An overview of Uvalde: Part II
[Part I can be found here. You can find my discussion of the ALERTT report on Uvalde here.]
If you’ve been following my posts on Uvalde, you know I’ve been working on a long post (or several posts) about the testimony by McCraw and others before the Texas Senate. Now, in the middle of that, another report has been issued, this one by the Texas House itself and this time a lengthy one, almost 80 pages. I read it last night in its entirety and plan to incorporate it into my posts, which obviously takes even more time.
But this post will serve as a summary introduction, plus a focus on one specific. It’s a cliche to say “this could be a book,” but there really is so much to say that it could be a book. I’m not planning to write that book, although someone probably will, and I hope that person does the subject justice. There also will be more detailed reports forthcoming from various agencies, because I don’t think the investigation has been completed.
Nevertheless, I’m far more impressed with the newest report than with anything else that’s come out so far. It manages to clarify a few things (at least somewhat) that were murky before, and adds some new information. In addition – and in my experience this is quite unusual – it’s written in manner that’s relatively easy to understand and I see in it a real attempt to get the story of a complex situation right.
I’ve written two previous posts on McCraw’s presentation to the Texas Senate (see this as well as this). McCraw is the Texas Department of Public Safety head, and although his talk only dealt with evidence from videos and audios of that day, it led to a hypothesis on my part about what was happening that day that caused the police to consider the situation that of a barricaded shooter rather than an active shooter – something that was key to even beginning to figure out why they acted as they did (or rather, failed to act). And now this newly-released legislative report offers even more evidence that would tend to confirm my hypothesis.
You might wonder why I’m still writing so much about Uvalde. After all, the dogs bark and the caravan has moved on, and is there really much more to say? The reason I’m doing this is that I find it not only an intensely tragic event, but also a fascinating (although horrifying) and instructive demonstration of how things can go horribly wrong, especially in the way that information is conveyed, received, and interpreted, and is then acted on or not acted on. That is sometimes the case both during a crisis and then later on when people read about it and analyze and describe it.
When we read about an event such as Uvalde, we become – at least in our own minds, at least many of us – the omniscient observer. We get a whole bunch of information from different sources – some of it incorrect – and most of us come to quick and sometimes implacable and immovable conclusions about what went on. And yet we are far from omniscient, although more reliable information becomes available over time. But as we know, people have trouble changing their minds, and when intense emotions are involved such as with Uvalde, it’s even more difficult to be objective. This is only human.
One paradoxical thing is that, although first responders are present at the scene, and one would think that means they know more than we ever do, in fact that often know less if the scene is large and chaotic with a lot going on and many people involved, as well as things unknown and unseen that are only revealed later.
As people responding to a crisis get word of an event or a sequence of events and rush to deal with it, they must create a preliminary story in their minds of what’s happening there. We all need such perceptions in order to properly evaluate what’s happening and to plan our responses. But we can’t get locked into these early notions; we have to take in new information – from what we observe at the scene, from what others are telling us (on phone or radio or in person) – and in real time, under pressure, revise our story of what’s happening and what’s an appropriate and effective response.
Whatever else was going on to cause the failures in Uvalde, poor communication and coordination was at least one of the things that hampered the response of the Uvalde police that day. there is virtually no question about that. Also, poor communication later – in the press and by spokespeople – has sometimes made it difficult for the rest of us to get a clear picture of the situation.
With Uvalde there’s a great temptation to give a simple explanation such as “the police were gutless cowards.” Not only would that explain a lot, but it would mean there is a relatively easy solution: get braver people in there. I just don’t think it happens to fit the facts as presented, although it’s certainly possible it was true for some of the people there. From our standpoint, the initial conclusion by Arredondo and other officers that it was not an active shooter situation requiring extremely aggressive action seems seems absurd. How could they be in a school, with a shooter holed up in a classroom and shooting a few times over the course of an hour – even if they perceived during that period that those shots were only being fired towards the hallway where police were – how on earth could this ever not be an active shooter situation? It boggles the mind and leads to the almost inescapable charge of cowardice, because that seems the only coherent explanation. But I see other possible explanations to which some of the evidence points.
So that’s my introduction to this long-promised series of posts. One specific which I plan to elaborate on in some detail in a later post is my current conviction that the root cause of the officers’ initial conviction that this was a barricaded shooter situation was a combination of the receipt of very incomplete and in some cases incorrect information (compared to what we’ve learned since), the timing of their arrival, the aforementioned terrible coordination and communication, and probably a stressed mindset that had trouble believing the worst. That last is my speculation, but I think it’s valid psychologically, although extremely unfortunate.
As I’ve read and thought about Uvalde in the nearly two months since it happened, one image that keeps coming to mind, strangely enough, is a scene from the novel Catch-22. If you’ve ever read it you probably remember it, because it’s the climax of a theme that builds throughout the book: the death of Snowden. Without revealing too much (in case some haven’t read it and intend to do so some day), I’ll say that the reason I make the analogy is that in that scene the main character Yossarian is engaged in solving what he thinks is the problem (a problem that’s already bad enough), while he neglects to do a full examination of what’s actually going on with Snowden and therefore entirely misses the far more horrific reality.
Now for one detail in the new report that I think will give you an idea of how the first stories we hear, and the ones on which we base conclusions, can be very wrong. You may recall that in the ALERTT reported, as well as newspapers, it was said that one Uvalde police officer had a chance to take the shooter out even before he entered the building, when he was in the schoolyard. It would involve a literal longshot by the officer, and the story is that he asked permission but by the time it was given it was too late and the shooter had entered the school itself. This is a heartbreaking and infuriating prospect.
Please ponder what the new report says about that incident:
On arrival at the school [early on], SSgt. Canales saw cars stopped and a man shooting a gun. He grabbed his rifle, put a magazine into it, and grabbed an extra magazine. He saw people at the funeral home pointing in the direction of the school, and he heard somebody say the attacker was in or near the building. SSgt. Canales entered an open gate where he met Lt. Javier Martinez, also of the Uvalde Police. Lt. Martinez also heard the report of a vehicle accident with shots fired. He drove toward the intersection of Geraldine and South Grove, and as he arrived, he saw a man on the side of the road pointing. He jumped out of his car, popped the trunk to get his vest…
One of those officers testified to the Committee that, based on the sound of echoes, he believed the shooter had fired in their direction. That officer saw children dressed in bright colors in the playground, all running away. Then, at a distance exceeding 100 yards, he saw a person dressed in black, also running away. Thinking that the person dressed in black was the attacker, he raised his rifle and asked Sgt. Coronado for permission to shoot…
So far that conforms with what we’ve read previously, right? Except that this was the case:
Sgt. Coronado testified he heard the request, and he hesitated. He knew there were children present. He considered the risk of shooting a child, and he quickly recalled his training that officers are responsible for every round that goes downrange. According to the officer who made the request, there was no opportunity for Sgt. Coronado to respond before they heard on the radio that the attacker was running toward the school. The officers testified to the Committee that it turned out that the person they had seen dressed in black was not the attacker, but instead it was Robb Elementary Coach Abraham Gonzales.
There is quite a bit more detail in the report about the coach in the schoolyard. But it turns out to have almost certainly been a good thing that the officer never fired. It’s a cautionary tale about initial reports as well as how the media shapes our views, and I think it also highlights the multiple dilemmas first responders face. Those who felt that it was clear this officer should have fired from far away into a group of children and teachers/coaches turn out to have been wrong – in this case. Sometimes they will have been right. But it’s the responders who have to make the split-second decisions with the stakes being lives. Often they make the right decisions, and sometimes they make very wrong ones. At Uvalde, there were some right ones and some very very wrong ones.
