these experts. “Running into the school with no key” is what they’re criticizing? Are they assuming he had keys to the classroom and just left them somewhere? I actually have heard that some police departments have keys to schools and other public buildings, but do they ordinarily have keys that open every classroom? And as we will learn later in the article, the Uvalde police did not have such keys.
“Failing to take charge of the situation” – exactly how? It certainly seems disorganized, but what orders should have been given that weren’t given? What actions should have been taken that weren’t taken? And yes, the gunman “continued to fire the rifle” – but only sporadically and as far as we know only towards the door at the cops.
More [emphasis mine]:
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.
So again we hear the chief had no body armor, but again we don’t know why.
One thing is cleared up – why he had no radio:
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…
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.
The article goes on to say that as he and other officers fist entered the school but before they got to the classrooms they heard the 100 or so rounds that I’ve mentioned before, the rounds that almost certainly killed the teachers and children. Then when the officers got to the locked doors there was gunfire directed at them; we’ve already heard about that, too. Then more gunfire (described previously as having also been by the perp towards the door; some of it apparently went through walls as well).
The officers were unaware of the 911 calls (we already knew that, too). But how would it have changed things if they had been aware of those calls? I’m not at all sure it would have mattered, but perhaps it might have – although if the police had fired through the door at the perp without being able to see him, they might have ended up injuring and/or killing more children rather than saving them.
More [emphasis mine]:
…[E]ven 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.
When was that? Somebody must know, but we’re still not being told.
Also [emphasis mine]:
[Arredondo] 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.
This is interesting and a little confusing:
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.
So does that mean there was some sort of window in the door (one child had indicated that, but no one else had), but they were unable to see inside? I’ve previously noted that the outer classroom windows looked relatively small, and even though it was daylight it probably was very hard to see inside the rooms without lights even if the door had a window. Shining some sort of flashlight inside through the door window – if there was such a window – would not necessarily have revealed the location of the perp but would certainly have made police targets, and what’s more until the school was evacuated they didn’t want the bullets to go into other classrooms.
This is why the students were evacuated through the windows and not the hallways, something various people have asked about:
He 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.
Here’s something a bit cryptic about body armor:
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.”
So did the chief not have body armor, but others did? I’d certainly like to know more details about that, and also learn what type of body armor the others had on if in fact they wore it.
Here is much more detail about the keys. It sounds like a nightmare or a horror movie [emphasis mine]:
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.
I believe the “door adjacent to the room where the gunman was” refers to one of the two classrooms with the dead and wounded children and teachers, either 111 or 112. The gunman is thought to have stayed in one room during the time police were in the building.
Regarding those keys, my hands would have been shaking so badly I couldn’t have put a key in a lock. But that’s one of many reasons I’m not a police officer.
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.
So it seems to have been a cooperative effort.
The rest of the article features some experts criticizing and some defending. For example, from a retired FBI agent:
“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.”
Oh, really? Let’s see [emphasis mine]:
Bruce Ure, a former Victoria police chief, 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.
That conforms with what I’ve said in several posts and comments, and it’s interesting to me to see a former police chief agreeing.
Arredondo’s jettisoning of the radio seems to me to be the worst thing he did, but if it really would have hampered his movements and he thought speed was of the essence, and if he also knew that the radio probably wouldn’t have worked in the school anyway, and if they would have had to turn a working radio off to keep their location secret from the perp, I don’t think the absence of the radio actually mattered all very much.
Still another obvious flaw in the entire operation was the fractured and confusing command structure, or lack thereof. But it’s not at all clear whose fault that was, because the situation was chaotic and had many special features; I can’t think of another school shooter situation like it, with a still-alive perp behind a locked door of that type and the children already shot when police arrived on the scene. So it’s not at all clear to me what difference it would have made if the command structure had been more clear, although I certainly feel it should have been more clear.
Ure also said this:
“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.”
Agreed.
I suggest you read the entire article – there’s a lot more. One of the many things you’ll learn if you read the whole thing is that one of the teachers who was murdered, Irma Garcia, was married to Arredondo’s second cousin Joe Garcia (who died two days later of what appears to have been a heart attack), a man with whom he’d grown up. That’s typical of the sort of intertwining of police and victims that you had in Uvalde, and still another reason why the “callous cowardly police” narrative didn’t seem likely to me and doesn’t seem likely to me.
I am so very very tired of all the premature blame and finger-pointing. I think anyone who reads this blog can tell that, because I’ve written about it before. This interview with Arredondo is the sort of thing I’ve been waiting for, and it’s just the tip of a very large iceberg of facts we need to know before understanding the terrible events that occurred that day in Uvalde.
But you know what? I think it’s already much too late. I think that, for the vast majority of people, no matter what exonerating information might later come out, their minds are set and they know that the police that day were cowards who stood by in order to protect themselves while little children and their teachers were murdered.
The police response was imperfect, to be sure. This is not a team of Navy SEALs who have practiced over and over a mission to get Bin-Laden. We see that on TV, and it’s like an action movie. But life is not an action movie, and small-town cops are not Navy SEALs.
Once the shooter knew they were out there, keeping radios off makes no sense. At best he would have been targeting a sound he heard through either a steel door or a wall. In other words, guesswork.
The key problem makes a certain amount of sense if every room had a different lock (possible, if stupid) and those locks were never engaged other than in a drill (likely). We have multiple levels of master keys where I work. The key I’m issued when I come on duty (I’m armed security at a federal facility) will open I’d estimate 98% of the doors in the facility. Maintenance keys would probably be 90%. My supervisors would be 99.9% and there are only a tiny number of doors that can only be opened by their supervisors. I can only assume this costs more to set up. The school has probably not had one individual in charge of locks and things have been done strictly on a one-by-one basis over multiple years with no planning.
Very good post, Neo. Much more comprehensive analysis than we’ll see from the MSM.
Dwaz:
I suppose the Texas Tribune, where the article appeared, is part of the MSM, and I think it’s pretty well done. So there’s that. But I doubt many other papers will pay attention.
” A pediatrician who attended to the victims described small bodies “pulverized” and “decapitated.” Some children were identifiable only by their clothes and shoes.”
While automatic firearms have long been illegal in the US, its infantry is issued fully automatic ones.
Kindly remember that more than 2/3 of pediatricians are Democrats.
The dead kids were identifiable only by their clothes; that is because he shot them in their heads. I doubt they were pulverized, which means ‘turned into powder’. one bullet in a small child’s small neck could have decapitated, I agree. Do not forget the exit wound of a modern bullet is a great deal larger than the entry wound, and the spine is pretty posterior. Were these kids looking AT the shooter, in horror?
Part of the issue is the shooter was using 30-round magazines, which I am sure the Democrats will use as a lever to control free and law-abiding Americans.
The 2022 election cannot come soon enough. America is turning rapidly into a Nueva Venezuela.
One detail on this that puzzles me is that the room keys seem to have been unlabelled. It would seem to me that to ensure rapid access to the rooms in the school in case of emergency having a full set of keys marked with the number of the rooms they could open would be an obvious precaution.
Automatic firearms are legal in the USA; to own them requires a registration of the firearm and a registration/approval by the US BATF (the Federal Government). The number of legal automatic firearms is highly regulated and controlled IIRC. They are called “registered or transferrable” for a reason.
There is a whole other category of US BATF things called “destructive devices;” think cannons, mortars, etc., that can be legally owned.
Have you not seen the annual “Machine Gun” gatherings shooting events on YouTube? Those are legal events. For now.
I make no criticism of decisions taken in “reality” in Uvalde that day.
However, “unrealistic options” (in particular breaching in one form or another) is a steaming pile here ex post facto. Tripe. Drivel. Nonsense. That a myriad of practical options were not taken does not in itself disqualify those options as “unrealistic” or unreal.
They simply weren’t availed at the time, that’s all.
Decision-makers on scene didn’t think of them, or rejected them if they did think them, or they were thought, authorized and started yet didn’t happen (though underway) because other events happened first, or whatever other possibilities unaccounted for here transpired.
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Neo: “But you know what? I think it’s already much too late. I think that, for the vast majority of people, no matter what exonerating information might later come out, their minds are set and they know that the police that day were cowards who stood by in order to protect themselves while little children and their teachers were murdered.”
I agree. Sadly, this is often the case with many events; too many folks have already come to a conclusion without any relevant facts. And any facts that come out are ignored by them as their minds are already made up.
sdferr
Any breaching would require physical energy. From what source? Explosive? I suggested, more as a ridiculous item, that if a Bobcat with a blade–those bad boys are supposed to have over a hundred fittings options for various tasks–had been available, maybe it could have gotten into the school.
But the small entry way in front of the door is how wide? IME, maybe four feet.
If you’ve taken a CRASE class, or had some practical experience, current window glass doesn’t shatter like in the old movies.
Not uncommon is surveillance footage on FB or elsewhere of a crook pitching, say, a cinder block at a store window and being struck by the rebound. You have to hit it just right at the corner and with a relatively sharp object.
The issue of the keys is reminiscent of the British soldiers at Isandlwana queuing up at the ammunition distribution wagons with Zulu impis bearing down on them. The lids of the wooden ammunition boxes were tightly sealed with screws and nobody had a screwdriver. Not one screwdriver had been issued. And the boxes, sturdily built and rimmed with metal bands, were difficult to break open. The Tommies were forced to hack at them with their bayonets, a lengthy process, frantically executed. Meanwhile the Tommies on the firing line were running out of bullets for their single-shot Martini rifles . . .
Knowing something of physical energy Mr Aubrey, I’m no respecter of walls, windows, doors and locks as I spent the better part of my working life putting them up and — more relevantly here — taking them down. I do not wish for and will not engage in an hypothetical for the sake of speculation. I wasn’t there in any capacity, so there’s just no point in that. The men and women on scene did their best, I do not doubt. I simply don’t think that “best” circumscribes everything that is, that’s all.
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IrishOtter49 (Roughcoat):
I’d never heard that story before, although I can well believe it.
And in the case of Uvalde, they didn’t just need a key, they need the key (or one of two keys). No one anticipated the situation exactly as it happened to occur. It had characteristics that were unique from other school shootings and even mass murders, as far as I know.
I haven’t been able to find the year Robb Elementary was built, but it’s not a rich community and my guess is that the key system was an older one and there didn’t seem to be any pressing need to modernize it, nor was there a lot of extra money around for the task.
charles:
Yes, and it’s one of our biggest problems. And the media knows that if they get in there fast with the lies, those lies will usually set in stone in people’s minds.
What this whole article and analysis makes clear, before anything else, is that all those armchair, ass-fattening, SWAT team members in their imaginations need to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. Thanking you in advance.
“The article goes on to say that as he and other officers fist entered the school but before they got to the classrooms they heard the 100 or so rounds that I’ve mentioned before, the rounds that almost certainly killed the teachers and children.”
So was the killer in the classroom for some minutes before the officers arrived, saw that they were coming for him and then starting killing? If they heard the shots then they must have been somewhat near, but I am under the impression that the officers were not there immediately after the killer was in the classroom.
IOW, could the presence of multiple officers have motivated the killer to start killing? Does anyone know how long he was locked in with the kids before the sound of gunshots was heard? And sorry if this has been covered already.
The key issue mystifies me. I worked in a public high school for a couple of years, call it 10 years ago. There was a master key that opened every door in the building, and I used it frequently in my job there. Why wouldn’t that school have a master key? Who in their right mind would design a public school building without it? I don’t get it.
In a word: No.
He killed a teacher as he entered the room, closed the door and proceeded to continue killing right away.
Uno Mhee:
There may have been a master key somewhere that opened every room, or there may have been one at some point that was lost or misplaced. But the important thing is that the cops that day weren’t responsible for the lack of a master key to open every door.
Obviously, there should be one.
Buildings like schools have a “Knox box” which holds keys that can get first responders inside the building. It’s primarily a fire department thing. That’s as much as I know. I’m not sure police could get in the Knox box without the fire department. I’m not sure if they contain a master key that gets them in individual rooms. The contents vary from property to property.
Most buildings like that (a school) have a master key that will get you in (almost) EVERY door. It’s possible that a master key might be in the Knox box, I don’t know. Buildings that grow by accretion might not have one master key because someone messed up on keying newer locks.
Where I used to work, I had a master key; I was a senior facilities person. There were very, VERY few locks I couldn’t access without it. The ones I couldn’t access held drugs. It was a DEA thing, and I wasn’t licensed. And I really did NOT want to be able to access those areas. I don’t see an elementary school having too many rooms the the principal couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t be able to access.
Also, electronically accessed locks have varying levels of access to different rooms. Again, a principal’s card key should get them in EVERY room.
(About fifteen years ago or so, there was a scandal in Marin where someone stole the access key to the Knox Boxes in the fire district. The Fire District had to shell out a lot of money to replace Knox boxes.)
M Williams:
It’s been covered before here, but this is the summary version: everything happened very quickly. The police got there about two or three minutes after the perp entered the building, and as far as we know much of the killing had already happened before the police entered and probably all of it before they got to the classroom doors. The perp killed as soon as he was able to enter a classroom, so there’s no reason to think he perceived the cops. He had only spent a minute or so earlier outside the school shooting at windows before he found the open door, came in, and entered the first classroom very quickly after that as well.
He probably knew time was of the essence, because he knew that his car crash had been observed and he had fired at some men who came to help. They were the first ones to call 911. The crash was right near the school; he didn’t know how to drive. But the school wasn’t just a target of opportunity; he left online messages a few minutes before leaving the house that he was going to shoot up a school. But he almost certainly realized the police would be coming ASAP.
om,
you are technically correct, but here are the data: “Automatic weapons are legal, but it takes a lot to get one of the 630,000 in the U.S.” Source: Boise State NPR 2018. “It takes a lot” means jumping thru a lot of regulatory/legal hoops to justify owning one and being granted ownership permission.
Americans own about 400 million non-automatic guns.
Lee Also:
Apparently Robb Elementary did not have a modern key system and certainly not an electric one.
In the case of Robb Elementary, it doesn’t sound as though getting into the school itself was a problem for the cops. Was it because they went in through the same unlocked door as the perp, or was it because they obtained a master key to the school? And if the latter, how did they do that? I think they actually went in through the unlocked door, but it seems a terrible system if they ordinarily would have had to have gotten a key to the outside from the janitor. In this case, though, it’s not clear that it actually made any difference if they had no key to the outside door; it was the inner doors that were the problem.
I[‘m just going to repeat:
Neo’s constant bending over backwards to give the police every benefit of the doubt and then some is bizarre. The chief of police thinks he didn’t massively screw up? Wow. That’s certainly not at all a self-serving interpretation of events. And hey! We all know news articles that tell us what we want to hear are always more reliable than any other kind!
And I’m no expert or anything but can’t pretty much EVERY radio used by law enforcement be clipped to a belt? You know, so you can have your radio with you AND have both hands free?
