He asked permission because it was so far away and hard to be accurate, plus the fact that he could have hurt or killed children or teachers.

When he received permission it was exactly when the perp had just opened the door and entered the school and was suddenly no longer visible.

Therefore he didn’t shoot.

As I said, I plan to write another post or posts in which I’ll offer my guesses about what might have been going on in their minds. But I’ll just add that I think it might be the case – although we have almost no information about it – that Ruiz might have tried to go in by himself, because of the phone call from his wife, and that someone (I don’t think it was Arredondo or even anyone near him in the hall, because the incident doesn’t seem to have been recorded) stopped him. I have hypotheses about that, too, but I have to say they are just guesses because for some reason we’ve gotten almost no information on that aspect of things – where was he, who was he talking to when he said his wife had been shot, who knew, what did Ruiz do, what was his demeanor, who escorted him out, etc..

From which I deduce the cops thought the door was secure and lacked the equipment to breach it. A crazybrave move wouldn’t have worked.

An unknown subject walking onto a school campus with a firearm justifies deadly force. Defense of person by law enforcement in Texas is based on reasonable belief- not absolute certainty. It is reasonable to believe that a person walking onto an elementary school campus openly carrying a rifle is there to do harm. It helps to know, but we do not need to know if he has already shot other people.

Indeed, the officer thought deadly force was justified- he asked for permission to shoot.

I realize I’m tugging stubbornly at a single thread here, but I would like to know why he didn’t take the shot. Asking for permission doesn’t absolve him of any responsibility for the use of force. While there is risk of collateral damage in hitting a bystander, the risk of allowing a man with a firearm into the school proper is greater. That means taking the risk of shooting a child or teacher in pursuit of the optimal outcome of killing the shooter.

Which brings me to my point of wanting to know if the officer’s reasoning was based on lack of confidence in making the shot or risk-aversion. And if it was risk aversion, was that from a training deficit or a belief (based on recent prosecutions of police officers) that he’d be hung out to dry if he shot a kid.

Also, we don’t know who was planning, or if there were police off-camera communication from phone to verbally/visually relaying.

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Keep in mind, at around 11:40 it moved from an active shooter to a barricaded hostage/shooter situation. The initial breech was repelled, the police lost momentum and had to regroup.

After the initial response was a lack of leadership, planning and communication.

To many Indians, probably to many chiefs from differing departments. We’ve seen the same for other “unique” situations, trying to fit a newish situation into preexisting playbooks.

Of import to the longer term discussion of what to do, one thing we need to see is the various departments active shooter playbooks. And what cross departmental training they’ve had.

As an abbreviated example, this is what’s expected post-Columbine.

1 – Assess the situation
2 – Find the shooter
3 – Engage the shooter
4 – Search for and triage casualties.

Looks simple, but it is far from simple.

The practice part of all the training has to create situations for the police to train on.

What are the contingency plans if #2 doesn’t immediately stop the shooter?
What’s the C.P. if active shooter turns into barricaded shooter?
And on and on for each possibility.

If in your planning and training you’ve never run those contingencies, you’re not going to respond to them as fast.

If SEAL TEAM SIX had answered the call that day, they’d have the training, skillset and personal experience breeching, that they’d have likely not stopped. Speed of action, violence of force.

I expect, lesser mortals will have lesser responses.

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Regarding the officer washing his hands, my explanation is simple. He is coming from the bathroom and doing what people have been trained the last 2 1/2 years to do, sanitize his hands. Normalcy bias (I think) in action.

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Regarding the cell phones, RADIO COMMUNICATIONS WEREN’T WORKING. There’s been multiple statements of officers having to communicate with cell phones.

I also noticed that Ruiz seems to have two cell phones – he pulls the other device out of his right-side leg pocket to briefly look at it, then returns it. He had carried the ‘Punisher’ phone in his left leg pocket.

What seems pretty evident from the behavior of all officers throughout this video is that there is a lack of clear leadership and no apparent plan of command and coordination. As you watch the video, most of the LEOs inside and outside the building seem to be doing their own thing, relying on standard police training to cover each other and position themselves tactically. There is a minimum of communication or instruction-giving – just the occasional pointing with ‘go there’ type instructions. On the body-cam footage taken outside the school, there are officers just milling around outside the doors, conversing, as others sidle over to the windows to join the officers that have stationed themselves there. It looks a lot more like a crime scene investigation than an active shooter incident in progress.

And of course the radios weren’t working properly, which explains why they aren’t using them. But I also don’t see much cellphone use, not did I notice the LEOs outside huddling up and discussing plans. I think this might be part of why the investigation is taking a while. There may have been so many LEOs there that crossfire was a concern, given the state of communications and the lack of command structure. Anyway: All of that from a non-LEO private citizen so all to be taken with a grain of salt!

Yes, that matches what I said. The problems with the time frame for Ruiz is also as I said – unless he got the news after he was in the hallway and had left, and then returned. My questions are the same about Ruiz. When he get the call from his wife? Where did he return to? Whom did he tell? Who was it who made him leave, and from what agency? Why? Where was he when he told the person or people, inside the school or out? Was any of it done within the awareness of any higher-ups? If so, who? If not, were they ever told?

The part you related earlier, where he’s looking at his cellphone inside the building, seems to have been before he learned about his wife or told anyone about his wife. And the time frame on that is odd, too, because he is standing and looking at the phone just a few seconds before officers were injured by debris from shots into the walls. Does anyone react? If not, why not?

It’s here:

https://heavy.com/news/uvalde-shooting-full-graphic-video/

He enters the school at almost exactly 11:33

The little boy spots him and runs away at 11:33:25. The shooting starts as he runs away, with the perp shooting from the hallway, into the classrooms, before entering.

First cops on scene at 11:35:55

I don’t understand that timeline at all. Where did you obtain it? The presentation by McCraw, as well as the ALERTT report, gives times that don’t jibe with that. The ALERTT report (see this post), for example, says that the police didn’t even enter the building until a small group came in at 11:35:55, and then two more small groups at 11:36:00 and four more at 11:36:03. It took them some seconds to get to the classrooms (it doesn’t say exactly how long) and then at the threshold of the classrooms they are fired upon by the perp at 11:37:00 and 11:37:10. If Ruiz is standing there looking at his phone at 11:36:50, that’s ten seconds before a shot is fired and a police officer hurt, and ten seconds later it happens again. He doesn’t react? He just stands there? He leaves a little less than 2 minutes later without saying anything?

From McCraw’s presentation, Ruiz arrives somewhere at the school between 11:44 and 11:52 – he doesn’t specify when, but it is between those times on the timeline – and tells someone (we don’t know who) “she’s been shot.” Someone (we don’t know who and we don’t know where) ends up escorting him out. I don’t think any of this is on the hall video, and I got the impression – although I’m not sure and I’ll have to look it up again at some point – that it isn’t recorded at all.

If Ruiz does appear earlier in the videos, as you say, it may be that it is before his wife has called him. The shootings had occurred between 11:33:32 and 11:36:04. If he appears in the hall at 11:36:50, it isn’t long after that, so she may have just been shot and not called him yet.

There really is very very little information on the Ruiz part of the story in terms of timing and the other people involved. I think there’s a reason for that and we don’t know the reason yet, but my guess is that it has to do with liability.