Focus on the critical point. Three armed cops enter the hallway. They are the first ones on the scene. They hear gunshots from one of the schoolrooms. Instead of charging in and taking out the shooter, they retreat.
They ignored the Columbine rule. When you hear shots, go take out the shooter.
And bear in mind that the cops in the hallway could hear the kids crying, screaming and getting shot. Not acting is what is astounding to me.
Also consider Occam’s Razor.
@MR Cornholio – you keep seem to not know what the heck you are talking about. The initial officers at the classroom didn’t just hear gunshots, THEY WERE TAKING FIRE THROUGH THE DOOR AND WALLS.
Trained soldiers break in combat, but I suppose you would have been steadfast and burst through that door.
I will not fault the officers for falling back under fire. I don’t know what I would do upon taking fire, get to cover is what is instinctive.
We can find fault with most everything after that point until they breached.
After that first breach attempt, Chief Arrendondo should have removed himself from the hallway and setup a command post. That’s what there own Active Shooter plans says should have happened.
FROM THE REPORT:
i. The initial responders to the west building heard gunfire and encountered a hallway with a fog of drywall debris, bullet holes, and empty rifle casings. They converged on Rooms 111 and 112, which they identified as the location of the attacker. They acted appropriately by attempting to breach the classrooms and stop the attacker. The attacker immediately repelled them with a burst of rifle fire from inside the classrooms.
j. The responders immediately began to assess options to breach the classroom, but they lost critical momentum by treating the scenario as a “barricaded subject” instead of with the greater urgency attached to an “active shooter” scenario.
l.
i. Chief Arrendondo was one of the first responders to arrive at the west building.
ii. In the initial response to the incident, Chief Arrendondo was actively engaged in the effort to “stop the killing” up to the point when the attacker was located in Rooms 111 and 112, and the attacker fired on responding officers.
“The attacker immediately repelled them with a burst of rifle fire from inside the classrooms.”
After they retreated couldn’t they attack again? One and done?
How many times in a basketball game does a guy miss a shot, gets the rebound and then scores? Or another player misses a shot and the second guy gets the rebound and scores.
I know this wasn’t a basketball game, but these professional law enforcement officers had little persistence.
Keep on digging zenman.
Uhm, if you are being shot at, it’s not a barricaded person. Moreover, just because there is a lull in a firefight does not mean the driving force has magically gone away and now you can hunker down on an 8 hour standoff.
What’s ironic about this is that police are vilified for being too militaristic, yet when stuff like this happens they are vilified for not being militaristic enough. Yes, in your normal day to day dealings, be the Norman Rockwell cop, but then switch to tactical officer on situations like this. It’s hard.
That said, this was an utter failure on the Ulvade police all the way around.
I am very pro police. So much so, I am an over 18 year veteran cop who has been on hostage situations and barricaded situations. I have went inside a building by myself with the knowledge the suspect in a murder in the building might be there.
I am not superman, just a normal guy with a family, but you have to act when it’s needed.
Neo keep on this story, while most everyone has dropped it what really happened hasn’t come out yet.
That book will be written but doesn’t mean it’s all facts.
So the cop didn’t shoot and it turned out to be a very, very good idea.
Take a lot of wind out of a lot of sails.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/indiana-delivery-driver-saves-five-burning-home-no-hesitation-no-thinking
This guy got me to thinking. Of all the cops there, none went nuts. When I was in the Infantry, I think half of us would have gone in barehanded, gone nuts. Maybe grabbed a club or something on the way.
Of all of them, none of them “lost it” and charged.
Police departments don’t want guys whose adrenalin overrrules their judgment.
That’s happened to me a couple of times, but I managed. Skated.
It’s as if there was a positive force holding back all of them including somebody who really wanted to go in.
And when did they figure the door was unlocked–or defective and thus effectively unlocked, whatever the indicator on their side showed?
Hey … good to know that none of the cops “lost it”.
Just too bad about all those dead children, eh? Couldn’t be helped. No possible solution. Those are the breaks.
“Can we still get our pensions?” seems to be the big thing government employees care about theses days. Who cares about doing their job?
Tuvea. None of the cops lost it, or were on the point of losing it. Did some come close and were held back by command in some fashion?
When a random pizza driver can do what I linked to, several dozen cops don’t include even one guy like that?
Nobody wants to get shot and rationalizing the danger away is a normal reaction but not everybody does it every time the situation arises.
I dunno. Somebody might picture himself launching himself in a flat trajectory just above the floor and coming to a sliding stop while throwing out a storm of lead while his buddy from the door way shoots up a storm, too. If you’re desperate enough, you might convince yourself it would work.
But no hypothetical possibility seems to have occurred to these guys which seems to me to be contrary to human nature. SOMEbody must have had SOME kind of a plan. Was he stopped by command?
But that depends on when they figured they could open the door. When did they know that?
“ Of all the old saws that roll off our tongues, none is more dubious than “there are two sides to every story.” Not always. Sometimes, the evidence is so overwhelming that there is only one side.” Cornhead and Andy McCarthy.
Overwhelming until the next tranche of facts. That piece about the coach is interesting. Now we’re back to only one side but it’s the other one side and all our decisive condemnation is….where did it go? Was around here someplace.
Culture eats strategy for breakfast.
Our culture was once dominated by sheepdogs, known in another setting as “men with chests.” Men who you want on that line.
Now we are a culture of protocols, guidelines, combat targets being approved by the JAG officer. Everyone has rights, nobody has responsibility. No ownership.
We have managers instead of leaders.
Guns don’t kill people. Culture kills people.
“Of all of them, none of them “lost it” and charged.”
Yeah, I wondered the same thing. Not particularly courageous or a bad ass myself, never in military, so won’t pretend to know how I would react.
Have seen and been in situations where average guy says F-it and runs into danger..
Fullmoon. Yeah. Of a group…there are some who will. But not at the school.
Richard Aubrey,
Do you KNOW when you will die? I have no idea when I’ll die.
Life is full of uncertainty.
What those “police people” KNEW is that children CHILDREN were being murdered.
I’m sure those little kids loved ones are relieved that none of the cops “lost it”.
That must be great consolation to those having to bury their children.
Richard Aubrey; Tuvea; Fullmoon:
About whether any of the cops “lost it” – one thing I think people need to understand is that there is still a lot of missing information. Maybe the investigators know it and just haven’t told us, or maybe they don’t know it yet themselves, or maybe there’s some they know and some they don’t know.
Only part of the hallway was videoed, and only some cops were wearing videocams, for example. And these reports and presentations we’ve had, although long, have only described a small part of what happened in any detail. I still have lots of questions that remain unanswered.
One series of unanswered questions of mine has to do with Officer Ruiz, teacher Eva Mireles’ husband. She was the person who called him after she was wounded. His story is heartwrenching and yet most of the details are missing, and I believe most of the details also occurred off-camera although I’m not 100% certain of that. At some point he, in the words of this new report (I plan to write in greater depth about this in a later post), was “devastated” and was taken away. None of that is described in depth, but in McCraw’s presentation he also said that Ruiz’s gun was taken away from him. We don’t know where this occurred, but I believe indications are that it was somewhere within the school building but not where the cameras were. We don’t know who removed him or his gun (no one was named). We don’t even know whether it was a Uvalde officer or one of the other officers there, or several. We don’t know what Ruiz did to precipitate that reaction or whether he was hysterical or angry, or was wanting to hurt someone else or to hurt himself, or really anything about it except what I already said. We also don’t know whether Arredondo or anyone else was notified about or witnessed what Ruiz had said or done. I had wondered about this earlier, because I knew some of his story weeks ago.