Anybody want to start a pool on when Neo starts speculating about “crisis actors?”
MBunge:
Your repeating something doesn’t make it so.
And you are somewhat reading-comprehension-compromised. You seem to consistently misunderstand my entire point.
And quit trolling – a la your last sentence.
Instapundit commentors have been rabid in their comments about the Police. Started right away and no amount of REAL information will change their minds. I have always been in the “Lets wait” camp. I am not sure if we will every get a definitive answer to all of Neo’s questions, but at least she is asking them, not making judgements.
SHIREHOME:
It’s not just Instapundit commenters. It’s just about every blog on the right (and probably on the left, although I haven’t read any of those on the topic of Uvalde, and I think the left focuses mostly on the gun control push). It’s not every single commenter on the right, but it’s the majority as well as the writers. I can’t recall seeing anyone taking the position I do on this. That has happened to me before on certain topics – just to take one example, whether Madoff’s sons were guilty. I thought they were not guilty and did not know about the Ponzi scheme, and that their father had betrayed them. Time has proven me correct, I think; despite looking and looking and looking, no evidence was ever found against them.
I find it depressing that the right has been part of a rush to judgment to blame police on this one. I’ve written a bit about that, but I probably will write another post on it.
It will be interesting to learn what changes get made in schools across the country because of what happened in Uvalde.
It will undoubtedly be hampered by supply chain problems and personnel shortages (as well as the basic personnel inadequacies and risk aversion that plague all staunchly bureaucratic organizations) , but I’d guess a lot of schools will be – or, at least, should be – different when the fall term begins, both in physical plant and operational considerations.
The same should be true of any medium to large private corporation.
It’s a primary tenet of OPSEC that one does not discuss one’s security measures, but if reasonable change occurs a fair amount will become well known, and some revelations will have a positive effect, that of deterrence, at least for those organizations who actually implement, and just as important, maintain them.
Security, especially high security, is a Level One PITA; the challenge is always creating and maintaining high security that functions as designed without being so intrusive that going around it becomes popular sport.
Very sad coincidence about the 77 minutes– there is a documentary about the 1984 mass shooting at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California: the documentary is titled “77 Minutes” because that’s the length of time the shooter had to fire at people inside and outside the restaurant and reload his weapons before a police sniper ended his reign of terror. At the time, the rampage (21 dead, 19 wounded) was the deadliest mass shooting by a lone gunman in U.S. history.
Here is a link to the documentary– you may have to click past the YouTube censorship advisory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LJ7yBA39HO4&ab_channel=BearzDLC
It’s true that the San Ysidro shooting involved a fast-food restaurant rather than a school, but a lot of the victims were children (including an eight-month-old baby) whose parents had taken them to McDonald’s for lunch. There were three boys who had ridden their bikes to the restaurant, two of whom were killed by the perp just outside the restaurant door.
Some similarities with Uvalde that come out in the course of the film: 1) the McDonald’s was hard to see into from the outside because the windows were made of tinted glass, and the bullet holes caused fractures in the windows that added to the visibility problem. The sniper could get a clear shot at the perp only because the perp had shot out the glass in the front door over an hour after he had started his rampage; 2) the first police on the scene did not know whether the gunman was holding hostages, which complicated their response; and 3) (which Neo will appreciate!) the second-guessing started almost right away afterward. The filmmaker in particular has the obvious agenda of trying to manipulate the police he is interviewing in the film into admitting they should have taken a different course of action. One of the YouTube commenters noted the filmmaker’s judgmental tone and remarked, “Great job documenting the shooting, but the director went overboard trying to blame the police. The note at the end was unnecessary and makes the documentary more about his negative views towards law enforcement than the actual shooting.” Other commenters made the same point about the interviewer’s intrusive questioning of the cops.
I can’t help wondering whether someone is even now planning to make a “77 Minutes v.2” about Uvalde.
I have no idea if it’s still accurate (or even if it was true at the time), but the first time I attended a machine gun shoot at Knob Creek Gun Range (you’ll find many videos at YouTube) I was told by another attendee that just the federal license to own a fully automatic weapon (assuming you passed all background checks) was by itself twenty thousand dollars. This was probably twenty years ago.
PA Cat:
Probably the police weren’t there for the full 77 minutes, either. Same for Uvalde.They did arrive quickly but not the moment the perp arrived.
These incidents are so terrible, so horrific, so heartbreaking, that people blame the rescuers because it gives them the illusion that we can control more than we can.
The key problem is puzzling. Even in my small college department we all had masters to get into every room. I’ve never worked in a public school, but even with old locks there should have been multiple copies of the master: principal, vice principal, administration secretary, and all maintenance personnel. And I would hope one in possession of the FD and PD. Should not have been hard to get a master.
physicsguy:
Did you all have master keys to get into every room in your department, every room in your building, or every room in the college? Are you saying you all were able to unlock each others’ offices? Every office and classroom in the college?
physics:
It appears that even the janitor at Robb lacked a master key to every classroom.
Hard to understand.
“Who Can Own a Full-Auto Machine Gun? – RocketFFL
Mar 8, 2021Although it is perfectly legal for a law-abiding citizen to own a full-auto machine gun, it must be one made before 1986. This means that an AR-15-style machine gun made before 1986 likely carried a price tag of less than $1,000 when it was brand new. Now that it is over 30 years old, however, it can easily fetch a price of $14,000.”
FFL indicates Federal Firearms License, So Rocket likely knows the facts of what he writes.
This from Reason (Steven Greenhut), “Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats” is intuitively compelling.
https://reason.com/2022/06/10/uvalde-shows-once-again-that-cops-are-just-armed-bureaucrats/
neo. I agree with the issue of displacement. You’d think somebody would say something bad about Ramos. Even a mild obscenity. But he’s not even a thing. Displacement.
Ramos was a predator thankfully unlike nick cruz he was put out of his memory too much like that incident we have similat results
Cicero:
Indeed, you have discovered that you can legally own a fully automatic firearm, and that it is very expensive to do so, and very expensive to shoot one on full auto.
See the YouTube site Forgotten Weapons for a run down of the many full auto firearms.
One example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfJkU4Sah8I
Or more to the point currently the AR-15/M-16:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iv7xEuTM36o
The question I have is why Chief Arredondo was secretly sworn in as a City Council member one week after the shooting. Couldn’t it have waited?
Apparently no other cops had radios.
Did you ever see firemen waiting 70 minutes to get in a building? Me neither. They have tools for that that either the cops or firemen could have used.
It was the chief’s incident the minute he arrived. Every cop had a radio but him. He could have taken one or more and maintained command or handed it off. He chose neither.
Who did he think WAS in command?
“Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats”
Yep that’s what I immediately think of when I come across a squad car with it’s lights on. Armed bureaucrats on the prowl again.
“Reason” indeed.
When things go south, call a Libertarian.
“school police chief Arredondo”
If this is the *school* police, then the *school* police chief is responsible for a key not being available. What is he doing with his time if not at least running drills with his officers to see how the plans work? That’s also a probable fire code violation; how can a school have doors that lock children into rooms without having a readily available key for emergency responders? Again, who should be responsible for having that key, the night janitor?
I’ve learned from previous experience that authorities practice a lot of cya. It takes time to come up with a good cya story.
Here’s a question no one has asked: If the door was into the classroom was a security door, impenetrable from the outside, why didn’t the teachers in the classroom close and lock it when they heard gunshots from outside?
Despite all attempts to break the event down into microscopic pieces, this simple reductionism remains the best setup:
“Start with what is known: they did nothing for a long period of time, and he was in charge. Work your way backwards from there.” – comment section on Instapundit
Indeed.
I can’t seem to understand how, after some guy is banging away with a rifle outside the school, you don’t lock the door to your classroom.
Is it possible those particular teachers didn’t hear it?
One account I read said the guy was actually shooting AT the building at some point before he went in–if true, someone would have noticed. And wouldn’t some administrator have been notified and ordered a lockdown?
It’s all very odd.
I am a former elementary school principal and I always understood that one of my chief duties was the safety of the kids and the staff. I have yet to see any mention of the principal in this whole affair. Where was the principal from start to finish? In every building I worked, the principal, the janitor and the front desk secretary had a set of master keys. The police should have been dealing with the principal not the janitor.
Roger
Children have said that one teacher had just gone to the classroom door and was just about to lock it when the shooter enterred through it. As for the other room, the perp entered through an internal door that connected the two rooms . I don’t think the internal door even had a lock.
And yet it wasn’t the police who shot the killer or rescued children.
Buck Melanoma:
Arredondo was with all the other officers in the hall. We don’t know if they had radios, nor do we know if any radios worked inside the school. The article does state that Arredondo communicated with the police station by cell phone. But apparently headquarters didn’t inform him about the 911 calls.
I wrote a previous post about the firefighters at the scene. Read it here.
Rachelle:
The article and my post explain that, plus it was BorTac who had the ballistics shields.
Israel Espinoza:
I agree that we’ve heard next to nothing about the principal. But apparently at Robb, the janitor seems to have been the one with the keys. I assume at some point we’ll hear more about what the principal was doing.
I found a number of statements in the linked article contradicting each other.
“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.”
None of them were marked? If so, are we to imagine that every time the janitor needs to get into a locked schoolroom he goes through those 26-36 keys… each time at every locked door?
Then it’s claimed that finally, Arredondo was called on his cellphone and told they’d found the key to the schoolroom(s). How did they know they’d found the right key? Was that one key marked? If so, wouldn’t the janitor know that?
What about the principal, who in an initial report (that hasn’t to my knowledge been corrected) was the person who finally opened the door?
Arredondo claims he never issued orders to stand down. Other police agencies claim he did… whose telling the truth?
If Arredondo considered himself not to be the on scene authority, wouldn’t he have wanted to know who was… as establishing on scene authority is policing 101 for cops.
I’m not suggesting Arredondo is necessarily lying but this simply doesn’t add up for me. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
“It was the chief’s incident the minute he arrived. Every cop had a radio but him.” Buck Melanoma
Reportedly, all the cops outside the schoolroom had their radios turned off, apparently to keep the killer from firing at the sound of their voices.
Arredondo had a cell phone on him the entire time. He did call out and they did reach him to inform him they’d found the key. So if he didn’t know what the situation was outside the school that was his choice. He could have positioned one cop at the school entrance to act as a liaison to the outside to bring any pertinent info to him.
If Arredondo wasn’t directing the response outside the school then who was? Again as the School Police Chief that would have been essential info for him. As if he’s not in charge he needed to defer to whomever was in charge, in order to facilitate a coordinated response, which makes linked communications essential.
I’m sorry but by now with so many basic questions unanswered, it cannot but be intentional. CYA and political manipulation of a tragedy are the most likely reasons why each time we get an answer, it only raises more questions.
kaf:
A lockdown was ordered immediately. It is unclear why the delay in locking that classroom. I have read several differing accounts from children. But things did happen very fast with the shooter’s entry, very unfortunately.
Take this as you will. I retired as a Commissioned Peace Officer of the State of Colorado after 28 years, and I did a couple of years at another department than the one I retired from. 30 years total, although my retirement was over a decade ago. I also had kids in high school when Columbine happened [we were across the state, so no I was not AT Columbine], so you can bet whatever you want that I paid attention to the changes in protocols.
Short form: First two officers who arrive pair up, advise dispatch, and enter and engage immediately. This is to stop or at least pin down the shooter and fix his attention on the officers and not the kids. First supervisor [SGT or above] on scene is incident commander and remains in command barring emergencies. Changing incident command in the middle of an incident can really confuse things. As more pairs come in, they enter to search and engage and to clear students and teachers out and a perimeter is established. And everyone coming out is treated as a possible suspect until things are sorted out.
Yes, keys should be available. But if they are not, there are other ways in, harder on the architecture. There are non-lethal explosive devices for breaching and explosive stunning devices. It would be possible and SOP to breach from multiple angles, enter, and engage. I cannot give the details in this venue. The kids will have headaches and their ears will ring, but they will be alive.
Been there, done that, although not in as serious an engagement as this and not as SWAT but just a line troop.
YMMV, but from what I have seen and based on experience, they screwed up badly and it cost the lives of a lot of kids. That opinion is shared by a lot of my fellow officers.
Subotai Bahadur
@irishotter49/roughcoat @Neo
The “Had to use screwdrivers for the ammo boxes” story at Isandlwana (or Little Sphinx as I prefer calling it in old British style) is a meme myth that needed to die a long time ago. The Victorian British Army had a lot of issues but knowledge of how important durable but easy-to-open ammunition containers would be to troops in the field wasn’t one of them.
http://samilitaryhistory.org/vol046fm.html
https://www.military-history.org/feature/3-popular-myths-of-isandlwana-1879-zulu-war.htm
TL;DR all evidence we have indicated that while opening the cartridge boxes without a screwdriver was inconvenient it wasn’t crippling and a bunch were simply bashed open, allowing the British to shoot until the last whether at Islandlwana or Rorke’s Drift or a number of others. The bigger problem was that the British were caught out in the open and hugely outnumbered by a well disciplined force, and their ammo supplies were in the rear and so they basically had to have people haul new cartridge boxes forward before they could be used.
“But apparently at Robb, the janitor seems to have been the one with the keys”– Neo
Schools are very control oriented, bureaucratic institutions– even elementary schools. The idea that the principal wouldn’t have a master key or master keys to every room in the school is hard to believe.
Even if it were true the principal didn’t have a set of keys, it’s still puzzling there has been no mention of this person.
Geoffrey Britain:
You seem to be making a number of assumptions. One is that the writer of the article was accurate in re-creating the information told him about the situation. I actually think the writer did a pretty good job compared to a lot, and the article is long and complex as well, but I will assume that some of the lack of clarity (for example, about the key that was finally found to open the door) is due to haste or sloppiness on the part of writer or speakers. Also, I agree that it would be important to know whether keys were labeled and/or labeled correctly, and whether the key that was finally found was labeled. And if they weren’t labeled, why not?
I don’t know why you think that Arredondo wasn’t in communication with the officers outside, at least through the main police station with which he was communicating via cell phone. He seems to have been part of coordinating evacuation efforts in the rest of the school, for example. The article certainly doesn’t purport to explain each and every communication he had, and with whom. I assume that a lot has been left out, either in the interview, or in the final article, which you can see is already extremely long.
When you say that “other police agencies” say that Arredondo DID issue orders to stand down, my recollection is that the only “police agency” that said that was McCraw, very early on. He didn’t say on what he based that or who told him that. But at the same time I read in the media a story or stories that said that officers on the scene, including a BorTac officer, had said this was not the case and that Arredondo had issued no such orders. I don’t have time to look for that at the moment, but I read it and write about it at the time. So it’s not just Arredondo saying this.
