Uvalde Police, School District No Longer Cooperating with Probe into School Shooting
The Uvalde Police Department and school district are no longer cooperating with the State of Texas’s investigation into the shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, which killed 19 children and two teachers.
Law enforcement sources in Texas, speaking to ABC News, relayed the decision to the press on Tuesday, a week after the deadly shooting. The withdrawal of cooperation comes after the Texas Department of Public Safety’s director, Steve McCraw, announced on Friday that the decision by Uvalde police officers not to breach the two classrooms where the shooter was located was “the wrong decision.”
After arriving at the scene of the incident on May 24, up to 19 municipal police and school district police officers were engaged in a standoff with the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, for nearly 50 minutes — while he was inside with children. As many as eight or nine children were still alive during this time and were placing 911 calls to police dispatch, pleading for help. Earlier, Texas DPS spokesman Victor Escalon had said that police presumed all children inside the classroom were dead. However, footage obtained by ABC News revealed that police dispatch had relayed the information to officers, saying the room was “full of victims at this moment” at 12:13 p.m.
Only at 12:50 p.m. did a tactical team of U.S. Border Patrol agents breach the classroom and kill Ramos.
That revelation, contrary to earlier reports about the police officers’ actions, sparked public outrage over the decision to fall back while children were still alive, during which time some are believed to have been killed. Texas governor Greg Abbott, in a press conference on Friday, said he was “misled” with “inaccurate” information about the sequence of events, while Representative Joaquin Castro (D., Texas) called for an FBI investigation into the actions of police.
In a statement in response to the source’s comments, the Texas DPS, which is leading the investigation, said that the Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District have been cooperating with investigators, but said that the “chief of the Uvalde CISD Police . . . has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview.”
That chief, Peter Arredondo, was the incident commander on-scene on the day of the shooting who reportedly ordered officers to fall back. Arredondo had made two media appearances on the day of the shooting to provide updates after the incident but has not been seen in public since.
It is unclear what impact the lack of cooperation from Uvalde authorities will have on the investigation. While the Uvalde Police Department is overseen by the town’s mayor, Don McLaughlin, the school district’s police is overseen by the school superintendent, Harold Hansen. As of writing, neither parties, nor the individual police departments, have responded to National Review’s requests for comment.