About “losing it” – did he try to charge the classroom doors, for example? If so, I doubt he got far, because if he had done that it would be on the video (which showed the approach to the classroom doors). But then again, have we even seen a completely unedited video?
Maybe he was disarmed because he expressed an intent to charge the doors? In some very emotional, “losing it” way? We just don’t know.
There’s a lot more in that vein. But that’s germane to the question of whether anyone “lost it.”
It’s also an example of the sort of information that is in the McCraw presentation and in the new report and yet most people aren’t aware of it. There’s a lot of information like that. And it’s why people aren’t even aware of what they don’t know.
Tuvea:
You think you know with absolute certainty that the cops “KNEW that children CHILDREN were being murdered.”
We indeed do know that children had been murdered before the cops got there. And we think we know – I think I know, for example – that the cops should have known children had already been murdered.
Whether children were still being murdered when the cops were there at the doors is an open question. It is probable that most of the murdered children (or perhaps all of them) had already been murdered by that time. And what the cops actually knew or thought they knew is something I plan to discuss in depth in future posts.
Richard Aubrey:
You ask when the cops figured out the door was unlocked.
They never figured it out. In addition, the investigators only figured it out because they saw the perp walk into the room by opening the door – that is, they think he did. They saw this on video later on; it happened before the cops got there, of course.
The problem is that their views of the doors on the video aren’t all that good. But I assume if somehow the perp was unlocking a locked door to get into the classroom, or shooting out the window on that door and then reaching in to turn the handle from the inside (he does shoot through the window, as I recall) they probably would have seen it on that video even if the view wasn’t all that clear. But when they talk about the door being unlocked they are quite careful to say they’re not absolutely sure it was, but the evidence points to its having been unlocked.
Investigators also say the cops never tried to just open the door without unlocking it; the cops had assumed it was locked because the default position for the classroom doors is locked, according to both McCraw and the new report. The teachers are supposed to keep their classroom doors locked at all times. The doors lock with a key from the outside. You can lock the door from the outside while keeping the door ajar, then go in and close it behind you. Once you’ve done that, it should be permanently locked, and that’s they way the doors are supposed to be kept. However, some teachers didn’t follow the rule. The authorities now think the perp entered room 111 but they’re not sure it was that one because of the aforementioned video angle problem. They think room 111 was unlocked because the door didn’t latch without pulling it rather hard; there was a strike plate defect which meant it could definitely lock but if you closed it softly it didn’t quite lock.
So they don’t know whether it was locked or unlocked but they assume unlocked.
In addition, when the breach finally occurred, the door was opened with a key. So, does that mean it was locked? Not necessarily, because if you don’t realize a door is unlocked you might use a key to open it. But wouldn’t you sense that you had just “unlocked” a door that was already unlocked? With some doors yes, with some doors no, and I’m not sure about the classroom doors. With my front door, you definitely know when you put your key in whether it’s locked or unlocked – when you turn the key you either feel resistance or you don’t.
The officers who entered that classroom door with a key think it was locked, but they don’t know. No one knows for sure. But we do know that no officers at the scene realized it was unlocked.
I hope that’s clear, because it’s a bit complicated. I’m planning a full explanation in a later post.
Apparently the individual classes weren’t notified of a lockdown because the principal couldn’t use their school app due to a faulty wifi signal.
“…He (Ramos) began firing in the air and Silva (a coach on the playground) sprung into action, alerting the school’s office there was a shooter on the premises.”
“”Coach Silva to office, somebody just jumped over the fence and he’s shooting,” Silva said into her radio. She gathered the third graders and told them to run inside.”
But the principal couldn’t alert the classrooms.
“Silva’s message reached Principal Mandy Gutierrez moments after the shooter entered the campus, the report says. Gutierrez tried to alert the entire school about the shooting threat using the school’s alert app, but couldn’t because of a bad wifi signal.”
We already know the radio used by the police weren’t reliable inside the building, but the wifi signal apparently wasn’t reliable either. This is likely separate from any cellular signal, which apparently worked inside the school.
https://www.insider.com/coach-robb-elementary-alerted-school-shooter-on-campus-report-2022-7
There is a question about the locks on the classroom doors, and here is a later story by Insider:
“The report says that Arnulfo Reyes, a fourth-grade teacher at Robb Elementary, told administrators that the lock on his classroom door was broken around March 2022. In May, a shooter “likely” used the unsecured door to enter Reyes’ classroom, killing all 11 students inside and wounding him, the report found.”
So the wifi didn’t work for the school’s alert system, and a classroom door didn’t lock. It seems the school district should share much of the blame for this tragedy. Had the lock on the classroom door been fixed, the shooter may not have had a way into the classroom.
As to the developing information about outside LEO have a chance to shoot the shooter, before the shooter entered the school, this additional information does change the situation. One LEO saw a shooter, and converges with another LEO that seems a person in black running away, along with children (probably at recess), and asks a third LEO for permission to shoot.
But it seems the second LEO hadn’t identified the shooter. Someone running away trying to escape, and someone carrying a rifle would look completely different.
So yes, it is a good thing that LEO didn’t shoot. He hadn’t ID’d the shooter.
Brian E:
The lock on Reyes room wasn’t broken. It worked, but it was defective. It could be locked but it had to be pulled shut tightly; if it was shut softly it didn’t lock.
See my post right above yours for a full explanation.
Also, he reported it and others reported it, but no one sent a work order to fix it. This was actually something Reyes, the teacher, could have done (the work order, not the fixing). He probably assumed someone else had filled out a work order, because many people were authorized to do it. It may have been a case in which everyone thought someone else had done it but no one had. Tragic, but ordinarily something like that wouldn’t have such catastrophic consequences.
As for the lockdown message sent by the Raptor system, most teachers got it but it appears that some teachers did not. By the way, in my post above yours, I explain that classroom doors are always supposed to be locked.
In addition, it appears that these sorts of problems with doors and locks are quite common in most schools. Teachers often override the locks (even if they’re not broken) because they are SO inconvenient. Most schools – fortunately – never have a school shooting.
If the doors had been locked the shooter still could have shot out the door windows, reached in to turn the handle, and gotten in. It just would have taken him somewhat longer, which might have reduced the casualty rates.
Tuvea. You need to get mad at somebody else. I’m not saying it’s a good thing no cops lost it and rushed the door. I’m saying it strikes me as odd that none did, given human behavior and the random pizza guy as just one of endless examples.
Case near here where a grandfather drowned trying to rescue a kid who’d fallen out of a boat yesterday.
Happens all the time except…not at Uvalde. Of all the cops there, none, not one, reacted as we expect to find at least one of in a group of a dozen, or a random pizza truck going down the road.
From which I think it’s worth asking if someone were about to try it and was held back by an active force such as command.
I suppose rattling the door to find out if it were locked–a silly thing to do when you’re absolutely sure it was locked–could get you killed.
But doors open outward, which means an assault doesn’t go in behind a door flying–on its hinges or not–into the room. You have to pull the thing open and start your assault from maybe two steps further back.
Opening outward means it opens toward the cops, and closes away from them, landing in a door frame. The door frame is fixed in the wall. So, to breach the door, you have to blow the whole assembly–door and jamb–top and sides out of the wall. Or you blow the door into shrapnel and go through the hole.
If I’d had the resources to do each, not sure which I’d pick.
Neo, thanks for the explanation as to knowing the door was unlocked.
A breaching round or slug-shot is a shotgun shell specially made for door breaching. It is typically fired at a range of 6 inches (15 cm) or less, aimed at the hinges or the area between the doorknob and lock and doorjamb, and is designed to destroy the object it hits and then disperse into a relatively harmless powder.