You also don’t know whether Arredondo tried to find out who was in charge, or how he may have tried to coordinate things with the other officers there. But for example, the article says, that Arredondo “told officers to start breaking windows from outside other classrooms and evacuating those children and teachers.” Were these officers in the hall with Arredondo, and then they fanned out and told other officers outside what to do, and communicated back to Arredondo? We simply don’t know, but my guess is that some communication went on.
We also don’t know what Uvalde’s rules were on coordinating a crisis of this magnitude and scope. Did they envision one that involved so many other police departments as well, US marshals, BorTac, firefighters, etc.? I doubt it. I’m not sure how he would have been expected to have coordinated such a large operation. I don’t think anyone else was prepared to take over, either. Not every town of 15,000 has envisioned such a thing and prepared for it. Fortunately, most have not experienced it, either, or we’d probably see a similar lack of coordination, at least from some or many of them.
The article is limited by the questions asked, the people interviewed, how much time was allotted, and decisions about what would go in the final version and what would be left out. The investigation that is ongoing is probably gathering a great deal more detail. I hope some time in the not-too-distant future we will gain access to that detail. We have found in the past that the final report is more comprehensive and differs in significant ways from the media reports early on. When you write “by now with so many basic questions unanswered, it cannot but be intentional” and CYA. I disagree with you, although of course it could be. But it would be very very strange and quite unusual if all that many basic questions were already answered. Offhand I can’t think of any event of this type and magnitude where all basic questions were answered this early. What we do see nearly always – and we see it here, too – is confusion and contradictions, as well as many misleading (some probably purposely misleading) stories in the MSM. It takes a lot of time and effort to assemble the big picture – hundreds and probably thousands of people must be interviewed, much video often looked at, all sorts of things, before we understand.
In addition, recall that very early on, videos of screaming parents angry at police were aired repeatedly on all MSM stations, and one could read countless articles condemning the police for cowardice and letting children die. It is now a near-universal to condemn them. I’m surprised that any of them are giving interviews to the press at this point.
Subotai Bahadur:
Great comment! Thanks. I know you from other blogs.
I don’t know enough to take sides and I respect neo’s valiant efforts to go on the facts she knows.
I do consider it a possibility the LEOs screwed up and could have done more.
SB “There are non-lethal explosive devices for breaching and explosive stunning devices. It would be possible and SOP to breach from multiple angles, enter, and engage”.
Are assuming that this small department had such devices?
SB ” First two officers who arrive pair up, advise dispatch, and enter and engage immediately. ”
Hard to engage someone that is behind a locked door.
I respect your comments and your experience. But I think you missed some of Neo’s comments.
I admit that I was somewhat angry at the Uvalde police in the first few days after the incident, insofar as I had any particular personal investment in the incident at all. But now, in view of the many points that Neo and others here have brought up, I think my anger, such of it as there was, has generally dissipated and been replaced by a feeling of pity for many of them as having been caught up in some kind of demented Keystone Kops out-take.
“For want of a nail the kingdom was lost,” and so on. For want of a key… or a radio…. I guess all I’m left with at the moment is bemusement at the fact that on such seemingly small things the world can turn.
This is pro beaurocrat with a gun BS. “They couldn’t kick the door in because it opened outward.” If that is the case the hinges are on the OUTSIDE of the door. Shoot the hinges off the door and go in.
Neo is a putz. Polizi are… not even the enemy. They are an obstruction. They could have got through that door. HOW MANY OF THESE BITCH POLICE DIED GOING THROUGH THAT DOOR WHILE YOUNG CITIZENS WERE BLEEDING TO DEATH INSDE?
Philip Sells:
I have also thought of that “for want of a…” quote many times since the Uvalde shooting.
However, as I point out in this piece, I’m not sure that certain things like the radio mattered all that much in the end. For example, knowing about the 911 calls in real time would have meant the police would have done what differently? They were already apparently trying to get in, but had no breaching tools and no explosives. So some of the horrible things that went wrong might, like the lack of radio access, not have mattered much in the end.
The lack of keys – that mattered. Keys should have been easily obtainable. Without shields, though, some officer or officers would almost certainly have died – but according to Arredondo, they were willing to pay that price if they could have gotten in. And some children who did die might have lived if they’d gotten help sooner (although we don’t even know if that is true).
However, the most basic “for want of a…” thing that would have made a huge difference and probably prevented the loss of life, was if the outer door had locked properly. One other thing that would almost certainly have made a difference would have been if the classroom door had been locked in time. Those two things, in my opinion, are two things that almost certainly would have saved a lot of lives. But is anyone to blame, or was it just horrible luck and the fact that the perp moved so quickly? I refuse to blame anyone but the perp unless I have evidence that someone was actually to blame. Even then, people are not perfect, and sometimes a very small omission or error causes horrific and completely unintended results.
I am leaving Bernal’s comment up as a perfect – and I mean perfect – example of the sort of attitude on Uvalde that I’ve seen quite a bit of around the blogosphere.
Brian E:
I completely agree, and I’ve wondered that myself. Where was the principal? Her name is Mandy Gutierrez, and the only mention I’ve found of her is that she was present at the ceremony when Biden visited.
The most disturbing thing to me in all of this is that someone (?who?) issued an order to not cooperate with the TX DPS in the investigation into the incident.
That right there smacks of Cover Up. With a multi-jurisdictional incident, DPS (which apparently was not involved in the action) would be the rational and natural agency to conduct the investigation, and compile the after-action report.
I await that report.
A gun is a gun is a gun … and so forth.
The murderer was in the classroom UNINTERRUPTED for three (3) minutes. That is more than enough time to fire, reload, fire over 100 bullets from grandpa’s 1954 Model 10 six-shot pistol in .38 Special at untrained, unprepared, terrified children and unarmed teachers.
NEITHER the caliber, the capacity of ammunition, the presence/absence of a cylindrical or box magazine, the action design (finger pull or semi-automatic), the barrel length, the stock design, the presence of a “pistol” grip, the color of the finish, or any other feature made the slightest difference to the victims.
Only the EVIL in the heart of a single man was relevant.
askeptic:
If you think that, I believe you have unfortunately succumbed to propaganda without realizing it. You call yourself a skeptic; well, ponder this.
Here’s an article from May 31 at ABC entitled, “Uvalde police, school district no longer cooperating with Texas probe of shooting: Sources.”
Sounds pretty clear, doesn’t it? They’re not cooperating. But like so many many things the MSM writes, it’s cleverly crafted to give you the impression it says what it wants you to think – which is that the police aren’t cooperating – and yet it doesn’t back that up and in fact backs up the opposite.
Please read the article carefully. Among other things, it says: “multiple law enforcement sources tell ABC News.” Who are they? Anyone who actually knows anything about it? Anonymous law enforcement sources – and to ABC? It might be true or it might not. It’s not the sort of report I tend to trust right at the outset.
But more importantly it also says this [emphasis mine]: “Reached by ABC News, a spokesperson for the Texas Department of Public Safety said, ‘The Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde CISD Police have been cooperating with investigators.”
In other words, ABC had some vague rumor of noncooperation and makes that the headline and the lede, whereas the actual Texas DPS denial of police noncooperation is something that’s easy to miss.
In that ABC article, it also says that same DPS spokesman had this to say about Arredondo’s cooperation: “The chief of the Uvalde CISD Police provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago.”
According to the Texas Tribune piece I discuss in the present post, this is what Arredondo’s lawyer says about that:
I have read elsewhere that the police are afraid of talking to the FBI in particular because they are aware of all the prosecutions (such as that of Michael Flynn) for “lying” to the FBI when people make honest errors or contradict themselves. And I believe they are correct to be very afraid.
Also, McCraw of DPS had trashed Arredondo in a press conference on May 27 and had thrown him to the wolves. The shooting had happened on May 24, so that press conference had occurred only three days later – way too early to have done a thorough enough investigation to say what he said. But McCraw had probably gotten a lot of flak during the previous 24 hours because on May 26, a day earlier, the NY Times and other news outlets had published and/or described videos showing irate parents outside the school during the evacuation, shrieking for police to do something.
Those videos went viral – as the Times no doubt intended – and caused a huge backlash against the police and Arredondo. McCraw then fed that backlash in his press conference – I believe in order to distance himself.
And since then, a lot of people – including you – are blaming the police for a big conspiratorial coverup. That’s exactly what the MSM wants you to think, in my opinion. And the evidence so far is that it’s not the case.
neo:
I “know” that Bernal has much experience shooting hinges off doors and getting doors out of door frames when hinge pins are removed. Vast experience, from video games IMO.
The “we knows” have some real sweethearts most assuredly.
Turtler, irishotter49/roughcoat & Neo,
A pretty good movie version of Isandlwana from Zulu Dawn 1979
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D3x6RPJOkTs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d17vfJ7bUVo
What a fine kettle of fish. Emergency situations are tough to handle even when you have trained and rehearsed the procedures. My line of work was flying airplanes for 38 years. In aviation you know there will be mechanical and personnel failures. So, you analyze and prepare as best you can to handle those things. And yet, failures sometimes occurred that no one had foreseen. When fire lights are blinking, warning bells are going off, and the aircraft wants to stall and spin; it’s often hard to get things right and in the right order. That’s why we practiced those things in a simulator and read everything we could about accidents and incidents to learn from other people’s experiences.
I’m trying to analyze things from the point of view of someone who has been in emergency situations that put a premium on cool-headed thinking and making decisions under stress.
There were several failures at Uvalde that are obvious. The unlocked door to the school is one. The fact that the teacher was a second or two slow in locking her door, which allowed the shooter access, is another. The fact that the police had no equipment or experience in breaching the school room doors makes three. The lack of a master key being available in a timely fashion was another. Every school principal, superintendent, and school board should be taking note of these issues. The mass shooting might have been prevented or been less severe had those failures not
occurred.
I’ve been on accident boards. It’s quite easy when you are sitting down with a cup of coffee and all the accident info in front of you to analyze what went wrong and what should have been done. But when you are on the scene with limited information, it’s not always easy to make the right decisions. The Chief may have made some bad decisions in the heat of the moment. My guess is that he had never rehearsed the scenario that was unfolding. Probably never even envisioned such a thing.
The lack of quick access to the key was the major obstacle to putting an end to the shooting. Who would have believed it? As mentioned by several commenters, master keys are supposed to be available from the proper people who are in the school or other such building. Once the key was obtained, the shooter was dispatched.
If the Chief erred, he should be disciplined. Eventually, the Texas authorities investigating this mass shooting will release their report with recommendations. I’ll wait for that before I judge anyone.
The Key Question has been a sticking point in the narrative from the beginning, as to why it took so long to get the one needed.
If the Key Answer was as simple as Arredondo says — there were a lot of unlabeled keys, delivered at 3 different times — why not simply say so back at the beginning of all the interviews and press conferences?
I don’t see any plausible reason to withhold that information, which had to have been known to everyone waiting in the hallway to go through the door once it was opened.
On everything else, I appreciate the back and forth of questions, speculations, sometimes answers, and mostly civil discourse.
But what the heck was the principal doing all that time?
Particularly, why wasn’t she in the forefront of the pressers and public statements, the natural habitat of bureaucrats of all varieties?
Does she only show up when Presidents come to town?
People have talked about having drills and training staff — did she do any of that?
Was she doing anything to help the police?
Was she getting in the way?
Was she at the school that day?
She doesn’t even show up in the “encyclopedia of Leftist record.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robb_Elementary_School_shooting
If there is any cya going on (and there well may be), she isn’t even doing that.
That seems very peculiar to me.
I don’t remember if this has been covered in the discussions here, but there is some information in it relevant to speculations raised in today’s thread.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/former-principal-school-door-uvalde-gunman-used-not-a-soft-target/ar-AAXJDvs
There has been so much published and discussed – was this interview covered in any of Neo’s posts or commenter responses?
https://www.cnn.com/2022/06/07/us/uvalde-school-teacher-arnulfo-reyes-interview/index.html
There are some discrepancies in his account in that article, and the writers spin it forcefully against the police (as the narrative demanded), but I was shocked to discover that the existence of a third teacher wasn’t mentioned much sooner, and also that he did NOT run to lock the doors immediately, as the consensus seems to be that’s what the other teachers did.
More information about him is needed, I think.
This was the earliest story DDG gave me, but then he suddenly showed up in the MSM almost a week later, in lock-step stories based on the one interview — NOT in statements to the press in general, or through the other law enforcement agencies handing out information.
https://aleteia.org/2022/05/31/teacher-heroically-defended-his-students-in-uvalde-massacre/
AesopFan:
Absolutely. I covered it in great detail just a few days ago, in this post and thread.
I find it odd that we heard so little about the third teacher for quite a while, but I think it may have been because he was seriously wounded. I also found the interview strange, as you’ll see in my post about it.
However, as far as locking the door goes – the interview is unclear about whether he had locked the outer classroom door, the one opening into the hall. It’s a strange omission in the article, because it’s an important fact to know. However, he states that the shooter came in from the other classroom through the adjoining door. So my tentative conclusion is that he actually had locked the outer door, but it failed to protect the children because of the design of the two rooms, with an inner door that I think was unlockable and that linked the two adjoining rooms, and the fact that the teacher in the adjoining room to his probably had failed to lock the other room’s outer door in time to prevent the perp from entering her classroom.
I am puzzled as to why the MSM doesn’t see fit to ask about these things, which should be fairly easy for him to answer – although come to think of it, if he had failed to lock a door he could have locked, he might be very traumatized by having to face that and to be asked about it on the record. I’m going to assume that the various investigations will uncover the fuller story, but the MSM doesn’t seem interested or capable of doing it.
As for your question about the keys – why not describe it at the outset? – there are tons of things that were not described, and in fact the press conferences (such as the one with McCraw) were very short, relatively speaking, compared to the huge volume of information. They said they wanted to do a more thorough investigation before giving out too many details, and that they had hundreds of people to interview and also videos to go through, and computer evidence from the perp, and that sort of thing. It’s a lot and it takes a long time, and most investigations of this sort don’t give out all that many details until quite a bit of time has passed. At a press conference, it also depends on what questions are asked. I don’t recall the press asking the questions I would have asked about the key.
In addition, Arredondo didn’t offer much till now, nor have other officers connected with this. I think that’s for many reasons, including the fact that they’ve been excoriated almost from the start. Anything they say will be used against them. Public opinion turned against them quite suddenly, too; starting on May 26th when the parent videos came out. Plus, I believe that the police themselves – including Arredondo – are deeply emotionally shaken by the experience. They probably have survivor guilt, as well as just plain PTSD from seeing all those children in the condition they were in – having tried to rescue the children and having failed, and then carrying out their dead and mutilated bodies. Some of those children they probably knew well, and knew their families too. Some were relatives; this is not a big town. To be giving detailed interviews not long after experiencing those events is asking too much, I think.
