Texas Elementary School Shooting, as many as 22 dead, including Children

[Jotaux]

So with them coming out and saying kids were only shot by the shooter and the withholding of body cam footage... did the cops shoot a kid?

[Edge-]

So with them coming out and saying kids were only shot by the shooter and the withholding of body cam footage... did the cops shoot a kid?

That's the thinking. But so far it's just the news that they didn't even bother trying to open the door to the room the shooter was in for over an hour.

Pretty good article today up on the ongoing questions - https://abcnews.go.com/US/month-uval...ry?id=85510718

Like...

Did they try jiggling the handle to the door?

Was a community alert sent out about an active shooter beyond the Uvalde PD posting to Facebook?

Was information from the 911 calls made from the building relayed to on-site law enforcement? If not, how was this information missed?

Did Uvalde PD even know what the fuck they were doing? Because they seem to have forgotten all their prior training, including apparently failing to quickly secure protective equipment like shields to help them breach the room.

How cooperative is Uvalde PD, and more specifically Chief Arredondo, being with the DPS and investigations?

It's wild that it's been this long and some of these very basic questions remain unanswered.

[Endus]

How cooperative is Uvalde PD, and more specifically Chief Arredondo, being with the DPS and investigations?

It's wild that it's been this long and some of these very basic questions remain unanswered.

Especially this last one.

US police need the opposite of qualified immunity. They need transparency and oversight, to ensure both that their actions and conduct remain within justifiable and acceptable norms, and to ensure the public is satisfied that they do. If there's a question whether an officer had the right to take an action, presumption should be that they did not, to prevent any possibility of a second offense. Whether that results in criminal charges would be down to the evidence and how much reasonable doubt exists, but if there's uncertainty, they should be dismissed with cause, and permanently barred for working in law enforcement anywhere again.

To protect the citizenry.

The same reason that if I, as a teacher, had any complaints against me of my conduct with students, and could not completely justify my actions beyond doubt, I'd be rightly fired with cause and have my license to practice revoked. Why hold police officers to looser conduct standards than teachers?

[Glorious Leader]

It's wild that it's been this long and some of these very basic questions remain unanswered.

I'm fairly certain it'll be fit for a movie treatment to be honest

[Edge-]

https://twitter.com/tplohetski/statu...05390108622849

Apparently Uvalde PD was on-site with assault weapons and ballistic shields 9 minutes after the shooting began. They waited for nearly an hour before actually doing anything.

[Deus Mortis]

https://twitter.com/tplohetski/statu...05390108622849

Apparently Uvalde PD was on-site with assault weapons and ballistic shields 9 minutes after the shooting began. They waited for nearly an hour before actually doing anything.

That is pretty fucking bad. Stuff like this is exactly why they don't want the footage to come out, because it most likely shows them being to scared to act when children are getting blown away, while they had the necessary equipment that would reduce their risk to themselves.

[Breccia]

Apparently Uvalde PD was on-site with assault weapons and --

Nuh uh uh! If you ask Texas, there's no such thing as assault weapons. How could Uvadle have something that doesn't exist?

They did have a crowbar.

The officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary wanted to get inside classrooms 111 and 112 — immediately. One officer’s daughter was inside. Another officer had gotten a call from his wife, a teacher, who told him she was bleeding to death.

Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 who had opened fire on children and teachers inside the connected classrooms. A Halligan bar — an ax-like forcible-entry tool used by firefighters to get through locked doors — was available. Ballistic shields were arriving on the scene. So was plenty of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.

One such officer, a special agent at the Texas Department of Public Safety, had arrived around 20 minutes after the shooting started. He immediately asked: Are there still kids in the classrooms?

“If there is, then they just need to go in,” the agent said.

Another officer answered, “It is unknown at this time.”

The agent shot back, “Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there?” He added, “If there’s kids in there we need to go in there.”

“Whoever is in charge will determine that,” came the reply.

The inaction appeared too much for the special agent. He noted that there were still children in other classrooms within the school who needed to be evacuated.

“Well, there’s kids over here,” he said. “So I’m getting kids out.”

The exchange happened early in the excruciating 77 minutes on May 24 that started when Salvador Ramos, who had just shot his grandmother in the face, walked through an unlocked door of Robb Elementary, encountering no interference as he wielded an AR-15 he had bought eight days earlier. At the end of those 77 minutes, 19 students, including the daughter of one of the officers stationed in the hallway, and two teachers were dead or dying. Others sustained serious physical injuries; the emotional and psychological ones will last for life. It was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.

But during most of those 77 minutes, despite the urgent pleas from officers and parents amassed outside, officers stayed put outside rooms 111 and 112, stationed on either end of a wide hallway with sky blue and green walls and bulletin boards displaying children’s artwork. Ramos fired at least four sets of rounds — including the initial spray of fire that likely killed many of his victims instantaneously.