Neo, et al: A lot of the confusion (almost since day one) about the door is that the terms “locked” and “latched” are sometimes used interchangeably. Maybe if locked/unlocked referred only to the door handle being capable of being operated from whichever side, and latched used only to refer to the tongue or bolt of the mechanism properly engaging with the plate in the jamb. Yes, I’m being a bit picky, but getting a bit puckered over terms can eliminate confusion…
However, that said, how do we deal with the COP’s story about actually trying to operate the door locks with 2 rings of keys, and not notice if the door was locked or latched; and why did the videos not show that happening. Or did I miss that?
A door jamb runs maybe seven feet on each side of the door and three across the top, depending on the door’s dimensions.
So if the lock and knob are destroyed, the door still has to be opened on the hinges, the difference being a loud noise instead of the rattle of the knob.
If there are two hinges, you destroy one and wrestle the door out of the way against the resistance of the attachment to the other hinge. That’s going to take a few seconds, at least. If three hinges….
So, basically, you have a noisy way of clumsily unlocking the door. Causing it to, in effect, instantly disappear out of the way of the assault team would be a whole lot more explosive.
Keep in mind the shooter’s in there with a rifle pointed at the door, you have to presume, and taking more than maybe three seconds is going to result in a pile of wounded cops getting in the way.
I’d be interested in exactly how the ultimate entry was made.
My experience with the M16–a bit larger than the AR models going around–is that it “points” at near targets as if it were neurally-controlled, based on its size and how you most conveniently hold it. Better than a pistol for getting on to or really close to a target just by thinking about it.
The full-size rifles have to be consciously pointed and aimed, while you have to remember you’re scratching your ear with the pistol. The 16…there it is.
So a gallant attempt might end up with dead cops and nobody saved anyway. Range is, what, nine yards from the shooter to the door?
A commander might rationalize delay by thinking about this and really, really wanting to have all his hockey squared away and every resource exactly in position…taking time.
Were I in that position with a couple of months to think about it, I’d ask for a series of flashbangs coming into the window to deafen and distract the shooter while I did whatever it is with the door.
. It’s reported his last ammo order was hollow points. Don’t know what he was shooting, but that’s the way to bet. And there’s less penetration with hollow points so trying to shoot the cops outside through the wall likely wouldn’t work. They’d be safe enough.
But flashbangs are rough on kids….still, least bad of the options?
The lock on Reyes room wasn’t broken. It worked, but it was defective. It could be locked but it had to be pulled shut tightly; if it was shut softly it didn’t lock.”
If Reyes knew there was a lockdown, and he knew that the door had to be tightly shut to latch, why didn’t he do that? Based on the fact that the shooter was still outside the building when the principal was notified of a shooter, he should have had enough time to make sure the door was latched. Or was he one of the teachers that was not notified?
As to a mixup on who needed to turn in the work order to have his door fixed, a would assume that schools are fairly hierarchical. The teacher would give the work order to the office/principal. The office/principal would submit the work order to maintenance.
It isn’t likely a teacher would give the work order directly to maintenance, since the office/principal needs to know the amount and type of maintenance in the schedule.
Yes, school shootings are rare, but somehow it needs to be drilled into every school in the country that the procedures established to ensure the kid’s safety need to be taken very seriously– including dismissal.
Bottom line, we’ve focused on the failings of the LEO, but the school needs to take much of the blame for this.
Brian E:
I plan to write a lot more about Reyes and the door. Many of your questions will be answered, but not all of them.
Another Mike:
The report discusses the fact that he tried a lot of keys. So it seems that happened.
My guess is that either the door really was locked, or since he couldn’t put the keys in the lock he didn’t know it wasn’t locked, or (and I think this last possibility is the most likely) he was trying them on another door or doors to see if they were master keys and knew they weren’t master keys because they didn’t unlock those other doors.
I doubt he would have stood in front of the door of the room the perp was in when he was trying keys. That would have alerted the perp to his presence there and would probably have gotten Arredondo killed. But none of this is explained in detail.
Bottom line:
The perp killed the students (children) and the teachers.
Butt, butt, butt, Bottom line, indeed.
Brian E. It appears, from various reports, that more than the classroom door had been ignored. There’s the external door through which the shooter entered the school.
There was commo. There were keys. There were classroom doors.
What would happen in a school if there were a drill and the principle circulated, given some kind of union-approved downvote and penalty for not doing what was planned?
I haven’t weighed in much on your Uvalde posts, Neo, but, you have been doing a fantastic job with getting the information – thank you!
The only thing I can say is this: We now have a MSM narrative of “coward cops” – if, IF, the cops had gone all Rambo-like, as some seem to think they should have; then I believe the MSM narrative would have been “trigger-happy” cops kill teachers and students in friendly fire.
Damned if they do and damned if they don’t. I’ll bet there are many involved that day who, with 20/20 (or even murky) hindsight wished they had done something differently. But, wishing they had done something differently just means they didn’t like the outcome. It doesn’t mean that their first reaction was the wrong reaction given what they knew at the time.
People need to remember how bad that corridor video actually is. It’s shot with a fisheye lens from the north end of the corridor, so you can’t see much detail from the south end of the corridor, where most of the breaching preps were being done.
Some relevant parts of the report… really encourage people to read it themselves.
Page 14
Uvalde CISD police officers commonly carried two radios: one for the school district, and another “police radio” which transmitted communications from various local law enforcement agencies. While the school district radios tended to work reliably, the police radios worked more intermittently depending on where they were used.
Page 50
The evidence establishes that as they arrived at the west building, the initial responders knew there had been gunfire inside the building. They heard it as they were approaching. When they entered, they could see a cloud of debris in the hallway from drywall, as well as bullet holes in the walls and spend rifle casing on the floor. Yet the testimony received by the Committee also indicated that non of these initial responders recalled hearing screams or having any contemporaneous understanding, as they arrived in the building, that teachers and students just then had been shot inside the classrooms.
Page 56
While Sgt. Coronado was outside, his body camera recorded several people commenting the need to find a master key to the classrooms. Once Sgt. Coronado returned inside the south side of the hallway, he found Chief Arredondo on his phone also asking for a key, which has a primary focus of his attention for the next 40 minutes. Chief Arrendondo personally tried all of one large set of keys brought to him, and when Sgt. Coronado cautioned him to stay clear of the hallway and the “fatal funnel,” Chief Arredondo responded, “just tell the to f***ing wait.”
While waiting, he also periodically attempted to communicate with the attacker in English and Spanish, including immediately after four shots were fired inside the classroom at 12:21pm.
Page 61
Working with the BORTAC team, Cdr. Guerrero had another agent use the rifle-rated ballistic shield to give him cover as he opened the classroom door. Cdr. Guerrero placed the key in the door to Room 111 and opened the door. (Cdr. Guerrero’s contemporaneous report stated that he unlocked the doo, but as explained above, there is reason to question whether the door was actually locked.)
In his statement, Commander Guerrero said “I placed the key in the keyhole. The key worked and I was able to unlock and open the door.”
Page 62
As mentioned in the narratives above, there were important events happening outside the north and south ends of the west building. In part due to the difficulty of maintaining radio communications within the building, not everybody inside the building received all of this information.
The general consensus of witnesses interviewed by the Committee was that officers on the scene either assumed that Chief Arredondo was in charge, or that they could not tell that anybody was in charge of a scene described by several witnesses as “chaos” or a “cluster.”
Also…
Page 43
Sgt. Coronado testified he heard the request, and he hesitated. He knew there were children present. He considered the risk of shooting a child, and he quickly recalled his training that officers are responsible for every round that goes downrange.
