The tragic school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, continues to raise questions, in particular about the chaos and disarray that characterized the police response. A 77-page interim investigative report released on Sunday by a Texas House of Representatives Committee attempts to answer some of those questions, but many remain.
The Committee found that the only “villain” in the attack was the shooter, whom the report does not name in order to avoid giving him more notoriety. “There is no one to whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making,” the Committee wrote.
That said, the Committee found that “Robb Elementary did not adequately prepare for the risk of an armed intruder on campus” and “law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.”
The report cites several examples, including:
- [N]obody ensured that responders making key decisions inside the building received information that students and teachers had survived the initial burst of gunfire, were trapped in Rooms 111 and 112, and had called out for help. Some responders outside and inside the building knew that information through radio communications.
- Recognition of an active shooter scenario also should have prompted responders to prioritize the rescue of innocent victims over the precious time wasted in a search for door keys and shields to enhance the safety of law enforcement responders.
- …Responding officers failed to adequately question the absence of command. Other responders failed to be sufficiently assertive by identifying the incident commander and offering their assistance or guidance, or by assuming command in the absence of any other responder having expressly done so.
As a result, “the entirety of law enforcement and its training, preparation, and response shares systemic responsibility for many missed opportunities on that tragic day,” the Committee explained.
The House Committee report also cited as problematic the daily “bailout activity” in the area over the past 18 months, where illegal immigrants who are involved in high-speed chases with police abandon their vehicles and scatter into the community:
Uvalde CISD Director of Student Services Kenneth Mueller testified that since February 2021, high-speed chases have been a daily event in the Uvalde area, causing Uvalde CISD schools to be secured or locked down frequently, with “secure” or “lockdown” events happening since late February 2022, and approximately 90% of those being attributed to bailouts. Uvalde CISD parents became so concerned about the number of bailouts occurring near the elementary-school campuses that they offered to hire off-duty police to supplement the Uvalde CISD police presence.61
Because the school’s emergency alert system could not differentiate between bailouts and other emergencies like school shootings, the school staff was receiving almost daily notifications, which led teachers to respond “to all alerts with less urgency—when they heard the sound of an alert, many assumed that it was another bailout.”
The report is troubling and gut-wrenching to read—so many things went wrong that day and in the months prior, when the shooter was planning the attack. There’s no way to know for certain whether lives would have been saved had teachers, administrators, and law-enforcement officials taken different courses of action, but if everyone had done what they were supposed to do that day, we wouldn’t have so many unanswered questions and concerns about the competence of the individuals involved.
Read the entire 77-page report below:
Robb Elementary Investigative Committee Report by PJ Media on Scribd
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