The New Neo

No, I’ve haven’t forgotten that I said I was planning to write another post (or several posts) on the lengthy McCraw presentation to the Texas legislature about Uvalde and the police response. It’s just that so many events have intervened that I haven’t gotten around to it, and time marches on.

And this isn’t that post about McCraw’s testimony either, not yet. This is about a related subject, though, the Texas State University ALERRT report entitled “Robb Elementary School Attack Response Assessment and Recommendations.” A reader was kind enough to send me a link to the 26-page document.

I had already read something about the report and wrote the following concerning it as part of this July 6 comment:

It would also be really nice to know whether the Texas State people had access to all the interviews and videos and all of that, or whether they’re working off newspaper reports. I hope for everyone’s sake it’s the former and not the latter. But neither of the two articles I’ve read so far (the NBC one you linked and the Texas Tribune one I linked) sees fit to mention the sources involved in the Texas State study.

In other words, I was very puzzled that this long report was issued and then reported on, and some of its findings cited, without a word in the MSM about what the report’s sources were.

Well, now I know [emphasis mine]:

The information presented in this report is based on a incident briefing held for select ALERRT staff on June 1, 2022. The briefing, which was held for approximately 1 hour, was led by an investigating officer with knowledge of the event and investigative details. Briefing materials included surveillance footage from the school, Google Maps, a brief cell phone video, and verbal questions and answers between ALERRT staff and the investigator. We were first oriented to the location of this incident by the investigator via Google Maps. We were then given a chronological timeline of events and actions by the investigator as we reviewed the cell phone and school surveillance video. All times presented in this report are based on timelines provided by investigators. Additionally, we have received additional information as the investigation is still ongoing. The timeline presented here is based on the most current information as of 6/30/2022.

That’s a bit vague as to the extent and timing of the “additional information,” but it seems to pertain mostly to updates in the timeline, as far as I can tell. Otherwise this took one hour, including questions, in a briefing held about a week after the shootings? That certainly gives a new meaning to the term briefing.

I watched four and a half hours of McCraw’s presentation to the legislature on June 21 (my first post on it was here), as well as hours of testimony from others later that day, and the experience raised more questions than it answered. I simply cannot imagine what kind of presentation could be given in an hour, even without the question-and-answer period, and how a report could be based mostly on that.

That’s not to say that this report isn’t accurate. Most of it matches much of the information we already have and can be found on this blog and its links, as well as comments here. The timeline the report gives contains a little more detail in some portions (including seconds rather than just minutes, for example), and it is more clear about certain aspects. For example, as had been hinted and as I had suspected, the initial flurry of shooting by the perp – and almost certainly the killing and wounding of teachers and children – happened as soon as the perp entered the classrooms, from 11:33:32 to 11:36:04. And it’s still not 100% clear whether the perp entered room 111 or room 112 first, a distinction which will become more important when I discuss the doors in one of the posts I have planned for later that’s based on McCraw’s longer legislative testimony.

Three Uvalde police officers enter the building at 11:35:55. That’s nine seconds before the last shot in the fusillade, but they’re not yet at the classrooms, which are down a hall and around a corner. Four other officers enter the building at 11:36:00 and four more at 11:36:03. As the officers get to the classrooms (the report says the “threshold” of the classrooms), they are fired upon by the perp (at 11:37:00 and 11:37:10). As we already know, two were injured – the report says “by building material fragments caused by the suspect’s rounds passing through the walls” – and then the group moves away from the doors but remains in halls nearby. After that, over the rest of the time they are in the hall, the perp fires two isolated shots, but unfortunately the report doesn’t answer the question of whether the shots were towards the hallway or not (I have read that police said they were, but I would guess there’s no way to substantiate that).

On page 12 of the report is a useful diagram of how rooms 111 and 112 relate to each other, and it contains some information that is new to me. I already knew (from some reports and also from McCraw’s legislative presentation) that the surveillance cameras had trouble picking up which door, 111 or 112, the perp had entered first. That was partly because the camera was mounted somewhat far away and therefore the perspective of the video of the doors wasn’t of great quality, but now I see it also was because the two doors are smack next to each other with no space at all in between. They constitute what’s more or less a double door.

McCraw’s presentation had already featured the doors themselves, so I knew what a classroom door in Robb Elementary looked like, but on page 13 of the report there is a photo and you can see the narrow window in the door. An important point is here (page 16) (one also mentioned in McCraw’s legislature presentation):

We received information from the investigating officer that the lock on room 111 had been reported as damaged multiple times; however, this has not been confirmed through work orders at this time. Regardless, the suspect is seen entering the room, exiting the room, and then reentering the room again prior to officers entering the building at 11:35:55. The only way to engage the lock is to insert a key from the hallway side of the door. At no point is the suspect observed entering the hallway and engaging the locking mechanism. Based upon this, we believe that the lock to room 111 was never engaged.

However – and again, this is part of a future post I plan to write about the doors and the locks – McCraw actually said some contradictory things during that presentation that made the issue quite confusing. In addition, the idea that a key was necessary to lock the doors from the outside was contradicted by at least one teacher interview I read, as well as the contradictions from McCraw. In other words, it was hard to make sense of what McCraw was saying, although I listened to the relevant portion several times. As I said, I hope to explain this in a later post; please bear with me, because it’s somewhat complicated.

As I’ve said many times before, in my opinion a big problem with the police response was that it was chaotic and disorganized. With this, the university report certainly concurs: “It appears that the officers did not create an immediate action plan.” It certainly does – or rather, whatever plan they did create (which was also chaotic and disorganized) was based on a false premise, that this was a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter. From the report:

It is not surprising that officers who had never been shot at before would be overwhelmed by the directed gunfire. This is especially the case if they had not been consistently training to deal with this type of threat.

From McCraw’s legislature presentation, I’ve developed a novel (and rather strange) hypothesis as to why the officers hesitated to act for so long and considered the perp to be a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter. But that’ll have to wait for another post.

The university report then goes on to give alternative approaches that should have been considered for getting into the classrooms, some of which seemingly could have been tried and should have been tried, such as going in through the windows in a coordinated effort. The report goes on to discuss various breaching methods, which would make sense if the officers felt it was an active shooter situation. We already know that for some mysterious reason they did not, and the report doesn’t try to figure out why they were so mistaken. It’s something I’ve pondered, and as I said I’ve come up with a somewhat strange possibility, which I plan to detail in a future post.

The report adds a couple of things I hadn’t known before, which is that miniblinds on the outer windows made it hard if not impossible to see from outside into the classrooms, and if the window entry had been tried the blinds would have had to have been “raked” by police. The classrooms were somewhat dark for that reason although it was daytime, and that could have made it somewhat difficult to see in accurately from the hallway through the narrow window in the door. In addition, of course, there would have been the possibility of hitting children if officers fired through the door without getting a good view of the perp.

I’ve said before – but it bears repeating – that I see the police response somewhat differently than most people see it. It’s partly a drama – and a tragedy – involving courage (or lack thereof) as well as training (or lack thereof), and I certainly agree that those are issues. But in addition, and importantly, I see the failures of the police that day as emanating from incorrect perceptions and poor communication. I hope to elaborate on that in a future post or posts.

I’ll stop there for today; this is already long enough. And it only scratches the surface.