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Also found this about breaching…
http://www.cqb-team.com/breaching.php
Breaching
A part of room clearing is the ability to gain access quickly to the rooms to be cleared.
Opening of Doors if not Locked
If the team knows that the door isn’t locked. One of two simple orders are used “pull and go” or “Push and go”.
A closed door is considered locked in all cases when a breacher is present, assuming the breacher has the means available to defeat the door.
Experienced teams do this automatically without any commands.
I ALWAYS make sure my classroom door is locked. If someone were to shoot out the glass window, I would have time to charge the door with a chair raised. I also keep a cricket bat under my desk.
I wish teachers could legally conceal carry.
It’s hard to imagine that if a shooter is inside a school that the police have not been trained and have thoroughly rehearsed the strategies needed to assault / take out the shooter.
If the police were forced to retreat because they were taking fire, are we to believe that the appropriate response is to back off and just wait?
And wait for what?
It’s totally clear that the police did not have adequate training nor did the police dept consider various scenarios they could encounter in a school shooting and develop strategies to deal with the possible scenarios.
Just as an example, why did not the police not have equipment to breach either locked doors or windows? Did it never occur to the police dept that a shooter could barricade himself in a classroom? Did they ever consider the assault strategies they could employ to deal with such a situation?
Sorry, but the response of the Uvalde police was totally incompetent.
JohnTyler. Your questions apply to any public building in the country. So the Michigan National Bank tower–third floor and up are offices for other businesses–in Flint needs what amounts to an arms room. Ditto the Genesee Towers across the alley, and the nine-story whose name I can’t recall diagonally across the intersection.
This would be supplied with shields, breaching charges of various types and any other items which it would have been useful to have on hand at the last catastrophe someplace.
About once a month, the cops go through checking door locks, asking the workers snap questions about tactics, making sure that the offices large and small have whatever items anybody who doesn’t have to pay for them or store them thinks are vitally necessary.
Failing any of these results in serious fines.
Sort of like the barracks except you don’t count socks.
Same is true for the small offices and retail places.
I exaggerate but only somewhat. The Bad Guys plan these things I don’t have to go again into detail but they plan. They are determined. They solve or avoid difficulties put up to stop such things. There will always be a gap to be exploited.
You know what’s outside a perimeter? Outside-the-perieter is outside the premier. That’s where people line up to get inside the perimeter.
It appears that there were too many law officers and too many agencies involved with no clear chain of command, it might have been handled much better with a team of six under the control of one leader who could say “Follow Me” and then move on out. Broken doors, broken chain of command and a terrible broken young psychopath intent on killing as many teachers and children as possible perhaps in the future more of these demented young men can be identified in the early stages of their evil designs and development.
I do appreciate learning what seems to be more factual information and I have no doubt that the majority of the law enforcement present would have moved forward rapidly if there had been leadership and a plan instead of the confusion and caution that caused the delay. Thank you Neo for your updates on Uvalde which is less than 100 miles from where we live.
The committee, in its report, also determined that Arredondo, who was one of the first responders on the scene, “failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander” on the day of the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead.
“This was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in the plan mentioned above, yet it was not effectively performed by anyone,” the report states. “The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon.”
—-
Just a quick reminder that I have been saying over and over that standard protocol (as well as the departments incident plan for school shootings, apparently) for establishing and transferring incident command wasn’t followed, and that Arredondo bore sole responsibility for that as he was among first on scene.
I just started a new job in my city and had to redo the ICS – 100 and 700 trainings, which I recommend everyone take as they are free. It makes it very clear how this was supposed to be handled and inexcusable that they fucked this up when it is literally 100-level course material. The lack of and established incident command directly contributed to the hour+ long cluster fuck.
Makes you wonder about Arredondo’s career up the hierarchy. Did he ever have a command position?
It would be a mistake to try to match a small-town police department or assigned force to the military. There may not be enough opportunities in various positions to learn or to be evaluated.
@Megan – technically, there were 2 other people mentioned in the active shooter plan, as having authority to take command of an active shooter situation. Either of them could have stepped in and setup command as well.
===========================
@Richard Aubary
About once a month, the cops go through checking door locks, asking the workers snap questions about tactics, making sure that the offices large and small have whatever items anybody who doesn’t have to pay for them or store them thinks are vitally necessary.
That was mentioned in the report.
Page 26
Uvalde CISD Police Officer Adrian Gonzalez testified that when an officer was waking the floors and checking doors, the teachers would notify each other, and they would lock their doors. The officers would speak to the teachers and to their supervisors, and they tried to discourage the use of magnets. Common responses from teachers would include that they did not have a key (particularly in the case of substitute teachers) and it was just temporary while a child was using the restroom. For some teachers, the inconveniences of keeping up with a key outweighed their perception of the risk of leaving doors unlocked. Other teachers were “rule followers,” always locking their doors.
===========================
Generally, in discussing this on another forum, everyone seems to think if you read the report, and respond to a query “this is what the report says” that it somehow means you’re endorsing what they did.
@JohnTyler
If the police were forced to retreat because they were taking fire, are we to believe that the appropriate response is to back off and just wait?
And wait for what?
=================
From the report, they were waiting on keys, entry tools, rifle rated shields and rifle rated body armor.
That the person who should have been setting up and manning the command post, was in the hallway fumbling around with a set of keys, shows that Chief Arredondo was not in the proper frame of mind.
I suspect tunnel vision because the plan was to breach, a closed door is assumed to be locked, and wasn’t aware that the tools were available. He got stuck in his own loop, gotta find the keys, gotta find the keys.
I’ve certainly done the same in less critical situations, getting stuck on STEP C say, instead of bypassing, adapting, or whatever.
I found the report frustratingly thin in several areas. My key takeaways are:
1) The school was not very secure. Considering the obscene amount of spending by the prostitutes in DC there is no excuse for that.
2) the Chief over four other guys is probably not the right guy to be in charge.
3) The door was probably locked. It was supposed to be kept locked at all times so it probably was particularly since it could be opened without unlocking.
4) BORTAC Acting Commander Paul Guerre ruled out using the Halligan as too risky to the breach team. Even though he left the building to retrieve it from his car, I don’t think he knew how to use it.
5) None of the ammo the killer bought could defeat Level III armor.
Zenman, yes, there were two others. But as I understand it, he was the first among them on scene. If someone more qualified showed up, he should’ve transferred command, and there is a protocol for doing so. The committee found he didn’t follow it, which was obvious from the start.
“As people responding to a crisis get word of an event or a sequence of events and rush to deal with it, they must create a preliminary story in their minds of what’s happening there. We all need such perceptions in order to properly evaluate what’s happening and to plan our responses. But we can’t get locked into these early notions; we have to take in new information…”
See my post ‘You Better Go to Raw Data’
https://ricochet.com/946310/you-better-go-to-raw-data/
Chases Eagles:
The report also mentions that no one at the scene had rifle-rated body armor.
Also, there were many other people there who could have assumed command.
Arredondo didn’t think he had done so. The protocol required the command post to be set up away from the immediate scene. There was an attempt by someone else to do that; I forget who at the moment.
The biggest error aside from lack of central command was the classification of the situation as barricaded subject. There were reasons for that classification, but it was a grave error.
Couple of points. Whatever the school needed they should have had. Even if it were not predictable…they should have had it. That’s hindsight. Thing is, so should everybody else; the four-bed day care, the GM factory, the bank, the Walmart, with employees trained on the hardware and with serious first aid training. Right. Simple. Problem solved.
This guy should not have been able to get into the school from a side door. Should not have been able to get into a classroom. What happened? Look at the report. No punishment for deficiencies. If you cannot force people to do the inconvenient, they won’t.