However, as I wrote earlier, the non-presence of stories about the principal is very odd indeed.
Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats: What happened in Uvalde is part of a pattern, not an aberration.
FTA: Police unions emphasize heroic “thin blue line” themes, as they portray officers as the only thing standing between civil society and disorder. Individual police occasionally act courageously, but such portrayals are vastly overblown. In my years covering these issues, I’ve found officers almost always behave like self-protecting bureaucrats rather than selfless heroes.
As Americans debate the proper response to the horrific mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, it’s important to dispense with our fanciful ideas about how police agencies operate. Toward that end, Uvalde’s school police chief and local police officials have provided Americans with a remarkable case study of real-world ineptitude.
Americans seem shocked by how police reacted while 18-year-old Salvador Ramos was shooting up Robb Elementary School, where he gunned down 19 children and two teachers. Ramos reportedly began firing at 11:33 a.m. Police reportedly arrived quickly, but didn’t breach locked classroom doors until 12:50, as trapped kids made desperate 911 calls.
Essentially, law enforcement behaved like armed bureaucrats. Large numbers of cops showed up. They hid behind walls to protect themselves. They milled around, conferred, and secured the perimeter, as the shooter emptied his weapon on helpless kids. They certainly wrote reports. As one headline noted, “Police delays may have deprived Texas schoolchildren of lifesaving care, experts say.” That’s a safe bet.
A few other items reinforce the bureaucratic tendencies of police agencies. On Thursday, police threatened to arrest journalists who gathered at the school district headquarters, which shows that officers often can be proactive when it suits them. Second, state officials accused school police of refusing to cooperate with a Department of Public Safety investigation after Texas officials criticized their inaction. Police offered shifting explanations.
Finally, ABC News reported that in March “the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on ‘active shooter response.'” So the police can’t pull out their usual flaccid, all-purpose response: “more training.” In a few months, police will no doubt be handing out valor medals. The city department already released a statement praising its officers’ actions.
Before you get too angry, remember that this is not unusual. It’s a pattern, not an aberration. The nation has so many mass shootings that it’s hard to keep track of them, but you’ll find the same complaints after each one. In truly dangerous scenarios, police have turned the “Blue Lives Matter” mantra into, “Only Blue Lives Matter.”
Police officials insist they changed their active-shooter protocols after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two young men murdered 13 people and then killed themselves, as SWAT teams waited to engage. As CNN reported, that “watershed event” led police nationwide to head to the sound of gunfire rather than simply protect the perimeter and wait…
[:]
…As a lawsuit related to [the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s mass] shooting makes clear, the government (unlike the private sector) has virtually no liability when its failure causes the loss of life. Police agencies have won court victories affirming that they have no legal duty to protect anyone. Whenever police use deadly force, they say they did so because they feared for their lives. Defend it if you choose, but don’t call it heroic.
At the very least, we cannot expect that police officers always will protect us. Until Americans face that reality, we’ll never create effective policies to combat mass shootings~
PA Cat:
Probably the police weren’t there for the full 77 minutes, either. Same for Uvalde.They did arrive quickly but not the moment the perp arrived.
These incidents are so terrible, so horrific, so heartbreaking, that people blame the rescuers because it gives them the illusion that we can control more than we can.
EXACTLY.
The article evokes questions. What happened to access through the open door the killer went through? How did the off duty BP officer get in a totally locked down school? How did the woman/mother/handcuffed get in? Didn’t anyone try the Ford Cruiser “master key”? Why not? They could’ve lined ’em up like a mule team and pushed down the whole building. Uvlade is a small town several hardware stores within a couple miles. Tools, fellas. Lotsa tools to open stuff. With the number of LE on site they should’ve swarmed the place, roof to basement to find a way in. I can understand one person having stuck thoughts on options but not the whole bunch of them.
“Jack Dunphy” offers his views on the moral if not legal accountability of the Uvalde police.
https://the-pipeline.org/to-protect-and-serve/
I posted this Neo article on my Facebook page, first with an excerpt; and then with these comments. My page is open to the world to comment, so go here to comment
(1/4) Clarice, I got about halfway through the article; and already I’ve found at least three falsities; but it’s well worth noting Chief Arredondo only issued a statement a week after the massacre, *after* he met with an attorney.
1) The Uvalde PD back in 2018 tweeted, with a photo, they had a fully-equipped SWAT team, with ballistic vests;
2) It was already revealed the school PD had undergone an active shooter drill in March of this year; so any problems such as keys to access locked classrooms would have been revealed;
3) Anybody who has re-keyed a lock would know that we’ve had at least 2 levels of master keys besides individual room keys available since at least before WWII
4) Although the classroom door could not me kicked in because it had a steel jamb, in fact it could still be breached with a battering ram, a tool the SWAT team has.
5) Although Chief Arredondo took off and laid down his school and PD radios, he still had his cell phone on them. This is standard fare that cops carry a cell phone to have private conversations which are *not* recorded.
Another post of yours opined that today’s police are no more than armed bureaucrats, with NO duty to protect the public, as was decided in court after the 1984 massacre at a McDonald’s in San Ysidro, California
Here is Instapundit’s Ed Driscoll’s entry:
(2/4) Here is the article [Clarice Feldman] cited a few days ago:
Uvalde Shows Once Again That Cops Are Just Armed Bureaucrats: What happened in Uvalde is part of a pattern, not an aberration.
[Via Instapundit]
FTA: Police unions emphasize heroic “thin blue line” themes, as they portray officers as the only thing standing between civil society and disorder. Individual police occasionally act courageously, but such portrayals are vastly overblown. In my years covering these issues, I’ve found officers almost always behave like self-protecting bureaucrats rather than selfless heroes.
As Americans debate the proper response to the horrific mass shooting of schoolchildren in Uvalde, Texas, it’s important to dispense with our fanciful ideas about how police agencies operate. Toward that end, Uvalde’s school police chief and local police officials have provided Americans with a remarkable case study of real-world ineptitude.
Americans seem shocked by how police reacted while 18-year-old Salvador Ramos was shooting up Robb Elementary School, where he gunned down 19 children and two teachers. Ramos reportedly began firing at 11:33 a.m. Police reportedly arrived quickly, but didn’t breach locked classroom doors until 12:50, as trapped kids made desperate 911 calls.
Essentially, law enforcement behaved like armed bureaucrats. Large numbers of cops showed up. They hid behind walls to protect themselves. They milled around, conferred, and secured the perimeter, as the shooter emptied his weapon on helpless kids. They certainly wrote reports. As one headline noted, “Police delays may have deprived Texas schoolchildren of lifesaving care, experts say.” That’s a safe bet.
A few other items reinforce the bureaucratic tendencies of police agencies. On Thursday, police threatened to arrest journalists who gathered at the school district headquarters, which shows that officers often can be proactive when it suits them. Second, state officials accused school police of refusing to cooperate with a Department of Public Safety investigation after Texas officials criticized their inaction. Police offered shifting explanations.
Finally, ABC News reported that in March “the Uvalde school district hosted an all-day training session for local police and other school-based law enforcement officers focused on ‘active shooter response.'” So the police can’t pull out their usual flaccid, all-purpose response: “more training.” In a few months, police will no doubt be handing out valor medals. The city department already released a statement praising its officers’ actions.
Before you get too angry, remember that this is not unusual. It’s a pattern, not an aberration. The nation has so many mass shootings that it’s hard to keep track of them, but you’ll find the same complaints after each one. In truly dangerous scenarios, police have turned the “Blue Lives Matter” mantra into, “Only Blue Lives Matter.”
Police officials insist they changed their active-shooter protocols after the 1999 massacre at Columbine High School in Colorado, where two young men murdered 13 people and then killed themselves, as SWAT teams waited to engage. As CNN reported, that “watershed event” led police nationwide to head to the sound of gunfire rather than simply protect the perimeter and wait…
[:]
…As a lawsuit related to [the 1984 San Ysidro McDonald’s mass] shooting makes clear, the government (unlike the private sector) has virtually no liability when its failure causes the loss of life. Police agencies have won court victories affirming that they have no legal duty to protect anyone. Whenever police use deadly force, they say they did so because they feared for their lives. Defend it if you choose, but don’t call it heroic.
At the very least, we cannot expect that police officers always will protect us. Until Americans face that reality, we’ll never create effective policies to combat mass shootings.
(3/4) OK, I read the whole article, and scrolled through the comments—the usual salient plus drivel—and here were some more points which stood out:
• Chief Arredondo did indeed have a cell phone on him;
• The issue of master keys and emergency access—especially fire department—has been addressed for at least 40 years, complete with UL listings required for anything related to fire. The most common emergency access vault is the Knox Box, which uses a special key fire departments have. and even the lowly Knox Box 3200 would hold 10 keys. You’ve seen the squiggly keyslots in the lobby call station and in the cab on the button panel which says “Fire Department
• When I perused the Knox Box website first I watched the 3-minute YouTube with video (turn on the closed captions as the audio wasn’t that clear), I found it asked me first to select my state and town to find out which first responders support it, and which products I could use, so contractors could select and order supported products; or I could click the link which says “I’m just browsing — Close this Window” … Click that box, else the website deposits cookies messing things up; and then click:
https://www.knoxbox.com/Products/Commercial-KnoxBoxes to see everything; and
https://www.knoxbox.com/KNOX/media/KNOX/SpecSheet_KnoxBox3200_W_1.pdf?ext=.pdf to see the basic Model 3200
• Here’s a 1-minute video on the Knox Box 3200.
• When I plugged in where my private high school in Burlington City, NJ is located, it came back with the Knox Box 3200 which holds 10 keys; but when I plugged in Uvalde, TX it came back with no supported products. There are other vendors and Uvalde may be using them, but Knox is one of the most common, as I’ve seen their products all over.
• The person who can answer this question as to what they use is the city or county Fire Marshall, as unlike police, they need the fastest access 24/7.
(4/4) Here are a few salient comments I found in the Neo article; but to put them in context, read the full article first:
• The key problem makes a certain amount of sense if every room had a different lock (possible, if stupid) and those locks were never engaged other than in a drill (likely). We have multiple levels of master keys where I work. The key I’m issued when I come on duty (I’m armed security at a federal facility) will open I’d estimate 98% of the doors in the facility. Maintenance keys would probably be 90%. My supervisors would be 99.9% and there are only a tiny number of doors that can only be opened by their supervisors. I can only assume this costs more to set up.
The school has probably not had one individual in charge of locks and things have been done strictly on a one-by-one basis over multiple years with no planning.
• One detail on this that puzzles me is that the room keys seem to have been unlabeled. It would seem to me that to ensure rapid access to the rooms in the school in case of emergency having a full set of keys marked with the number of the rooms they could open would be an obvious precaution.
• The key issue mystifies me. I worked in a public high school for a couple of years, call it 10 years ago. There was a master key that opened every door in the building, and I used it frequently in my job there. Why wouldn’t that school have a master key? Who in their right mind would design a public school building without it? I don’t get it.
• Buildings like schools have a “Knox box” which holds keys that can get first responders inside the building. It’s primarily a fire department thing. [Ed. This is what jogged my memory on them ~DLS] That’s as much as I know. I’m not sure police could get in the Knox box without the fire department. I’m not sure if they contain a master key that gets them in individual rooms. The contents vary from property to property.
Most buildings like that (a school) have a master key that will get you in (almost) EVERY door. It’s possible that a master key might be in the Knox box, I don’t know. Buildings that grow by accretion might not have one master key because someone messed up on keying newer locks.
Where I used to work, I had a master key; I was a senior facilities person. There were very, VERY few locks I couldn’t access without it … I don’t see an elementary school having too many rooms the principal couldn’t / wouldn’t / shouldn’t be able to access…
(About fifteen years ago or so, there was a scandal in Marin where someone stole the access key to the Knox Boxes in the fire district. The Fire District had to shell out a lot of money to replace Knox boxes.)
• It will be interesting to learn what changes get made in schools across the country because of what happened in Uvalde.
It will undoubtedly be hampered by supply chain problems and personnel shortages (as well as the basic personnel inadequacies and risk aversion that plague all staunchly bureaucratic organizations), but I’d guess a lot of schools will be — or, at least, should be — different when the fall term begins, both in physical plant and operational considerations.
The same should be true of any medium to large private corporation.
It’s a primary tenet of OPSEC that one does not discuss one’s security measures, but if reasonable change occurs a fair amount will become well known, and some revelations will have a positive effect, that of deterrence, at least for those organizations who actually implement, and just as important, maintain them.
Security, especially high security, is a Level One PITA; the challenge is always creating and maintaining high security that functions as designed without being so intrusive that going around it becomes popular sport. [Ed. Lock picking has been a sport at MIT for over a century! ~DLS]
• Apparently no other cops had radios.
Did you ever see firemen waiting 70 minutes to get in a building? Me neither. They have tools for that that either the cops or firemen could have used.
It was the chief’s incident the minute he arrived. Every cop had a radio but him. He could have taken one or more and maintained command or handed it off. He chose neither.
Who did he think WAS in command?
• “School police chief Arredondo.”
If this is the *school* police, then the *school* police chief is responsible for a key not being available. What is he doing with his time if not at least running drills with his officers to see how the plans work? [Ed. In fact the Uvalde school PD &/or PD had an active shooter drill in March. ~DLS] That’s also a probable fire code violation; how can a school have doors that lock children into rooms without having a readily available key for emergency responders? Again, who should be responsible for having that key, the night janitor?
• Despite all attempts to break the event down into microscopic pieces, this simple reductionism remains the best setup:
“Start with what is known: they did nothing for a long period of time, and he was in charge. Work your way backwards from there.”
• I am a former elementary school principal and I always understood that one of my chief duties was the safety of the kids and the staff. I have yet to see any mention of the principal in this whole affair. Where was the principal from start to finish? In every building I worked, the principal, the janitor and the front desk secretary had a set of master keys. The police should have been dealing with the principal not the janitor. [See next comment for overflow]
• I found a number of statements in the linked article [Ed. No link provided ~DLS] contradicting each other.
“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.”
None of them were marked? If so, are we to imagine that every time the janitor needs to get into a locked schoolroom he goes through those 26-36 keys… each time at every locked door?
Then it’s claimed that finally, Arredondo was called on his cellphone and told they’d found the key to the schoolroom(s). How did they know they’d found the right key? Was that one key marked? If so, wouldn’t the janitor know that?
What about the principal, who in an initial report (that hasn’t to my knowledge been corrected) was the person who finally opened the door?
Arredondo claims he never issued orders to stand down. Other police agencies claim he did… who’s telling the truth?
If Arredondo considered himself not to be the on scene authority, wouldn’t he have wanted to know who was… as establishing on scene authority is Policing 101 for cops.
I’m not suggesting Arredondo is necessarily lying but this simply doesn’t add up for me. It doesn’t pass the smell test.
