A deadly hour in Uvalde
At 11:48 a.m. on May 24, Rubin Ruiz, an officer with the Uvalde school district police department, arrived in the hallway of the Robb Elementary School and informed officers on the scene that his wife, Eva Mireles, had called and told him she had been shot in her classroom at the school. Ruiz, who was armed, apparently told the officers he was there to enter the classroom and attempt to save his wife’s life.
Instead, Ruiz was disarmed by fellow school district police officers, including the department chief, Pete Arredondo, who was on the scene in the school hallway. Ruiz was “detained and escorted off the scene,” according to testimony given yesterday to a committee of the state Senate by Steve McGraw, Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
At 11:48, the heavily armed shooter had already been inside two classrooms at the school for 15 minutes and had fired his gun more than 100 times by the time Ruiz informed his fellow officers that his wife had been wounded. Eleven officers from the Uvalde police department, sheriff’s department and school district police force were in the hallway outside the classroom filled with dead and wounded school children and teachers. An hour would pass before the classroom was stormed and the shooter was killed by officers from the Border Patrol at 12:50 a.m. During that hour, eight more officers would crowd into the school’s hallway, many of them armed with AR-15 style automatic rifles. By 12:03, three ballistic shields would be available to the officers in the hallway. At least one of the shields was visible leaning against a wall with a police officer armed with an AR-15 automatic rifle using it for protection in images taken from video footage from school security cameras and police body cams. A total of 19 officers would eventually gather in the hallway of the school awaiting orders to launch an assault on the gunman, according to McGraw’s testimony yesterday. The orders never came. The Border Patrol officers who ended up storming the classroom did so on their own initiative.
Uvalde school district police chief Arredondo, the so-called incident commander at the school, was placed on “administrative leave” today by the department. Arredondo, who was recently sworn in as a member of the Uvalde City Council, is being paid while on leave.
More than 60 law enforcement officers from multiple jurisdictions – city, county, state and federal – were at the school by the time the classroom was stormed and the shooter was killed.
All the reports about McGraw’s Texas Senate testimony are quoting his statement that the police response to the shooting in Uvalde was an “abject failure.”
It was more than that. It was a prime example of police officers who were charged with ensuring the safety of the public choosing to safeguard their own safety over that of the 19 school children and two teachers who were killed during the incident at Robb Elementary School. Nineteen officers in the school hallway, and more than 40 others outside the doors of the school, were apparently unwilling to risk their own lives to save the lives of the 21 who were killed and 17 who were wounded during the assault on the school.
It wasn’t an abject failure. It was dereliction of duty and criminal negligence by officials of the state.
The Texas Republican Party, at its recent convention, passed an official platform that calls for reforming what they call “School Security” in this way:
We support passage of a statute, which permits local law enforcement to provide handgun safety and proficiency training for all educators, and allows LTC (License to Carry) holders to carry a concealed firearm on the premises of Pre-K-12 schools for security and protection purposes.
So Texas Republicans will depend on “local law enforcement” to train educators and License to Carry holders to do what they failed to do in Uvalde, which is to provide “security and protection” to school children and teachers.
Problem solved.
This whole incident is outrageous. The fact that the police chief is still drawing a paycheck and being protected is beyond belief. Were this some small town in New England the outrage over this would be overwhelming, but this is a largely Hispanic town and the response by the public so far is reflective of the overall attitude of white America towards people of color. I so feel for those parents. The horror of losing a child knowing it may have been prevented. And the cop who was restrained by cowards has to live with his inability to save his wife’s life. This is the unthinkable brought into reality. It’s sickening.
Just how many "good guys with guns," all armed to the teeth and paid by tax dollars to do this, do you need to open a door and take on a single young man with a rifle? How can anyone possibly believe that the answer to this problem is training and arming more people?