But if things were as presumed, he could have shot his way into the front door and wandered the halls shooting those locked out of locked classrooms, or through the drywall (!?) interior walls.
It takes no time to learn how to swap out mags in about four seconds, so he could have fired off all he could carry in next to no time.
Okay. He can’t get in. Sets up behind a bush a hundred yards away and waits for the school buses to arrive. See the sniper’s perch of the Highland Park shooter.
Okay, no cover. Drives his mom’s car across the sidewalks into the school when the buses are unloading.
Okay. Bollards. Takes his mom’s car out into the country and runs over kids at bus stops.
Remember what’s outside the perimeter; people lined up trying to get inside. No matter how far you push the perimeter.
Such prevention makes people feel good until it fails because the guy figured out a way around it–he always will–and gives a rallying point for second-guessing afterwards.
What we need to do is figure out how to spot these guys in advance and do something–a monumentally complex task. And figure out how to undo whatever we did since, to pick a date at random, 1964 when the military dumped a quarter million assault weapons into the market and NOTHING HAPPENED. We’ve always had a surfeit of guns. It’s…something else.
Meantime, learn serious first aid and keep your head on a swivel.
I’ve told my granddaughters that if you come up to a mess and there are people standing around and nobody’s in charge…you’re in charge.
@Richard Aubrey – good points. What’s the quote, something like, we have to be 100% effective in preventing terrorists, while they only have to score once and they’re always coming up with new means.
I’m with Megan, and with the report: there is no such thing as thinking you’re not in command, and yet not getting to work figuring out who is.
If you combine that problem with the fact that Arredondo was at least eligible for command (if perhaps not exclusively so) and made statements that led others to believe he was in command, this part of the malfeasance is about as open-and-shut as things get in real life. As Megan says, this is not abstruse doctrine, it is absolutely bottom-line basic stuff in ICS training, for everyone from the rankest junior civilian volunteer to the grand high poobah. There’s simply no way not to be in command and yet not be figuring whom you need to solicit your orders from–no middle ground at all, not for the first minute, let alone an hour.
I could understand Arredondo saying he mistakenly believed X was in command and that he was constrained to do nothing until X authorized him. Then we’d look at how credible his claim was to have believed X was in command. That’s not what he claims happened here. It’s as if he somehow believed literally no one was in charge, and yet he also believed that was not something that required emergency attention. That is completely beyond the pale.
“What would happen in a school if there were a drill and the principle circulated, given some kind of union-approved downvote and penalty for not doing what was planned?”– Richard Aubrey
I was talking to my daughter, a principal in an inner-city school configured somewhat like Uvalde. They have somewhat regular lockdowns, in addition to drills and in this state, the lockdown procedures are encoded in district policies. If a teacher fails to follow these procedures the teacher can have a reprimand written into their permanent file.
She has avoided doing that, but after the Uvalde tragedy, teachers had been expressing anxiety about their buildings safety. My daughter responded to the effect of “it sounds like you want me to hold you accountable.” Most of this is related to doors not getting locked and closed.
In the case of this building, some of the doors (outside metal doors) have swollen or sagged, which means they rub on the jam and don’t latch when closing. The teachers have to push the doors to latch the door.
The classroom doors are supposed to be closed and locked at all times, but in an elementary school- the kids are going in and out of the room throughout the day, and each time the teacher has to stop teaching to open the door– students are not allowed to open the door. So the doors tend to get propped open slightly.
There is no way to see who is knocking to get in the classroom, since the doors have no window.
There are solutions to all of this– but it would take a will to do it and money.
1. cameras could be located to show the classroom door from the hallway with a small monitor inside the room.
2. Classroom doors could have a electric mechanism to allow the door to be released remotely, to minimize the disruption from teaching.
3. An understanding by the teachers they would be reprimanded when not following district policies as to lockdowns.
This is low hanging fruit. But overcoming the inertia of the school bureaucracy.
Case in point. In my daughter’s school there are four classrooms connected by hallways with no doors separating the rooms. That’s a lot of children vulnerable once a shooter gets into one of the classrooms. The school district has resisted adding secure doors separating the classrooms, even after my daughter made this vulnerabilty known. This request was to the school district’s security administrator. Yes, there is a person at the district level responsible for security in all the buildings in the district.
This, of course, is in a much larger city, but the issues are similar.
So … in Greenwood Indiana a serial murderer opens fire killing 3 and injuring others. Instead of waiting for the Police to mill around ‘not losing it’ an armed civilian takes matters into his own hands.
“Dicken did not have military or police experience.”
I guess he ‘lost it’. He also likely saved a number of lives. Do I KNOW that?
Of course not. I’m not omniscient. I’m not God The Father nor His Son Jesus.
I guess I’m naughty for having an opinion. So I’m taking a ‘time out’.
Chat with y’all again after a while.
I don’t know if this will be a helpful comment or not, but it concerns Incident command and control.
My profession is the Oil & Gas industry, and I run drilling programs. This means, a 24-hour operation with anywhere from 30 – 150 people onsite, working with heavy industrial machinery. Incidents can range from a release of oil & gas, minor injuries, near misses, all the way up to catastrophes that claim life and destroy installations.
Many O&G companies maintain an Incident Control room in the central operations office, with 24-hour controlled access. There is an Incident Management plan, and a control structure. These are documented and form part of a company’s formal Management System as required by law. The on-call Incident Manager can call in a specialized team depending on the nature of the incident. Our plan calls for us to be in the IC room within minutes of a call.
There we have multiple telephone lines, fax machines, radios, white boards, and prepared materials – copies of the Plan, contact lists for government, media, services, air transport, Fire-Police-Military, medivac, and etc – to assist in managing an incident. There is an extended team of specialists, from Communications to Contracts, to HSE, to Engineers, Logistics, etc – all of whom have been through training and drills so that they know their role should an incident arise that requires them to participate. The resources are designed to be at fingertip, a phone call away. Having these things for immediate access is fundamental. Having a recognized chain of command and hierarchy of authority is also fundamental.
The structure of any Incident Management Plan is premised on a remote Command & Control center that allows resources to be brought to bear in an organized fashion so that the incident can be resolved as quickly as possible. This frees up the people that are ‘at the coal face’, so to speak, to act freely knowing that there is a support function that is feeding them the required resources so they can focus on getting the fire put out, so to speak.
All of our Incident training is based on this idea; regular drills reinforce the behaviors needed to satisfy and polish the Roles and Responsibilities so they become habit. Regular audit functions test these skills and make sure the IC room is kept in order and ready to go.
Seen from this perspective, the Uvalde school incident really shows the value of such planning if it is honored, and also shows the tragic consequence of under-preparation and non-compliance. It’s not just the Uvalde PD that failed its mission that day. Many jurisdictions were represented, and more than a few senior people were present, and it occurred to none of them to call a time-out and bring some structure to the efforts that reflected their training. That is a major process failure. We should be seeing (and demand to see) reforms across the community, and not just in Texas.
Just want to add, Neo your analysis and reporting on this have been nonpariel as far as I have seen, and I really appreciate your commitment to getting to the heart of the matter each time news is released. I predict there will be several more changes of direction as more conclusions are reached.
“Also, there were many other people there who could have assumed command.
Arredondo didn’t think he had done so. The protocol required the command post to be set up away from the immediate scene. There was an attempt by someone else to do that; I forget who at the moment.”
Neo, the part about assuming control is what you don’t seem to understand. The most qualified person first on scene IS the initial incident commander, period. Unless Arredondo cheated through multiple training modules, HE KNEW THIS. If a unified command post is set up or someone more qualified arrives it is the duty and responsibility of the initial commander to transfer command, which requires debriefing the incoming commander. The whole point of a standardized incident command process is to avoid situations like Uvalde where no one knows who is in charge at any given moment.