“It was the chief’s incident the minute he arrived. Every cop had a radio but him.” [Ed. Another commenter ~DLS]
Reportedly, all the cops outside the schoolroom had their radios turned off, apparently to keep the killer from firing at the sound of their voices.
Arredondo had a cell phone on him the entire time. He did call out and they did reach him to inform him they’d found the key. So if he didn’t know what the situation was outside the school that was his choice. He could have positioned one cop at the school entrance to act as a liaison to the outside to bring any pertinent info to him.
If Arredondo wasn’t directing the response outside the school then who was? Again as the School Police Chief that would have been essential info for him. As if he’s not in charge he needed to defer to whomever was in charge, in order to facilitate a coordinated response, which makes linked communications essential.
Again, I posted the Neo article on my Facebook page, first with an excerpt; and then with these comments. My page is open to the world to comment, so go here to comment.
Dan Schwartz,
Atlanta~
“Eighty minutes. That’s the amount of time that elapsed on May 24 between the first report of trouble at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Tex., and the moment the gunman was shot and killed. We are understandably dismayed by this. How, we ask, when there were so many police officers at the school within minutes of the first 911 call, can it have taken so long to confront the gunman?”
https://the-pipeline.org/to-protect-and-serve/
“He noted that some 500 students from the school were safely evacuated during the crisis…”
500 students got out of the school, and yet no cops could get in?
Oh, and the shooter was shot by a private citizen (an off-duty border patrol agent) using a shotgun he borrowed from his barber. Not shot by the cops.
Maybe this is true. Another question is how was the gunmen able to get in the classroom? Shots were fired outside. A teacher supposedly slammed an outside door shut that mysteriously failed to latch. This implies some period of time of alarm to the school before he got in. How long does it take to lock the classroom door. Did he try to get in other rooms before this one? No one wants to be critical of dead teachers but the questions must be asked? Also, was this shooter the same person arrested as a juvenile for threatening the school?
So you are telling us that it took over 1 1/2 hours to get the keys and try to open the door?
The fire department did not have Halligan Entry Tool? Firemen can routinely open metal frame doors in seconds.
They are lying to cover their cowardice and incompetence.
DoctorofLove. Get a grip. Cops were in the school, some of them evacuating kids. Some initially engaged Ramos.
Once Ramos was forted up in a classroom behind a reinforced door, the number of cops otherwise in the building was irrelevant.
How does slamming a door which failed to latch start an alarm? Is there an alarm each time the door is opened as you sometimes see on emergency exits in, especially, retail buildings?
No, somebody would have had to call whoever stands next to the general alarm button most of the day, hoping they’re standing next to the general alarm button. And answer the question, “Are you sure? What’s going on?” After which somebody who feels–possibly assigned–authority to punch the button without conferring with higher authority does so. Couple of minutes. How, come to think of it, does a staff member at the north end of a building call the admin at the south end?. Go ahead. Dial somebody. Hands not shaking, right. Count the seconds before the other end starts to ring.
It was said, when I was in the Army, that surprise drills usually found the troops lying in bed at two in the morning with full equipment including boots and LBE. One unit, accidentally alerted, thought it was the real thing and were “up” faster than any “surprise” drill, although shower shoes and a towel don’t usually count as uniform.
Used to be, everybody knew what to do with a fire drill. Line up, out the door. Until, was it Jonesboro, AR? when things got more complicated.
A shooter drill would necessarily be far more complex and…get the kids worried, too. Human nature would be to do it rarely and, instead, talk about required responses as part of staff meetings.
Some stupid stuff has been done, including getting fake shooters into the school. Nobody wondered whether a visiting parent might take them down. Should have. Or a substitute teacher.
There are two levels of complaint here: Should-have-had arguments and, without the should-have-hads, what should-have-been-done.
In the latter case, every suggestion is absolutely guaranteed to work just as it looks like when you type it out.
To make an analogy: Lancet recently published a piece showing school mask mandates were useless. I can imagine–with a great deal of satisfaction–the smug, self-righteous mask-the-kids bozos who felt so superior to the science deniers. Now, losing their sense of moral, intellectual and scientific wonderfulness to the “science deniers”. It will be such a traumatic loss that they will never accept the Lancet’s conclusion.
The savage, self-satisfied implications from those slagging the cops is so apparent that…any information exonerating this or that action could not possibly be acceptable.
On another site, a guy uses a street view to show the access door was sheltered from gunfire and could be worked on. Wrong door, moron. But he’s happy.
Pix of the school show windows which aren’t going to be blown out in a glorious, macho explosion of shattered glass, but which instead have panes maybe a foot high and the width of the window opening, with steel sash. Aww, bummer.
I read this long article twice and I still think that the police chief is a gutless incompetent coward
Can anyone post a link to scaled plan-view schematic drawings of the schoolrooms with hallways, including locations of windows, interior and exterior doors? How about a link to a map of the school buildings with indication of the location of the rooms 111 & 112 under attack, as well as a general view of surrounding grounds, roads, footpaths, avenue of the murderer’s approach, etc.?
Time was these sorts of information — fundamental to understanding the situation at all — were a commonplace in news reporting. Nowadays, not so much, if they’re to be found at all, much to my chagrin.
However that may be, my thanks in advance to whoever may be of help finding such links.
sdferr
Google Earth will give you overhead and slant views if you manipulate the thing correctly. You will have street views available if a Google Earth vehicle has driven by with their cameras working. You’d be surprise the mileage they’ve covered around the world, so, possibly.
Inside would be some other source.
I’ve long-ago and just yesterday looked at satellite views there Mr. Aubrey, so no worries on that score. However, none of the information I seek is there. Other information, sure, and useful too. But not what I want. I might add, a few days back, on initiative I looked through neo’s extensive postings and many links therein, but came away empty handed. I reckon I probably wasn’t assiduous enough, though I spent a good deal of time at it.
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…
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.
—-
So he already knew all this, presumably from the drills they executed (one as recently as March), and yet STILL hadn’t planned for how to mitigate these issues in the event of any emergency, let alone the school shooting they allegedly ran drills on.
Being gracious, perhaps he decided from the drills that using his cell phone was the way to mitigate it. If so why wasn’t the number given to the city police or dispatch? And if he can’t hold a radio because he wants to keep his hands free, how was he planning on using the cell phone? Ear bud? Again, he drilled this two months ago, so presumably he drilled it under the assumption that he would be actively hunting the shooter through the hallways where he would need his gun in both hands… so how was he planning on communicating in the traditional non-barricaded Columbine/Parkland shooter scenario that he probably trained for? He *knew* radios were an issue and he had at least two months to find a suitable comm alternative and by his own actions proved he had FAILED to do so. I am content to let him shoulder the blame for that, which is an epic failure.
And it’s not like comm issues hadnt featured in other school shootings (e.g. Parkland in 2018). IIRC, comm issues were a significant contributing factor to the delayed and confused response there, so there should have been revised protocols, right?
The key thing still bothers me too. I mean hell, what happens if a teacher collapsed alone in the room and EMTs had to get in because she couldn’t get to the door? As for school shooting scenarios in particular, did they never anticipate the possibility of needing to get in a vacant classroom in order to use the interior door between classrooms to create a safer path to evacuate children (say if the shooter were outside the building in front of classroom 101 and it’s safer to get in 102 and evacuate them using the interclassroom door, or in hindsight, divide a shooters attention between two entry points? Or that the kids might be too scared to open the door for anyone if the shooter killed their teacher and moved on? Maybe not, but you would think that someone on that six man district police force would’ve thought of it during tabletop exercises or live drills. And as someone else noted, you expect me to believe the janitor tries every one of the 30 keys at every door every night that he cleans the school? I straight up call bullshit on that. Someone fucked up hard with the keys. Not sure it was the cops, but still.
I believe, on no particular evidence, that public building’s specs are publicly available except they’re not because somebody might use them to bad ends.
OTOH, I’ve seen them here and there.
The overhead shows the high school layout as being particularly complicated.
From overhead, Uvalde looks as if there are any number of sides with doors not visible from other sides.
However, he did things which should have attracted the attention of LE prior to entering the building. One question is how long from crashing the truck to entering the school? Cops can’t be everywhere and it takes time to get from one place to another. Sandy Hook…took fifteen minutes for a pretty little town.
But…five minutes? Ten? Our savagely efficient keyboard Rambos would have been all over his ass in less than seven seconds, count on it.
sdferr: your request for maps rings so true. I know, we are all geolocated now but in fact we humans need maps and building plans. Did the chief of PD have them and use them? Did his team?
What happened to spatial literacy in a world of GPS?
How could anyone in the tactical stack pretend to competence if they did not have continuous and fine-grained command of the 3-D situation for themselves, their compadres, the kids and the assailant?
In this instance Owen, I need the maps and plan-views because I’ve never been at Ross Ele. in my flesh. Were I there, able to walk into a hall, say, and see for myself any similar two classrooms I’d have everything to understand precisely what I do not now, in mere seconds of observation. I wouldn’t know the disposition of deceased and injured children and adults in the rooms, nor with any precision the location of the demon gunman within, but would at least know where he may possibly be found. And if he moves or fires, would then have that further information to work with. From here, however, I got nothin’.
Mission accomplished
https://mobile.twitter.com/PartymanRandy/status/1536028473726205954?cxt=HHwWhICw1cbwiNEqAAAA
Mission accomplished
Bullshit.
“For the want of a nail… ” enters my thoughts often. When people fail to do their duty. When people ignore their duty. When people ascribe to a false narrative and fail to know or acknowledge their duty. It is a very significant problem in the United States in 2022.
Todd Rundgren wrote and performed a beautiful song on the subject:
https://youtu.be/gNY6-BqUieg
Richard Aubrey:
The police got there extremely fast. The timeline was given in the McCraw press conference on May 27 and is this:
11:28 a.m.: The shooter crashes a pickup truck into a ditch behind the school. He is carrying a semi-automatic rifle. He opens fire on two people outside a nearby business who escaped uninjured.
11:30 a.m.: The first 911 call about a crash and shots fired outside the school is made.
11:32-33 a.m.: The shooter enters the school through a propped-open door, enters one of two connected fourth-grade classrooms, locks the door, and begins firing. He can travel from one room to the other via an internal unlocked door between them, and does.
11:35 a. m.: Police arrive and enter the building.
You can see that the police response was extremely quick.
Also, some police officers (probably not the same ones, but I don’t know) had responded shortly before to the shooting of the grandmother at her house. I don’t recall whether the police who got to the school were aware that it was the same young man who had shot his grandmother a few minutes earlier.
Megan:
Arredondo communicated via cell phone with headquarters, so obviously they had his number. I believe it is likely that there was so much turmoil, confusion, and stress at headquarters that they failed to inform him of the 911 calls. I assume he felt a cell phone would have to do – particularly since the radios didn’t seen to work well in many of the schools.
This is a relatively poor community and it’s likely the police department didn’t have the funds to modernize what was needed to be modernized. They were not prepared for the magnitude and nature of what occurred, despite drills. It would be informative to learn what the drills actually consisted of and what they were prepared for. My guess, however, is that most towns of 15,000 are likewise unprepared, although my guess is also that they have a better key system. The key system in Uvalde seems to have been especially archaic and disorganized. Who was in charge of that? – the principal, the janitor, the school administrators? What were the rules and guidelines? What sort of key system was Robb Elementary supposed to have, and did they have it? If not, why not?
Some reporter should find out whether the keys were numbered or not, or misnumbered, or what. The article doesn’t say. My guess (and it’s only a guess) is that, if the story Arredondo tells in the article is accurate, either the keys were unlabeled or more likely some were mislabeled or the particular keys to those particular rooms were missing from the ring or misplaced, and Arredondo was just trying all the keys in the hopes that a key to another room would also open 111 or 112. That makes more sense to me. But I wish the reporter had asked for that information and included it.
sdferr:
I’m not sure what information you’d like that you lack. Many many MSM articles published diagrams of the school as well as overhead shots. You can find them by doing a search for “Robb Elementary diagrams” and “images.” For example, see these. More than that I can’t help you with.
By the way, Ulvade is a small town and many of the police had kids at the school and knew it well. Arredondo, for example, had grown up in Uvalde and gone to Robb Elementary as a child.
Richard Aubrey:
Good try in your reply to DoctorofLove. But the Ulvade-cop-hating crowd doesn’t want to get a grip. Clearly you’re aware of that, but they would rather spin their wheels and show how much smarter they are even though they misstate the facts over and over.
Many of them remind me of 9/11-Truthers. It seems to be fairly common human tendency.
Sam:
The article says that Arredondo called for those tools and they never came. He called for keys at about the same time, and it was keys that finally opened the door:
It later says that the tools “never materialized.” The keys did.
There were firefighters at the scene, but they were securing the perimeter and helping to evacuate the children. Uvalde has an all-volunteer fire department, so I believe they came from other jobs or home rather than a central place like a firehouse. If they carried such tools with them, it’s unclear why they weren’t used but it does appear that Arredondo called for them. Was headquarters tasked with finding them, and failed? It’s perplexing, but it’s not as though we can all think of this and they didn’t think of it; they did think of it but for some reason the tools never came.
As I’ve said many times, we need a lot more information.
Also, I’m trying to think of a single previous school shooting where the shooter remained holed up in the same room as the victims, having locked the door behind him. Usually in such shootings there is no locked door, and often the perp kills himself when police enter the building or even beforehand. My guess is that they didn’t anticipate this situation because there was no precedent for it. I would be very curious to know whether there was a precedent for it (the living perp behind the locked door that still contained victims who were not deceased), and whether other school districts have planned for that sort of thing prior to the Uvalde shooting. My guess is that many have not, especially relatively small towns like this one. I bet they will plan for it now, though, as well as pay a lot more attention to modernizing their key system if it’s still old-fashioned or disorganized.
Also, I don’t know how you get an hour and a half to get the keys. The police only entered the school at 11:35 and the shooter was dead by 12:50. That’s an hour and a quarter. Take off the time it took to get to the correct classroom door, engage the shooter, get pushed back by gunfire, regroup, speak to headquarters, request the tools, and then request the keys. Let’s say that all took ten or fifteen minutes, which brings it down to an hour till the perp was killed. We don’t know when the first set of keys came, but certainly it took quite a bit less than an hour, and then the second set, and then finally the third set (the correct set) was obtained. Then they had to organize the way the BorTac team would enter. How long did that take? We don’t know, but a few minutes probably. So I’d guess it took between 50 and 55 minutes to get the correct keys and ascertain that they were the correct keys.
I don’t think anyone isn’t shocked by the disorganization of that, but it isn’t an hour and a half.
See also my reply to Megan here.
It just seems like innocents die and the ghouls use that opportunity to deprive of our rights again. Maybe they did all they could but it wasnt enough.
