Yes, you do what you've gotta do. My partner and I ran a Trauma center during the AIDS crisis. California passed a law that no one but the AIDS patient could know the results of his AIDS test. My partner cut himself on a bloody case that had a high likelihood of AIDS. He avoided his wife until his own test came back negative.

Yes, that was definitely part of it. But there was more than that, including poor communication in which I think most of the people there thought the doors had already been tried and found to be locked. Many other points I plan to make about the door locks, as well.

By the way, no one’s police radios worked in that school except for BorTac. Not just those of the Uvalde police (which some officers had taken into the building), but also of federal marshals and of state officers. Even BorTac’s radios had trouble being patched together with each other for inter-officer communication in the building. McCraw said in some instances the radios didn’t work until people got about 10 feet away from the building.

I recall radio problems for police and firefighters during 9/11 at the WTC.

As for the checking, or lack thereof, of the doors:

It seems as though that could have been a sort of tunnel vision caused by lack of experience. I don’t have a specific term or explanation for it, just my anecdotal observations from several years of training in these sorts of things.

Pretty much every training scenario I’ve been involved in, at some point the instructor (or me if I’m the instructor) will bring up this point to ponder:

Hey, before you ram through / kick in / blow the door off….see if the knob turns!

There’s videos of these sorts of events, failed breaches where the breach man is unable to get the door open, he falls out of the way, then the next guy turns the knob and voila in goes the good guys. Sometimes they’re shown in class and everyone chuckles and never thinks they’ll be the person who doesn’t check the door first.

Common-sense things like “see if the door is locked before you ram it” get forgotten in the heat of the moment if you don’t train constantly for this sort of event.

Not an excuse for the failure, just an observation based on experience of how it can happen.

I plan to answer the questions at length in future posts. But the short version is that the answers to some are quite complicated. Some will take quite a lot of words to explain.

However, I’ll take a couple of the easier ones: (2) the entry was a coordinated effort involving BorTac, the Uvalde police, and I think maybe one other from another force (would have to check that last bit again). Seven officers were in the stack, but 4 got in first and killed him. All the people there, including Arredondo, were in favor of this. (3) They gained access with a key.

The doors are the complicated part. But it seems pretty clear that everyone thought the doors were locked, and yet at least one probably wasn’t locked (accent on the probably – but too convoluted to explain it here). And whether they checked (and why they didn’t check if they didn’t) is also complicated – I plan to explain my theories of it.

I think incompetence gets a person fired, and maybe there’s liability in a civil lawsuit.

The investigators have already examined the doors and have all sorts of findings about the doors in the school and the particular doors on those rooms – it’s part of the McCraw testimony at the hearings. Unfortunately, it’s still not 100% clear, and as I said I plan to explain later why I say that.

Typically many many entities are sued. I have read that in Uvalde the police (as an organization) are being sued, but my guess is that Texas state forces who were also there and maybe even federal troops who were also there will be sued.

In recent years, schools that have had school shootings of any magnitude have typically been razed. Nothing unusual about Uvalde’s plans. It has to do with people refusing to go back there.

I did a search at some point to learn how old Robb Elementary is. I never have been able to find out. I do remember hearing that some of the buildings are those temporary trailer-type things. I didn’t hear that about the one where the carnage occurred, but it does have walls that bullets can rather easily penetrate. I suppose any new building would be more hardened.

It is further reported the Robb school will be bulldozed, as if that can eradicate the stain of the event. Build a new school? At what cost in these Biden-inflationary times? And it took the board 4 weeks to fire Arredondo!

Our media is just terrible at the basics.