And honestly, I don’t understand your reticence to review what the standardized Incident Command protocol is and then review this incident against that information, especially when you seem to review it against everything else. It is available for free at FEMAs website. If you find something there that supports the notion that Arredondo didnt fuck up spectacularly with regard to the expectations set by this protocol then I’ll eat my hat.
Aggie. It seems your firm has the understanding of employees–who see bad stuff at their finger tips–to comply, and corporate arrangements to “encourage” compliance.
For a few years, my father was a telephone lineman. He/they were so careful about the power lines–same poles, this was maybe seventy-five years ago–that he wouldn’t flip a light switch with a wet hand. It’s easier to get guys who are right on top of trouble to pay attention.
Educators not so much. I have a relation who’s a retired high school AD. Talking about the Oxford HS shooting, she was gobsmacked. After the admin told the parents to take their nutcase kid home and they refused, he was released into the school population and…nobody had the initiative to check his backpack.
Not only are most educators not the kind of people who get up close and personal to potential catastrophe as part of their work–it’s not mining–many of them have what seems to me–might be wrong– a classist resistance to doing stuff like inspecting and training. It’s based on something. “It’s not my job….” something something not taught in ed school reduces compliance without close supervision.
Not sure where the union would be on accountability for same
Brian E. Please let us know what happens if your daughter does impose some accountability sufficient to actually prevent or mitigate the shooter.
Aggie:
Thanks!
I want to add that the Uvalde school district covers a town whose rural and aggregate population is about 15K. There is nothing all that special about Uvalde in terms of lack of ability to handle this, IMHO. I don’t think there’s any area in the US except perhaps some very big cities (and I’m not even sure about them) that has the sort of structure in place that you describe from the oil and gas industry. In addition, most schools have problems with teachers and others leaving doors unlocked that are supposed to be locked. There are obvious reasons for that, and they have to do with human nature and the difficulty of going in and out many many times a day with all that locking and unlocking by many many people.
Also – and I may write a post about this someday, although I have so many topics that I could have a blog devoted only to Uvalde! – there were some unique features of the Uvalde situation even compared to other school shooters. Therefore I doubt anyone foresaw this particular situation and I don’t think most places could have handled it effectively. For example, I’ve done some research on this and I have yet to find a school shooter situation where the shooter is still living when the police arrive, shoots at them while holed up in a classroom with dead and dying students, and the police can’t see into the room (in this case, the room was quite dark and smoky and that obscured their view) and don’t know who else is in there or if they’re dead or living. So the police are afraid to fire in there – they can’t see the perp or the victims or potential victims. The 911 calls, which if relayed would have helped them know, were not relayed to them, and their radios didn’t work. The one or two officers who learned of the 911 calls did not relay the information to Arredondo and the others near the classrooms because they thought they already knew. And yet all the time there were many many dead (and some wounded and dying) students and teachers in there with the shooter.
In no other situation I have found do those conditions hold. In the other shooter situations, the perps have either killed themselves by the time police come or simultaneously with their arrival, or they are in a place where they can be seen and shot if possible, and the victims are viewable as well. Sometimes the perp left already and they find him later.
Uvalde actually had uniquely challenging conditions. I haven’t seen anyone acknowledging that so far. And if you can come up with a school shooter situation that had similar conditions, I’d be very interested in learning.
I think that perhaps a big city with a lot of crime might have been better able to handle it, but that was not the case here. And of course it is quite obvious that there was a huge communication and coordination problem with the Uvalde situation that made it even worse.
Megan:
Do you think I’m making this up? I’m taking it from McCraw’s testimony and from the House report.
Why don’t you listen to McCraw and read the report?
From the report:
There were a total of almost 400 officers who arrived, total. Some were assisting with the school evacuation, which went off quickly and well. It was coordinated and executed from outside, though (by breaking windows from outside), where cellphones and radios worked more reliably. Inside there were huge problems with the radios and some problems with cellphones, and a lot of assumptions were made (including that Arredondo had taken command when he didn’t ever say he had). There were large numbers people from all sorts of different agencies, and it was a huge challenge to organize. No one rose to that challenge.
In addition, for various reasons this situation was wrongly declared to be a barricaded subject situation, which hampered the response greatly as well.
But I wonder if any similarly large and varied group under those exact circumstances could have established the command structure that was necessary to deal more effectively with the situation. I think some definitely might have done better, but I think only a few would have done well.
Lastly, I have said consistently and almost from the very start that the Uvalde response was disorganized and chaotic.
Neo. Good summation of the differences between Uvalde and other situations.
You mention big cities and it reminds me of the schools with which I have been familiar since maybe fifth grade including one locally where I sometimes help with a feeding program. It was built about sixty years ago.
Without exception the interior walls were some kind of ceramic construction. Sort of like a kind of polished hollow brick. Wish I could think of the name. The halls in the classroom areas were lined with lockers.
Is it the case that Robb’s interior walls were drywall or something similarly flimsy?
If this is the case, the idea most of us have of the cops taking cover being excessive might be incorrect.
Still looking for the pizza delivery guy among the responders and wondering if one or two were positively stopped.
Don’t fret, Megan is here again to …. Megan.
Richard Aubrey:
Yes, the walls were flimsy. I believe they may have been cinderblock – that’s what I recall, anyway. Bullets went right through them. A teacher and a student in room 209 were injured that way, although that hasn’t been well publicized.
We had a dedicated IC room because we do dangerous things 24 hours a day, and we need one. The point isn’t for everybody to have a dedicated Incident Control room to cover all situations though, or to attempt to envision everything that can possibly go wrong; the point, even in a small community, is to have a fit-for-purpose, living Incident Response Plan that is structured to organize and facilitate an effective response to any disaster, swiftly. There is probably a template of an IR Plan that is expressly developed for communities and customized to suit individual needs as required, sold as a product to Municipalities.
Modern safety takes a Systems-Based approach. If the Uvalde police had handed over the Incident Command role as people arrived, and if a Command and Control center had been set up nearby, then one of the early priority tasks (I am betting) would have been to set up effective communications chains – because by then, it would have become well understood that communication failures at the site were compromising the response. In fact, an IR Plan that was in place and properly administered could have caught this in advance, in a drill or an audit – maybe with corrective actions like installing signal repeaters inside the school).
Would that have changed the outcome? Would the inside-the-classroom 911 calls being relayed swiftly to the Team in the Hall have changed the situation? Almost certainly. But that’s hindsight and hardly useful, past showing the benefits of having, and abiding by, a response plan.
Aggie:
I’m not sure better central command would have mattered much, actually, because setting up the command center and conveying information to the people involved, with the technical problems at the site (radios that didn’t work, etc.), probably wouldn’t have speeded things very much. Plus, it is almost certain that all the injuries of students and teachers were sustained prior to the police arriving, and almost all the deaths as well. Some were still alive, however – but only a speedier response might have mattered. And we don’t even know if they could have been saved with a speedier response, although a medical team is currently studying the evidence regarding that and will release a report about it at some point. I have read that the way most of them were shot, and the weapon used, killed most of them instantly. However, we know that certainly wasn’t true for Eva Mireles, who lived long enough to contact her husband. We don’t know, however, if even she would have lived had she gotten prompt treatment, or if her wounds were inevitably fatal.
I spent a month in Valley Forge Army Hospital–non-combat issue–and it was full of guys who’d been shot, one way or another. But they weren’t dead.
That was because either they weren’t hit in the heart or brain, and….most especially, had been kept from bleeding out by comrades.