Miguel cervantes:
Every shooting is an opportunity to the left towards achieving their goal of limiting the 2nd Amendment more and more.
But a significant proportion of the right seems to take it as an opportunity to vent hatred on the rescuers for not doing enough, before they even know what the rescuers did do and what was even possible to do. Sitting at home, safe in front of a computer, and with incomplete information, they think of the way they would have done it successfully of course.
Thanks neo, some of my questions were answered by those maps, photos, diagrams and schematics. Unfortunately the linedrawings of the classrooms/hallways are terribly crude, lacking scaled door openings, swings, window openings missing altogether, and so on. It’s better than nothing though.
sdferr:
You’re welcome.
I do so many searches that I often can get creative in finding something.
“Cops can’t be everywhere and it takes time to get from one place to another. Sandy Hook…took fifteen minutes for a pretty little town.
But…five minutes? Ten? Our savagely efficient keyboard Rambos would have been all over his ass in less than seven seconds, count on it.” Richard Aubrey
It’s a small town, plenty of cops arrived fairly quickly. Ramos entered at 11:33. The cops entered the room at 1:50.
It took that long to locate the key? Why? Answers are needed not ‘well, that’s how it went down’.
In all that time, breaching Eq. was never found?
As others here have mentioned, the Fire Dept. has the Eq. no one thought to call upon them? Even if a volunteer dept. the cops have the fire dept. personnel’s phone #s.
Those are the primary questions, the primary issues in evaluating the police response.
Come on, this isn’t rocket science. School shooter drills had recently been conducted. School shooter drills break down into obvious response trees; is a single or multiple shooters involved? Are they outside or inside the school? If inside, where are they? As you work through the scenarios, you have to arrive at the scenario where the shooter is in a locked room with victims because that’s one of the most difficult scenarios. Is a master key available and if so, who has it? If not, why not? What must be done to ensure there’s always a master key available, if needed?
Etc, etc. Competent training involves practicing for each major scenario.
Expecting a basic, commonsense level of competence is not holding the Uvalde cops to an unreasonable standard. That’s not expecting perfection and allows for screw ups. But it doesn’t excuse a failure to meet a minimum level of competence.
If you look at all the unanswered questions and mind boggling circumstances mentioned here, like the situation with the keys and it doesn’t raise questions of at least competence, if not a cover up, then the question arises of whether there’s even a desire to know what actually happened.
IF, once the investigation is concluded those questions are answered satisfactorily then fine, exoneration of the individuals involved is warranted.
But given the ‘puzzling’ circumstances, assuming the cops on scene to be competent is not warranted.
Hard questions need to be answered.
Those dead kid’s parents deserve an honest, straightforward response to their questions.
To fail to provide them confers complicity in future school shootings because unanswered questions ensure future inadequate responses.
CJ Phaedrus:
Ramos was not the same person as the juvenile who had threatened the school years earlier. There was some early suspicion about that, but some official or other announced that it was definitely not the case.
As far as what happened with alarms and lockdowns, there is a lot of information but some of it is slightly confusing (in particular some of the child survivors have contradicted each other in the information they give, which is very common with eyewitnesses and certainly with children under such conditions of great stress). Here’s the best I could piece it together.
The lockdown was announced just before the perp entered the building through the unlocked outer door. It was announced because there was a bulletin that shots were fired nearby (at the two people who witnessed the crash in front of the school). So they knew there was a shooter nearby, plus he immediately came on school grounds and for a minute (initially reported as longer, but it was about a minute) he fired at some school windows. Then he entered the school a minute or so after the lockdown was announced.
The protocol for announcing a lockdown there was that teachers had to have cellphones that connected to an alert system, and an alert was sounded telling them to lockdown (I believe with one of those very loud sounds that really gets your attention). So why the delay in at least one classroom? One child reported in an interview that the teacher had finding “finding the key.” But I find that confusing – why would a key be necessary to lock the door from the inside? Was it so students wouldn’t lock it themselves?? And if a key was necessary, then how did the perp lock the door after himself, which he apparently did? Was the key already in or near the door? Or was the child mistaken, or misquoted? Another child simply said the teacher got the message and had arrived at the door to lock it when the perp walked in. Those are the only two accounts I’ve heard. That’s the sort of thing I would guess the investigators are trying to sort out.
“they did think of it but for some reason the tools never came.” neo
Why did they not come? That’s not a question that can be dismissed. Nor can the questions surrounding the difficulty in getting the right key be dismissed.
I think someone already mentioned this, but weren’t they were bragging about having their own SWAT team on Facebook two years ago? Seems like that should come with the necessary SWAT shields, breaching tools and the like, no? I mean, I guess I can see the populace objecting to “unnecessary spending” for a swat team but they must’ve had the shit at one point so where did it go and why did it take over an hour to get equipment from a border patrol tactical team?
Even trying to give the benefit of the doubt, I can’t find a way to make some of this add up.
DoctorOfLove:
Plenty of cops were in the school, and the kids were evacuated from outside through the windows by other officers of various sorts as well as firefighters. It’s well documented in articles with photos, as well as interviews. They used the windows instead of halls because it was quick and also safer. The school has only one story.
Your information about who shot the perp is incorrect.
Erasmus:
The article to which you linked is a typical rush-to-judgment without enough information on the specific details of the events at Uvalde. Those pieces are certainly a dime a dozen these days.
Dan Schwartz, Atlanta:
That’s a very long comment you wrote, and I don’t have time to answer every point.
So I’ll just take the first few points as examples of the problems with the objections you list there:
(1) “Chief Arredondo only issued a statement a week after the massacre, *after* he met with an attorney…”
My response: he actually issued a very brief statement on the day of the shooting shortly after it occurred. The YouTube video of his statement can be found here (the audio is low). He says an investigation is ongoing and more information will be issued later in line with that. He is very subdued; this is right after experiencing this terrible event. And then on the 26th, all the recriminations and accusations against the Uvalde police spread (it had already started in Uvalde with the parents outside the school that day) and the police were receiving death threats, etc.. In addition, his second cousin, who was married to one of the murdered teachers, died of a heart attack. I think if he’d given interviews before being lawyered up he would have been a complete fool.
(2) “The Uvalde PD back in 2018 tweeted, with a photo, they had a fully-equipped SWAT team, with ballistic vests”
That was discussed at this blog in some depth days ago, in this thread. Yes, we know about that photo, but it doesn’t tell us what the cops actually possessed that day and why, or what Arredondo (not a member of the regular Uvalde police, but of the school police) had access to that day. The interview is the first concrete discussion I’ve seen of the issue, and as I point out, we still don’t know what the other cops wore that day and why or why not.
(3) “It was already revealed the school PD had undergone an active shooter drill in March of this year; so any problems such as keys to access locked classrooms would have been revealed”
Easy for us to say, but we don’t know whether that question was ever brought up (it should have been, but again I repeat that I can’t think of a previous school shooter who was holed up in a LOCKED classroom, alive, with students some of whom were dead, some wounded, and some unhurt.) One would have to know if that’s a common part of such drills, and why or why not, and specifically whether it was part of the Uvalde drill. We simply don’t know at this point.
(3) ” Anybody who has re-keyed a lock would know that we’ve had at least 2 levels of master keys besides individual room keys available since at least before WWII”
Indeed, but what did the Uvalde school have, was it available that day, and if not then why not? We don’t know the answers yet.
(4) “Although the classroom door could not me kicked in because it had a steel jamb, in fact it could still be breached with a battering ram, a tool the SWAT team has.”
The article states that Arredondo called for all those things but they were never provided. We don’t know why they weren’t provided or how available they were, or how long it would or should have taken, or who was at fault, if anyone, for the failure in that regard. But he apparently asked for them. That’s a good case – and there are many – of areas in which we may learn that he was at fault or that someone else was at fault, but we just don’t have enough information yet to answer. We do know that this was a small town and a relatively impoverished one.
I could go on and on, but you get the idea.
As far as the article you linked to goes, by Clarice Feldman, it demonstrates what I’ve been talking about – assumptions and generalizations prior to knowing what actually occurred in Uvalde. When I make judgments, I don’t assume that each case is like the others. I wait to know more about the case at hand before I make a judgment. I wish other people did that, but it seems a great great many people refuse to wait till they know more. They are often wrong, but they don’t have to admit it, either because they never read the full report, or because their minds are already made it and they reject it, or because they simply move on to the next generalization.
But I find that confusing – why would a key be necessary to lock the door from the inside?
A possible answer — not by any means exhaustive — is that if (if!) the door has a glass pane any button lock could be defeated. On that assumption, then indeed the key must be available to the demon in order to lock the door.
Megan:
“Bragging”? Please quote the “bragging” Facebook entry. Also, as I’ve said already (and I’m getting really tired of playing repeated whack-a-mole), Arredondo said he called for a SWAT team and it didn’t arrive. That certainly doesn’t seem to have been his fault. If true – and it may indeed be true that there was a SWAT team that should have arrived and didn’t – then it’s someone’s fault. We need more information to find out if this is so, and if so who or what entity was at fault.
And that’s what an investigation is ordinarily about – finding that stuff out. It doesn’t happen in a day or a few days or a week or a few weeks. It usually takes considerably longer if done right.
@Turtler on June 11, 2022 at 11:01 pm:
From one of your links:
“There was chaos at the waggons, the ammunition boxes being closed. Each box had the middle third top section as a sliding lid, held in position with only one cheese head brass screw, which when removed allowed the lid easily to slide out, revealing the tinlining which was easily opened by pulling on a tin strap in one corner. The whole procedure took a few minutes. . . .
In battle a few minutes can be a very long time. At Isandlwana it was a very long time indeed: one might say a lifetime, which proved very short for the British soldiers on the firing line as their mates worked the required “few minutes” to open each and every box. Here I would note that the battle unfolded at terrifying speed. The Zulus moved very fast and were not to be stopped. Your source goes on to say:
“. . . the complaint made after the battle by the few survivors, that the difficulty in opening the ammo-boxes was the cause of the men not obtaining enough cartridges is blatantly incorrect.”
It is not “blatantly” incorrect; it is not even incorrect. The “delay of a few minutes” for each box” proved cumulative. The fact remains that the British soldier were not provided with enough ammunition in a timely fashion. The distance of the ammo wagons from fire line contributed to the problem.
“The Washing of the Spears” by Donald Morris is generally considered the best book about the Zulu War. I can’t recall what Morris had to say about the ammo problem. I’ll have to check it out.
The brits recovered at the battle of ulundi, if memory serves one wonders id lord chelmsford and bartle freres ever had any regrets about the matter.
The ammo box procedure is shown quite accurately in the second link I posted from Zulu Dawn.
https://www.1879zuluwar.com/t165-ammunition-boxes
Mike Mahoney:
The police are reported to have gotten in through the outer door, the same one the killer got in through. So getting into the school was no problem. Getting into the room was a problem.
Breaching tools were requested but not delivered. As for finding them in hardware stores, I just did a quick search to see whether that’s possible, and I don’t see the sort of tools needed for that door readily available in hardware stores. They can be gotten by mail order – I’m not sure exactly the right tools, but surely more specialized ones that I see at hardware stores in stock. But mail order obviously wouldn’t have accomplished anything that day.
If you think they were so commonly available at hardware stores, you need to provide a link to a hardware store in Uvalde or nearby that carries the sort of tool that would breach that sort of door, and has it in stock.
Then there’s your question: “How did the off duty BP officer get in a totally locked down school?” That didn’t happen. See this. That story was an early rumor that was false.
You also ask: “How did the woman/mother/handcuffed get in?”
You are almost certainly referring to Angeli Rose Gomez, who has been telling this story. However, nothing she says has been authenticated by anyone else, as far as I can tell – and I’ve researched it because I’m curious. For example, see this. It was US marshals she argued with, and they say she never was handcuffed, nor are there any photos or videos of that as far as I can see.
In addition, she says that she drove 40 miles to the school after hearing of the shooting. It had to have taken at least five or ten minutes to hear of the shooting, and how long to drive the 40 miles there? That means she would probably have gotten there after the children were evacuated. Time stamps, etc., from teachers, indicate that the evacuation was complete by a few minutes after noon. Even by the timeframe of her own story, she would have gotten there after the evacuation. Apparently the children were taken to an area where parents could claim them, after the evacuation. I recall this area as being somewhere on the school campus. At that point, that’s probably where her children would have been.
This woman is the hero of her own story. Although that may indeed be true, I think that the lack of any corroboration, plus the timeline, indicate that she is exaggerating as well perhaps even making up some parts of it, for attention. In addition, she has said they are trying to silence her, and then there’s this:
It sounds very fishy to me, and the lack of anyone but Gomez herself corroborating her story seems odd as well. She is the hero and everyone else is at fault. What is her probation about, ten years later? That doesn’t sound like a minor infraction.
I have searched and searched to find independent corroboration of her story. I haven’t been able to find any so far. The MSM just says she told them this and she told them this, and loves her story because she casts herself as the hero and everyone else as the villain, and the MSM takes it at face value because it fits the narrative.
@Turtler on June 11, 2022 at 11:01 pm:
As well (to my point, and yours), the author of the article you linked, “Firepower and Firearms in the Zulu War of 1879,” makes mention of a mere “trickle of supplies” (e.g., ammunition) arriving at the firing line, and attributes this to “the fact that each company or section did not have its own ammunition supply readily at hand, and thus the long distances of many of the companies from their ammunition waggons resulted in the loss of valuable, and as it turned out, vital time”; to which I would add the “few minutes delay” in opening each ammo box also resulted in the loss of “valuable, vital time” and a “trickle” of supplies instead of the needed steady flow thereof.
The same author goes on, in this context, to make mention of the “drying up of the available ammunition, and the resultant drop in the firepower” on the part of the British. In other words: the British soldiers on the firing line were running out of ammunition, and for the reasons discussed.
I am NOT suggesting that the British lost the battle because of delays in getting sufficient quantities ammunition to the troops on the firing line.
Breaching tools were requested but not delivered.
Requested from the Firemen, trucks, or Fire Department I venture to assume. Which I’m given to understand were present outside the school within a reasonable period of time after the beginning of the crisis.
So I marvel at the missing simple expedient: within a short while 7 officers are said to be in the school and proximate to the schoolrooms — why then wasn’t even one dispatched to run out to a firetruck and grab the needful tool? I mean it’s less than a cityblock away, right? Go get it. Get it now. Bring it back and don’t come back without it.
https://nypost.com/2022/05/28/unclear-if-uvalde-swat-team-responded-to-texas-school-shooting/
https://www.mediaite.com/news/watch-uvalde-swat-team-performs-successful-breach-at-a-2019-opening-ceremony-demo/
They had a demo to show off how awesomely trained they were. If that isn’t bragging I don’t know what is.
