The report followed weeks of closed-door interviews with more than 40 people, including witnesses and law enforcement who were on the scene of the shooting. Border Patrol did not immediately return requests for comment Sunday. Officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety and U.S. Dustin Burrows, a Republican who led the investigation. "Everyone who came on the scene talked about this being chaotic,” said Texas state Rep. Prior to Sunday, only one of the hundreds of officers on the scene – Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief – was known to have been on leave. Investigators said it was not their job to determine whether officers should be held accountable, saying that decisions rests with each law enforcement agency. The report noted that many of the hundreds of law enforcement responders who rushed to the school were better trained and equipped than the school district police – which the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state police force, previously faulted for not going into the room sooner. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.” "There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. "Other than the attacker, the Committee did not find any ‘villains’ in the course of its investigation,” the report said. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials. The overwhelming majority of those who responded were federal and state law enforcement. "These leaders are not leaders,” she said.Īccording to the report, 376 law enforcement officers massed at the school. They need to come back and give us their undivided attention,” she said later. None of them do,” Vincent Salazar, grandfather of 11-year-old Layla Salazar, who was among those killed, said Sunday.Īnger flashed in Uvalde even over how the report was rolled out: Tina Quintanilla-Taylor, whose daughter survived the shooting, shouted at the three-member Texas House committee as they left a news conference after the findings were released.Ĭommittee members had invited families of the victims to discuss the report privately, but Quintanilla-Taylor said the committee should have taken questions from the community, not just the media. He also disclosed for the first time that some officers had left the force since the shooting but did not provide an exact number, saying it was as many as three. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said an investigation would be launched to determine whether Pargas should have taken command of the scene. Mariano Pargas, a Uvalde Police Department officer who was the city's acting police chief during the massacre, was placed on administrative leave. Swiftly, the findings set in motion at least one fallout: Lt. The report – the most complete account yet of the hesitant and haphazard response to the May 24 massacre – was written by an investigative committee from the Texas House of Representatives. Still, no one tried to breach the classroom. A Uvalde Police Department officer said he heard about 911 calls that had come from inside the classroom, and that his understanding was the officers on one side of the building knew there were victims trapped inside. The commander of a Border Patrol tactical team waited for a bullet-proof shield and working master key for the classroom, which may have not even been needed, before entering the classroom. No one assumed command despite scores of officers being on the scene. The gunman fired approximately 142 rounds inside the building – and it is "almost certain” that at least 100 shots came before any officer entered, according to the report, which laid out in detail numerous failures.
"At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety," the report said.
Some families blasted police as cowards and demanded resignations. The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside two fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers.Īltogether, the report and more than three hours of newly released body camera footage from the May 24 tragedy amounted to the fullest account to date of one of the worst school shootings in U.S. About 400 law enforcement officials rushed to the Uvalde elementary school in Texas where the mass shooting took place, but "egregiously poor decision-making” resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released on Sunday.
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