Almost anything can be survived if medical care is immediate, although some survivors may not be grateful–quad amps or quadriplegics, for example–but nothing cures bleeding out and in some cases it can be very fast. Such as a major artery, particularly if under stress and the pulse rate is over a hundred.
It is easy to say that faster action against the shooter might have saved lives, but more than likely, it would have had to be maybe ten minutes for the wounded.
A guy in my father’s platoon had a femoral artery opened clean–fragment–and lived about ninety seconds.
Had a neighbor lose an argument with a circular saw while doing deck work. Cut his thigh…feeders not the femoral…and was a couple of minutes away from the end when his neighbor, a retired physician saw him. Got him tied off or whatever and he lived.
As I’ve said before, Ramos’ last ammo order is reported to be hollow points which create more tissue damage than does ball ammo.
I suppose it was a mercy to be quick.
Richard Aubrey:
I am going on what was described by a doctor at the emergency room who saw the Uvalde victims. Remember, this was a rifle, and these were children, and for the most part these were apparently not survivable injuries, these were instantly fatal injuries.
As I said, however, there is a medical team studying it. I am sure they are aware of what sort of injury can be treated if medical help comes in a timely fashion and what sort are instantly fatal. Their report should give more information about how many victims had potentially survivable injuries and how many did not.
Richard Aubrey, I think the killer might have discovered via the internet that the 77 grain BTHP wasn’t effective against hogs with the animal running off and bleeding out elsewhere and the 55 grain FMJ dropped the hogs DRT (dead right there). Also, I read the report as saying the 375 rounds of 55 grain FMJ was purchased last. One of the other timelines said he entered the school with only about 300 rounds.
Found this:
“The BTHP is specifically designed for accuracy and not terminal expansion. It is only found in rifle cartridges. This is because its accuracy-enhancing features would not offer an advantage over the relatively short distances handguns are able to cover.
…
We do want to emphasize that despite technically having a nose cavity, the BTHP will not expand as it penetrates soft tissue. “
neo. I was speaking of those injuries not immediately fatal. The guys at Valley Forge had not been wounded such that they were immediately dead. But they might have been, many of them, only minutes away from bleeding out.
Kids. A rifle at close range….many wounds not survivable. Wonder how many were shot more than once.
Glad I’m not on that medical team. Thought the same thing about the Sandy Hook kids.
I guess my larger point is that, however we displace our anger on the cops and however much they may deserve it, it would have taken an hour less, likely, to be able to save lives. Anything after, say, ten minutes would be too late.
Richard Aubrey:
I understand what you’re saying.
One of the many terrible things that happened at Columbine, however, was the story of the death of Dave Sanders. Please read this article; he bled to death after four hours of non-rescue. So it’s possible for a person to survive that long and then die, when that person might have been saved if rescued way past 10 minutes. That article is also quite good at explaining similarly chaotic communication and coordination among the Columbine responders.
I think problems in communication are inherent in such situations and almost unavoidable, no matter what the training. But working equipment by which one person can communicate with many would be helpful.
Chases Eagles:
He brought a lot more rounds with him to the school grounds that day. For some unknown reason, he left his backpack behind, with a lot of rounds in it, after scaling the school fence. My guess is that he found it too cumbesome and jettisoned it for speed. He still had a lot of rounds with him.
Neo. There are outliers. My point is…they’re outliers. It’s possible the cops’ delays cost an outlier a chance. But most were likely already dead, even if survivable wounds bled out.
Ramos is the bad guy here. Incompetence and possibly cowardice or at least astounding lack of initiative are on video.
You don’t need comms to go through the door. You need other things including some sense of where the potential victims might be when you go through shooting.
One cop’s round in a person who’s already dead and….you can guess what the cops are thinking.
I sometimes help out with Feeding America. The old vets are a hoot. Razz each other like we’re still nineteen and can by God take care of business. Twenty minutes on the rifle range and we’re BACK. Might not assault a hill but we’d be a hell of a speed bump.
Like to have had half a dozen of those guys at Robb.
Apropos of something or other, I taught a nine-year old guest how to do a tourniquet. Got it right, reefed down pretty hard on my arm. Old guy skin marks pretty easily.
I wish that and self-defense weren’t necessary for kids.
Richard Aubrey:
We are in agreement. Sanders was an outlier, but it did happen that way and I wonder how long Eva Mireles lasted. It troubles me that she might have been saved if only there had been something done earlier, and it wasn’t done.
Chases Eagles.
Thanks for the research. If Ramos had done the same research–and as you point out it’s easily available–it would further my point that these shooters plan thoroughly. Indeed, considering he’d be shooting kids at short range, this was unnecessary detail. But they like that and they don’t want to miss a thing. Part of the fun.
Which is to say they’re determined. And a “ban” on this or that, a “lock” protocol, and any other thing we can put up is merely a problem to be solved, avoided, gone around and even adds to the enjoyment and anticipation.
We need to figure out and fix whatever happened in the last, say, twenty-five years before which this did not happen.
NEO: “With Uvalde there’s a great temptation to give a simple explanation such as “the police were gutless cowards.” Not only would that explain a lot, but it would mean there is a relatively easy solution: get braver people in there. I just don’t think it happens to fit the facts as presented, although it’s certainly possible it was true for some of the people there.”
IF you watch the video of the first encounter with officers, you will see they turned tail and ran… they actually had a chance to return fire and ran as soon as there was fire… one rubbing the top of his head, obviously believing that a bullet came that close… did it? was it imagined? does it matter? as that bullet is long past the person by the time they even start to register a ‘feeling’.
They turned tail…
the NEXT easy failure point was they had a ballistic shield and did not try two men, i mean persons, going up to the door, getting his attention and firing…
If he can fire at them, they can fire at him
Want to know what the difference is and how short it can be?
In the recent Indiana incident, 15 seconds…
“The surveillance video shows Sapirman exit the restroom at 5:56:48pm. He was neutralized by Dicken at 5:57:03 pm.”
8 of his 10 shots hit the target…
In that 15 seconds the gunman was able to kill three and wound 2 and get himself shot 8 times…
in the incident under conversation, the gunman had 72 minutes…
if one wants to play administration games one can then call it the fault of a system of labels and SOPs… ie. they mislabeled the shooter, so they applied the wrong SOP…
so not only do we hire cowards… which we do…
we ALSO hire idiots who follow SOPs and cant think for themselves
much like the people who followed their GARMIN over a cliff or into a lake
its a failure of trying to be Confucian and come up with all the recipes one can employ to avoid the bad… this is to replace the autonomous lower thinker with a autonomous rule follower putting all the real responsibility in the hands of the ‘programmer’ who comes up with SOPs and absolving them of that responsibility as well, placing it on the fools that follow the things to their success or failure…
They failed to think
They failed to seize and capitalize on the event in front of them
They ran chicken…
wW are now safety first in all these areas as a matter of administration because who and what kind of people do we now have on the force in terms of risk and aversion and playing it safe, vs the old days when people like Serpico got a bullet in the face.
We need to figure out and fix whatever happened in the last, say, twenty-five years before which this did not happen. – Richard Aubrey
“We were young radicals, just discovering feminism because we were tired of making coffee but not policy,” says Ms Morgan.
and the next decades they basically demonized these kids from before birth, ejected fathers, etc… Its what the soviets discovered about it… no one was left to fight for the kids! even now they hear about post birth abortions.
Brian E:
By the way, I think that investigators’ conclusions that the shooter entered through door 111 is quite shaky. I plan to explain why in a subsequent post – it’s a long story.
Good lord, neo. I’m torn between really wanting to know and telling you to take a break.