“There are still departments in this country where there is ambiguity about this policy.” “The change from Columbine has not necessarily been accepted by agencies across the country, and that’s what you saw in this situation,” said Chuck Wexler, the head of the Police Executive Research Forum, a Washington-based think tank. The decision to wait appeared to those agents at the time, and to many policing experts afterward, as out-of-step with practices that have been in place in departments around the country for two decades since the deadly shooting at Columbine High School in 1999. “It is possible she could have been saved, if they had done their jobs,” Mr. Roland Gutierrez, who represents the area in the State Senate, said the family of one of the children killed told him that their daughter had been struck by a single bullet to the back and had bled to death. Inside the classrooms, children whose classmates lay dead around them quietly called 911 over and over again, at times pleading with dispatchers to send the police in to rescue them. “What is your problem?” they asked, according to an official briefed on the response. Specially trained agents from the Border Patrol, who arrived more than 40 minutes after the shooting had begun, had yelled for permission to go in and confront the gunman. The degree to which some law enforcement officers on the scene disagreed with the decision to hold back became more apparent on Saturday, as more became known about their frustrations in the protracted chaos of Tuesday’s shooting. On Sunday, emotions will run high again with a scheduled visit from President Biden. Its chief, Pedro Arredondo, had ordered the assembled officers to hold off on storming the two adjoining classrooms where the gunman had already fired more than 100 rounds at the walls, the door and the terrified fourth-graders locked inside with him, the state police said.Īs Uvalde lurched into a holiday weekend of somber gatherings and free public barbecues, questions mounted over Chief Arredondo, the role of the police and whether any of the 21 lives that were lost could have been saved.Īt a vigil on Saturday evening, hundreds of mourners met in the parking lot behind Sacred Heart Catholic Church and were urged by the pastor not to dwell in anger. That fell to the chief of a small police department created only four years ago to help provide security at Uvalde’s eight schools. Agents from the federal Border Patrol.īut none of the growing number of agencies had control over the scores of officers at the scene on Tuesday of what would become the deadliest school shooting since the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School a decade ago. UVALDE, Texas - From the first minutes after a gunman began shooting, officers descended on Robb Elementary School.
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