And you know as well as I do that Arrendondo and his team weren’t the only cops there, nor did I say in my recent post regarding the swat team that it was Arredondos failure specifically. I was observing that Uvalde had a swat team and thus should have at least had gear… and yet it never arrived. You agree that someone failed to act on the SWAT request. Ergo, SOMEONE in the police department fucked up. Maybe they stored all the gear in a locked room and no one could find the key. It would be tragically poetic.
As for getting tired of whack a mole, I get tired of the constant water carrying for the Uvalde cops in the face of obvious, indisputable failures and I get tired of this idea that we can’t have any opinion critical of their response until ALL the information is out.
You will never have all the information. Ever. Especially when everyone is in CYA mode. At some point you have to decide whether the behavior was reasonable for a police dept allegedly trained to deal with such scenarios. I have come to the conclusion that some of this was a systemic failure that Parkland should have made less likely. That some of it was foreseeable and thus preventable. YMMV.
With that, I’m taking my leave of this thread.
Now were outnumbered 10/1 even a maxim gun can do so much to square the balance.
(Continued from above):
In my opinion (recalling from memory, which is problematic), the PRECIPITATE (but still not the only) cause of the British defeat was the turning and collapse of Younghusband’s force on the lower flank of the British position.
And, BTW, Durnford’s force, for the most part, DID run out of ammunition.
Lord carnavon was the father of howard carter if memory serves
One might say it was a pyrrhic victory for cetswayo for what would come later
Megan:
I most definitely expect to have enough information to make a decision, as I have many times before. You don’t seem to understand my point, which is certainly NOT that this was handled well or that there weren’t errors. In fact the errors may have been egregious. The outcome was certainly awful.
But as I’ve said before, I don’t point fingers at specific people without knowledge and cause, and I find it unjust and destructive when people do.
A Facebook page showing the purported resources of a police department is very standard information offering. That you automatically tag it with the pejorative “bragging” is interesting. Provide a link so others can judge for themselves.
As for the fire engines and the tools, you have no idea who tried to communicate what to them, and where the failure to get tools lay. It obviously appears to be some sort of failure; that is easy to see. But we need to know more before we know how or what failed and why. That also seems quite obvious.
As for the fire engines and the tools, you have no idea who tried to communicate what to them, and where the failure to get tools lay. It obviously appears to be some sort of failure; that is easy to see. But we need to know more before we know how or what failed and why. That also seems quite obvious.
Very well. Though I in no way claimed to “know” any of it, I’ll just shut the fuck up then.
And that is the downtown abbey estate isnt it
Megan:
A classic song from the old west may revive your energy and spirits:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Uai7M4RpoLU
🙂
According to the timeline laid out in reports Neo gives us;
The first time Ramos should have come to the attention of LE was when he crashed the truck. But that doesn’t actually start the clock unless LE is standing there watching.
More than likely, somebody sees it and sees Ramos getting out, apparently unharmed and thus is not likely going to call the cops.
Ramos starts shooting at somebody and moves toward the school.
Somebody, maybe, calls the cops.
They hustle right over, whatever that looks like at that time and in that place.
So unless somebody calls upon the crash instant, the clock actually starts later.
In about four and a half minutes, Ramos is forted up within the room.
That means a five minute response–pretty darn good–from the time of the crash-the earliest but less likely starting the clock–would be too long. If it’s not until the guy shoots at a couple of folks around the area, then even four minutes’ response is too long.
So it matters not in the least how many cops are running up and down the halls looking for somebody to shoot if they get there after four and a half minutes. The situation is digging the guy out from a tough situation and that doesn’t require a couple of dozen cops running up and down the halls looking for somebody to shoot.
sdferr:
No one suggested that you shut up, much less shut the f*** up.
None of us knows those things, that’s all.
Richard A.,
You’ve got the timeline issues about correct. My recollection is that we know that one of the people (from the funeral home I think) did make the 911 call very shortly after the perp crashed the vehicle. I believe they made the call when the perp started shooting at them. An early report, which might be incorrect, stated that one of the 911 callers said that they saw the perp getting out the vehicle carrying a long gun.
I think it is somewhat clear that the perp did do some advance planning and preparing for a school mass shooting, but that he also mentally snapped with his grandmother and started off in something of a rage. His crashing the vehicle, waving a long gun around and taking pot shots at funeral home workers were all mistakes in his F’d up plan, in that it generated 911 calls and cost him a couple minutes. If there were properly locked exterior doors that might have cost him a few more minutes, I suspect no students would have been killed.
TommyJay:
I agree that if that outer door had been locked all those children and teachers would be alive today. It is tragic and frustrating.
The other thing to note about the early timing is that the SRO (not the correct title) did essentially beat the perp to the back entrance of the school. The SRO was there, but didn’t see him because he was hiding. So the LE response time was barely good enough (maybe), but there were additional errors.
I say “maybe” because it presumes that the SRO would have done something impactful with the perp if he had the chance. No reason to think he wouldn’t, but that’s not same as knowing he would.
Neo,
You had a good response about the back exterior door and locks up above somewhere.
I’ve been thinking about what a commentor said a week ago or more. He said they should have configured that back door for electronic card keys that would have allowed entry through that door and given those type of keys to teachers. I don’t know if that’s the exact best solution, but bigger point is that the human engineering of that door was not well thought out.
I did read through the newspaper article. The teacher who had trasferred from Robb Elem. to another school intimated that that back door was intended for egress or departures only. So kids leave and the door locks behind them. I guess that back parking lot was intended originally for school busses or vehicles picking up students.
My problem is that it seems that teachers or staff were using that nearby back parking lot as their primary parking lot. My feeling is that the school should have either completely blocked the staff from that lot or they should have changed the door locks to accommodate staff entry in a secure manner.
There’s always the cost issue, but they were already paying for 6 school officers. I’d say that it would be a good trade-off to lose an officer and get all the door locks sorted out.
Tommy Jay.
Hate to be a buzzkill, but some motivations will overcome first obstacles. As I say, the layout of the school–from google earth–seems awfully complicated and I can’t tell how long it would take him, if frustrated at the back door or whatever it was, to go around to the front. And if, as at Sandy Hook, the hardened door was bordered by tempered glass with wire in it, shoots his way through it past the front door. Then it’s off to the races, although at some other place in the school. Might have taken enough time for more internal doors to be locked.
I’d be interested in how he chose a door he could/should have expected to be locked.
Worst that could have happened, from Ramos’ point of view presuming he restricted his activities to the school, is that he’s reduced to looking into windows and shooting at what he saw. Doesn’t need a body for a target, just fire a dozen rounds into a corner or at a desk or something. Then on to the next. His body count would depend on whether he finds a tightly-grouped bunch of kids once or more times than that.
I have no idea how long he worked with his weapon, but it takes very little time to learn to speedily reload one of those, based on my experience with the M16. So, a mag into each classroom window firing rapid semi-auto without much aiming. Depends on the characteristic of the “glass” which is what we call whatever transparent stuff we use these days when it’s shot with a firearm. Spider web and cloudy? Twenty rounds spray and pray and on to the next.
As to planning, at least to the extent of thinking about it; The Columbine guys practiced shooting and rigged a propane bomb. The Colorado theater shooter scoped out venues until he found a gun-free zone and rigged a bomb at his apartment and left the radio on high. Figured he’d draw cops to a noise complaint and then with the explosion.
No idea how much planning Cruz did but he was likely relieved at the thought he could just walk in.
The Buffalo shooter reconned the target and bought body armor.
So Ramos might have been in the planning mode including some options. Wouldn’t have been out of character for that kind of character. I wonder if wondering about the planning isn’t part of the fun, the lead up. IOW, the idea of a sudden whim is not what we have to face.
Since the cops got there in under five minutes, he wouldn’t have lasted long.
Richard Aubrey:
I believe he may have seen the teacher go in that outer door and suspected it was unlocked, and therefore tried it.
Regarding shooting through the windows – he did do that at first for about a minute. I think there were only minor injuries, like from flying glass. Once teachers and students realized he was shooting at windows, they would have hit the deck and reduced casualties.
neo. That is part of the drill. Next is how many times he fires into a room and that has to do with how long it takes LE to get there.
And what he’s doing in the meantime. I figure a twenty-round mag. You can fire off that in ten seconds or less. So, one mag per room, reload while moving to the next, that’s five seconds. So call it twenty rounds more or less at random into a room every fifteen seconds. Given, say, two and a half minutes, what’s the butcher’s bill?
It isn’t back-door-or-nothing.
Or suppose the flag pole is in a circular raised flower bed, maybe a foot and a half high. He takes cover there and shoots away from the school at whatever’s out there across various streets.
No telling, but the putative fun in planning might be exaggerated if he’s running over alternatives. And he’d have a couple ready. In fact, likely not presuming he could get in through a back door–did he crash there on purpose or was it serendipity–he may have shown up with other plans and taken instant advantage of luck.
I had a thought which I’d rather put on this thread than on the open thread because (a) it’s more directly pertinent here and (b) non-distracting on the open thread.
This wild notion is occasioned by a conversation I had with a church friend a week or two ago about gun violence. I speculated out loud at that time to the effect that maybe one solution to the spate of massacres by gun-armed attackers might be, instead of trying to take all guns away, what if we did the opposite and gave guns to everybody (for reasonable values of ‘everybody’) and trained them in their use enough to be able to defend themselves when required? One beneficial side effect of that would be to remove some of the mystique that seems to attach to firearms in some people’s minds, which I think acts as an inhibitor of rational consideration of gun issues. (This seems to me to be a worthy topic in itself, thinking of all the people in this country who have probably never even touched a firearm in their lives. I was in that category until grad school.)
That’s not my wild idea of right now, though. It might be a wild idea, but that was last week. 🙂 This morning, I had this thought: what if public institutions, and indeed any institution or business or anything like that, were to make firearms a part of their standard safety equipment? In pretty much every non-residential building, we see fire extinguishers in their little wall-mounted cases, for example; clearly marked, regularly inspected, “Break Glass In Case of Fire,” that sort of thing. What if all of these establishments had a similar case with a working AR-15 in it next to the fire extinguisher? Regular inspections, clear labeling, etc.
I suppose that in view of the rather obvious inducement to attempted theft, the question of access authorization – anyone can go grab the fire extinguisher, but should just anyone be allowed to go grab the rifle? – and other problematic but necessary doubts, this really would be a crazy idea. But I think there could be something interesting to be learned from posing the question, at least.
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Richard,
You are assuming that the perp had a minute or two unimpeded once he got to the school. The armed SRO was already there. The big question in my hypothetical imaginings of a locked back door is: would the SRO have gotten his body behind an engine block or equivalent and opened fire on the guy, or would he have panicked? Backup was only two minutes away.
Philip S.,
I’m definitely not fond of the idea of “Break Glass for AR-15.”
The other idea of guns required for everyone including training is a little less, um, ill advised. If the training comes first and includes some background checks, maybe psych screening, and failure to pass basic training means they don’t get the gun; then I’d go for that. I almost sound like a big government type don’t I?
Years ago, there was a smaller town in Georgia that was experiencing some home robberies. The new mayor (& council I presume) passed an ordinance requiring every home to have a gun, and robberies went to zero. I’m sure there is more to that story, but that’s all I read.
Neo, you posted earlier back about the radios at the school, specifically this:
“I assume he felt a cell phone would have to do – particularly since the radios didn’t seen to work well in many of the schools. This is a relatively poor community and it’s likely the police department didn’t have the funds to modernize what was needed to be modernized. ”
I don’t know if you were speaking to the radio issues per se, but I wanted to post some info to ponder.
The big push in public safety communications is the convergence of many many agencies of all sizes onto large regional radio systems. Uvalde is no exception. The public safety communications in Uvalde are carried on a system known as the Greater Austin/Travis Regional Radio System (GATRRS). Think of these systems as private cellular phone networks, with the radios on belts the “phones”.
The equipment is expensive, quite literally some of the most expensive radio equipment money can buy. As an example a current model Motorola radio with required options can be over $5000 contract price. That’s one radio. However, between state and federal grant monies the cost to small-town agencies is oftentimes negligible. You end up with some lopsided results- in my neck of the woods the brand-new all band Motorola mobile radios are worth more than some of the volunteer fire department apparatus they are installed in.
In order to receive and transmit, any radio on one of these systems has to be able to receive what’s known as a control channel. This is a data stream from the nearest radio site that tells each radio what frequency to listen to among many other things. If the radio isn’t receiving that control channel, it is dead in the water. No receive, no transmit, no nothing, not even if there are two cops right next to each other.
When the radio system upgrades were implemented in the more rural areas of Texas, decisions had to be made about what frequency bands to use. They chose to use VHF frequencies. This gives an advantage in increased coverage area, but VHF doesn’t penetrate some designs of buildings very well. Higher frequencies (in public safety, frequencies in 700 and 800mhz are used) penetrate buildings better, but do not have as far of a range. You need more infrastructure, radio sites, etc, to cover the same about of area.
To summarize, the radios not working in the school was not a money issue due to a lack of funding. It was a known design flaw in a radio system that cost many many millions of dollars to build and maintain.
I don’t have a crystal ball so I can’t speak affirmatively to the future, but knowing how this works some I bet the industry-encouraged response will be to throw even more tax dollars at even more expensive things. What I’d like to see fixed, and probably never will, is why such sub-optimal results are tolerated to begin with.
I’d continue to pursue the lack of keys, were I a reporter covering the story. Why didn’t the principal have a set of master keys? Why didn’t the police contact her initially, it it’s true that she provided the keys much later?
The keys are just an excuse at this point for the inaction for way too long a time, IMO.
Brian E:
Oh, that makes tons of sense.
There was no problem with the keys, they just preferred to sit in a hallway and do nothing while children and teachers were dying. And these were men who are part of the community, with children in the school and/or even in those two classrooms, friends’ children in the school and/or even in those two classrooms, and/or relatives in the school and/or even in those two classrooms. But no, they didn’t want to help or rescue them. The keys are just some sort of excuse – and that’s your opinion because you read it in the MSM or some other reason that has little to do with any special knowledge of the details or the actual events as they transpired.
People want someone to blame, but I suggest you focus on blaming the perp. If you think I’m coming down uncharacteristically hard on you, it’s really not you personally. But I’m flabbergasted at this rush to judgment from SO many people, a judgment that has no trouble embracing the idea that an entire bunch of police didn’t care about children and teachers who for the most part those officers actually knew and/or were related to. Uvalde is a small and tight-knit community.
Grunt:
Thanks for the information. That’s very interesting.
Neo, your statement at 6:51 on 6/11 is the one that stands out for me.
I’d never heard of Uvalde before this. I did grow up in a town of about 15,000 people, though. The cops were there to arrest drunk drivers, burglars, vandals. They were there to break up domestics and bar brawls, to respond to traffic accidents, to know who the lawbreakers were and to keep an eye on them.
They were not there to respond to someone walking into a school with a rifle and lots of ammunition and shooting more than a dozen children, catapulting my hometown from obscure suburb of Minneapolis to above the fold headlines across the country and world. (Thank God that never happened.)
In some ways, this was going to play out the way it did the moment the murderous young man decided he hated existence so much that he was going to cause as much anguish as he could before dying. I imagine there was a collective “Holy shit!” when the call came over the wire and everyone drove hell-for-leather to get to the school. Once there, everyone knew what they wanted to do, but few had any idea how to go about doing it. Meanwhile, the shooter knew what he wanted to do and knew exactly how to go about doing it.
While it’s true the police don’t look great, the problem isn’t really the police. It’s this culture that either ignores or belittles the anguish of boys and men, who haven’t grown up with men in their lives to show them how to be men, how to persevere against all the obstacles, how to push through them and find a purpose anyway. The best female therapist in the world couldn’t have helped the shooter; but an ordinary man who showed some interest in him, cared enough to discipline him, told him he had every right to be here and helped him find something to be, would have prevented this terrible thing years ago.
And we would never have heard the name Uvalde.
“We” can’t control anything. Only individuals can. But it’s so uncertain, and it’s long, hard, time-consuming work for people who sometimes aren’t interested in doing it. Fewer, it seems, than in decades past.
You just know this or something like it is going to happen again. Which town am I going to learn exists because of a massacre?
neo
I say again, displacement. Ramos is dead so….
In addition, there seems to be a kind of idea that coming up with an outrageous idea makes you smart or something, on account of nobody else thought of it.
“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.”
I want to get to the facts of what happened. This explanation doesn’t do that. According to this, the PC waited 40 minutes “to avoid provoking sprays of fire”. But then the next sentence said “when the keys arrived”. When did the keys arrive? After the 40 minutes or before?
The story implies that none of those keys worked, and it took and additional 37 minutes to find a key that worked.
Here’s my problem. Why didn’t the principal have master key/keys to all the rooms in the school? Did only the janitor have keys? And from the sheer number of keys– did the janitor work at other schools and wasn’t even at the school when the shooting began?
The story is vague.
I would first like to get facts.
If the principal didn’t have master key/keys to all doors at the school, why?
If a door that should have locked when closed didn’t, why?
If the PC called for tactical gear at the beginning and it to between 40 and 77 minutes for it to arrive, why?
Brian E:
Of course we need more facts. I’ve said it and said it, and asked many of those questions, and more.
No one has provided answers, but for the most part the answers we have gotten are filtered through the MSM and many come from anonymous “sources.” In the case of this interview with Arredondo (and/or his lawyer), we don’t have a transcript of the interview, we have an article about it and much is paraphrasing although there are some quotes. I’d prefer the transcript. Even then, the answers are based on which questions are asked, which is up to the writer.
By the way, for most incidents of this type, it takes many many months to issue a report. Could be a year. Till then, we often don’t know many important facts. And when the reports are issued, they’re very long. Who reads the whole thing? Mostly we see summaries, filtered through the MSM again.
Brian E. Your problem about the keys–who, when, where–is a problem. But it is not to be solved that day, in that moment. The cops had to work with what they had and they or their superiors’ or their protectees’ (school) failure to make keys instantly available in case of the inconceivable is not relevant.
Telling a guy stranded by the side of the road, “You should have checked your gas gauge,” doesn’t automatically refill his gas tank nor make the need for a tow truck disappear.
Neo,
If I were still a reporter, I’d be digging for answers to this.
That’s one of the big problems we have– very few trained journalists left that don’t think their job is to reinforce, or create a narrative to fit their biases.
We do know a couple of things, or at least we think we know them.
1. Had the door that was supposed to lock on closing actually locked, it might have been much harder for the shooter to gain entrance.
2. If the school had master keys readily available to first responders of any type of emergency, it might have cut down the time to disable the shooter.
Yes it will take time to get reliable information about what happened and why. But each time a tragedy happens like this I would hope lessons are applied to schools around the country to make it harder for these people full of rage to carry out their senseless, evil acts.
Richard Aubrey,
At this point I’m skeptical of almost everything I’ve read. And this wouldn’t be the first time that people signing up for a job in law enforcement, supposedly knowing the risks, failed to act when their lives were at risk. I don’t know if Arredondo is one of those folks, but the problem with the keys needs to be resolved.
By the way, has there been an explanation why the doors to the two classrooms weren’t locked before the shooter entered the area? If he had been firing outside the school, and then firing from the outside at the school, the teachers should have had enough time to lock the doors from the inside.
Brian E:
Yes, there’s an explanation for the question you ask in the last paragraph of your comment right above this one. But I’ve never seen it clearly explained in the press. Because I’m a blogger and I need to read and read and read and watch video interviews and that sort of thing – more than most people will ordinarily be reading and watching – I think I’ve been able to cobble together an answer from many sources.
I shouldn’t have to do that – journalists should be making the answer clear, because it’s important. I’ve answered the question before in the comments, but I’m sure plenty of readers haven’t seen my answer unless they are obsessive comment-readers.
Anyway, with that intro, here’s my answer. One of the kids who called 911 from one of the two rooms (or perhaps another kid who survived and was in the room the shooter first entered) said that her teacher got the lockdown message but was somewhat delayed in finding the key to lock the door. That made me wonder why the teacher had to get a key in order to lock a door from inside. I’ve done some recent research in order to answer that question, and I plan to write a post about it some time in the next few days, but apparently a key was needed. I can imagine how rattled that teacher might have been, which could make it hard to find that key, which probably had to be in some well-hidden place so the kids couldn’t get at it.
The girl said that the teacher found it and went to the door to lock it, and at that moment the perp appeared, walked into the room, and killed the teacher and then the kids. What a horrific nightmare.
I don’t think the girl said which teacher that was.
I have never read anything that addresses whether the second classroom’s outer door was locked. I have concluded it probably was locked. I have read from several sources – including the male teacher who was wounded but survived – that the way the perp entered that second classroom was through an inner door that connected the two classrooms. No one has said, but I would guess that that inner door was not locked and that it apparently was not even lockable. I have read that it was a bathroom for the two classes. You wouldn’t want small children to be able to lock themselves into the bathroom.
Who would ever have envisioned this horror-show scenario in real life? One teacher tries to lock door, can’t find key in time, and he gets into that room? Then he goes through the inner door to the next classroom, a door which is unlocked even though the outer door to the classroom is locked? And he kills almost everyone in the two rooms – which happens, by the way, in just two or three minutes, before the cops get to those classrooms. That is known because of audio of when the vast majority of shots were fired.
I put together that scenario and I’ve not read of anyone else – no journalist, that is, and not even bloggers – even doing the research to try to answer the very obvious and important question you asked. I don’t get it – is no one curious? Maybe I missed someone else talking about it, but I don’t think so.
These are the sorts of things that drive my own need to answer the questions for myself, and to write so much about it. I think I might put parts of this comment of mine in the next post I write about the doors and the way the locks worked.
Brian. There is individual initiative and…firing outside. I can tell you that individual AR-15 firing from a distance sounds like a mad carpenter. It is a reduced power cartridge, unlike the full-size battle rifles like the M14 and its equivalent in various armies around the world for seventy years. The latter is a distinctive sound.
A teacher, thinking of anything but a mass shooter, might well wonder who’s doing what to the scaffolding or whatever else is out there. Most teachers who aren’t veterans have heard considerably more reports from nail guns than from fire arms. So she/they hear this rapping sound outside the school whose walls and windows are strengthened for load bearing, thermal insulation, protection against south Texas’ hail and winds and, who knows, maybe some security specs as well.
Remember Pearl Harbor…. “What the effing eff are those clowns doing….? It takes a minute if you’re not on combat alert, at least mentally.
So if you start the clock with the first shot and presume the teachers heard it clearly and knew exactly what it was, that’s one thing. Realistically, you can’t expect it.
As I say, the external layout of the school is kind of complicated and “outside” may not have been “outside” those classrooms, but possibly around the corner or even on the opposite side. Once Ramos is inside, his previous position outside is irrelevant. Maybe they didn’t hear the shots at all.
Presumably, it stopped for a moment while the guy is getting through the door and so the issue fades away.
What gets the teacher’s attention is the alert notice, whatever that looks like at Robb. Which will be sounded when somebody someplace near the door manages to contact the office and get somebody who’s authorized to hit the button. There’s “are you sure?” because this has never happened at Robb or at any school where these folks have worked.
Resolving the keys problem in terms of, 1, was it as mixed up as advertised, 2, did it take as long to get this dog’s breakfast of key rings to the cops as advertised, 3, why both preceding; are meaningless in the context of the guys trying to get through the door once the stuff hit the fan.
Richard Aubrey:
Please see my comment right above yours. It also deals with the question of the delay in locking the classroom door.
Also –
At this point, I see some of these discussions as dealing with several connected but actually separate issues.
(1) clarity on what actually happened
(2) what was possible to do and wasn’t done in terms of security prior to the incident, and why
(3) what was possible to do and wasn’t done in terms of officers reacting to the incident
(4) would any of it have actually mattered to the outcome?
(5) would any of it have made things worse?
Neo,
Thanks for your reply.
There are two types of deadbolts. Single and double cylinder. Single are what you find on residential locks. A keyed cylinder on the outside and a knob on the inside to lock the bolt.
Double cylinder are typically used in commercial buildings and require a key to lock or unlock a door on both sides.
So if the teacher was killed before got the door locked, how did the shooter lock the door? We have to assume that the key was on the teacher, near the door or in the lock when the shooter entered the room. We may never know how the shooter found the key, but obviously he locked the door.
Brian E. You presume the shooter knew to lock the door with a key. I’ve been around various buildings, old and new, commercial, residential, government or not, for maybe sixty-five years when I became old enough to pay attention. I may have seen a door needing a key to be locked from the inside but I wouldn’t know since I’ve never seen a door actually locked, which is to say the action accompanied by somebody explaining it.
How did Ramos know? You think he’s ever seen a door like that in whatever number of years he’s been old enough to be able to follow and not lose interest at another inexplicable grown-up thing?
He shoots the teacher, a key falls on the floor and he figures it out instantly despite his heart rate of 200, his near-lethal adrenalin flood, and acts accordingly either before or after he kills the kids.
I suppose anything’s possible but the coefficient of likely doesn’t seem very stout.
Or maybe we’re wrong about the key from the inside. Do we know what a terrified kid calls a key? Might he have said that when he saw the teacher reaching for the knob?
I have helped out in a hunger program which, among other things, delivers food to el ed students qualified for low or no cost lunch, extra to get them through the weekend. So I’m wandering around a school built sixty-three years ago. Some of the classrooms are connected and were at time of construction. I went to el ed about the same time in two schools whose classrooms at the time were not connected. Might they be now? No idea. Such connections as I have seen are considerably less stout than the classroom doors. So, at least, that is almost certainly true.
Richard Aubrey; Brian E:
One of the things I learned from my research about locking classroom doors – and which I plan to put in my post about that – is that this type of door that can be locked with a key from inside has been the standard for many classroom doors for about 10 years now, ever since Sandy Hook. They were recommended based on what happened at Sandy Hook. It’s a long story why it’s done that way. But Ramos was 18 years old and he’d probably been in many classrooms that had doors that had keys like that which could be locked from the inside with the key.
In addition, lockdown rehearsals are common in recent years. I’ve heard they’re quite common in border towns such as Uvalde. Someone of his age would be expected to know how those doors worked, from past experience as a student.
So I think the “coefficient of likely” actually might be very stout.
Neo. That answers the knowledge question. But did I miss in your earlier explanation how the first door, the one not locked in time, was later locked? Or did it remain unlocked and what did that mean?
Did Ramos lock one and find the other already locked. Sorry if I missed it.
Richard Aubrey:
Nothing I’ve read or heard says “the classroom door though which the shooter first entered was locked by him.” I think we can assume it, though, because obviously the officers needed a key or other device to get in there – I think that much is pretty clear (although it would be nice to get a simple direct statement about it). Assuming the perp locked it, I think my comment at 10:19 above indicates that Ramos probably knew about the key – and I think it would have even been in the hand of the teacher he killed – and knew enough to use it to lock the door. He would have known that probably from previous experience in a school or schools with classroom doors that worked that way, and from previous practice lockdowns.
I also believe – if you see my comment above at 9:02 PM – that the door to the second classroom was locked and so he didn’t have to lock it. He entered that classroom from the first one, through the adjoining unlocked door.
I could be wrong about all of this. But that’s the way I’ve reconstructed it so far, based on interviews, articles, and logic. I’d love to see something that directly addresses it.
neo
Our DiL is a HS teacher near Oxford, MI. She said the Oxford teachers did as they were trained, leaving open the question as to whether that reduced the shooter’s potential targets. IOW was it class change time, etc.
I’ll have to ask about the lockdown drills.
I wonder if the drills are announced in advance. If you’re trying to get people to do the various things smoothly and in the order required, you practice first. “Okay, one more time…..GO!
Did they ever do a drill completely unannounced, which nobody could tell from the real thing until it was over? Doing that with a fire drill is one thing. Allowing the staff and, depending on what the kids have been taught, to think there is an actual, armed murderer in the building until the all clear is sounded would be a pretty severe item to impose on people for whom peaceable routine defines their day.
“Okay, kids. It’s all over Was just practice Those of you with wet pants can….”
And if you don’t do that, expecting the teachers to have keys–and whatever else non-teacher protocol writers can think of–immediately to hand is a hope. And getting it right 99% of the time isn’t enough. We’re talking about people here, and people who aren’t cops or soldiers
Whatever the problem with the entry way door, it’s only somewhat relevant. The interest in it presumes that Ramos could not have gotten in any other way. Is there a loading/freight entrance? I suppose you could close that between deliveries. Could, as with Sandy Hook, one or another door or its sidelights simply be shot to pieces, thus allowing entry?
People go and out of the building. It would be useless if that were not possible and, as with Cruz at Parkland, somebody could just walk in.
Armed sercutiry is a good idea but they’re not likely to shoot first. The intruder’s shooting would be required to justify the guard’s shots. So we have dead and wounded anyway. But fewer.
Much as I dislike the camel’s nose issue with any gun control reg, getting the juvie records into a data base seems like a good idea, presuming P.R.O.M.I.S.E. allows for there being records in the first place. See Cruz at Parkland.
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Devastating and heartbreaking, but not surprising. It doesn’t sound as though many children could have been saved even if the police could have gotten in sooner, but it would be good to know and we don’t know. But – was it possible to have gotten in sooner?
Yes, they could have gotten in 3 minutes after he started shooting people
And it would have saved a lot of lives
Cops who fail to go in against an active threat are guilty until proven innocent, not the other way around
You get the badge, and the respect, because of your willingness to risk your life.
If you’re not willing, get off the force