After the special agent’s comment, nearly another hour passed before a tactical team from the Border Patrol breached the classroom doors and killed the gunman.

I wonder how many times the Uvadle police will change their story.,

[Edge-]

Nuh uh uh! If you ask Texas, there's no such thing as assault weapons. How could Uvadle have something that doesn't exist?

They did have a crowbar.



I wonder how many times the Uvadle police will change their story.,

Jesus christ, was anyone working Uvalde PD not a piece of shit? Because it's sounding like every time federal or state law enforcement wanted to do anything the locals told them to keep fuckin waiting.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.kxan.com/news/texas/uval...board-meeting/

Local parents have fair questions about why Chief Arredondo still has a job. I mean, I get they probably can't fire him until they figure out how deeply he's fucked up, but the parents have a valid question all the same.

[Breccia]

Local parents have fair questions about why Chief Arredondo still has a job.

I will continue to have some sympathy for the Uvadle police for their actions at the time. I keep saying "average American with a weapon of war" but let's be honest, a mass murderer appeared in their quiet little school district out of fucking nowhere and had dozens hostages and hundreds of rounds before anything remotely like a plan could reasonably be formed. That's legit terrifying. I get freezing up, I get wanting to know what's going on before rushing in, and I get the confusion. Even from a police precinct.

Then, they lied about it. I am far less forgiving of that.

[Endus]

I will continue to have some sympathy for the Uvadle police for their actions at the time. I keep saying "average American with a weapon of war" but let's be honest, a mass murderer appeared in their quiet little school district out of fucking nowhere and had dozens hostages and hundreds of rounds before anything remotely like a plan could reasonably be formed. That's legit terrifying. I get freezing up, I get wanting to know what's going on before rushing in, and I get the confusion. Even from a police precinct.

Then, they lied about it. I am far less forgiving of that.

We now know they were geared up by 9 minutes after the attack started.

And then they sat on their asses for nearly an hour longer.

Because they're chickenshit cowards.

I don't want to be all Rambo Internet Tough Guy saying I'd have charged in there myself with just a ham sandwich and a stern glare and totally pwned that noob shooter, but if I had a gun and I knew there was a mass shooting event? I'd be trying to stop the guy. Circumstantially, maybe even if I didn't have a gun. I'd probably get shot, but if I get shot and live and failed to stop the guy, at least I tried. If I get shot and died, well, I don't have an opinion any more, do I? And either of those outcomes is, to me, a lot more morally and ethically comfortable than the idea that I just sat around and let those kids die because I was too fucking chickenshit to help.

If police won't go into situations like this to stop a shooter, then you don't need police. Like, at all. Disband the entire department. You need parking enforcement and crime investigators, but neither of those need guns. If cops are too chickenshit to protect and serve, then they don't need the equipment for said protecting and serving, and that includes all the weapons, all the body armor, even the nonlethals like pepper spray and tasers, even tools like handcuffs. If things get heated, just leave the criminal alone and get back in your car and fuck off.

[Breccia]

If police won't go into situations like this to stop a shooter, then you don't need police.

The question in this context I have is, did they not go in because they were underequipped to handle, yes I'm saying it again, the average American with a weapon of war? Or did they have the tools, and choose not to use them?

Neither option is good, but they point at different solutions.

[Endus]

The question in this context I have is, did they not go in because they were underequipped to handle, yes I'm saying it again, the average American with a weapon of war? Or did they have the tools, and choose not to use them?

We know they had the tools, on-site, ready to go, 9 minutes after the attack started.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture...nutes-1371489/

[Edge-]

https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/te...ilure/2996892/

Law enforcement authorities had enough officers on the scene of the Uvalde school massacre to have stopped the gunman three minutes after he entered the building, and they never checked a classroom door to see if it was locked, the Texas public safety chief testified Tuesday, calling the police response an "abject failure."

Man, things are just getting started today and ooph for Ulvalde PD.

The classroom door, it turned out, could not be locked from the inside, yet there is no indication officers tried to open the door while the gunman was inside, Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, testified. Instead, he said, police waited around for a key.

Ooph.

McCraw lit into Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief who was in charge, saying: "The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children."

Bigger ooph.

"Obviously, not enough training was done in this situation, plain and simple. Because terrible decisions were made by the on-site commander," McCraw said. He said investigators have been unable to "re-interview" Arredondo.

I call bullshit on the first bit, they'd literally just done a walkthrough and everything a few months prior. They should have been prepared.

As to the latter, we now have confirmation that Arredondo is still not cooperating. Why is he still police chief? Why is he still on the city council?

"You don't wait for a SWAT team. You have one officer, that's enough," he said. He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw.

More on police inaction, in contradiction with their actual training.

Arredondo did not have a radio with him.
Police and sheriff's radios did not work within the school; only the radios of Border Patrol agents on the scene worked inside the school, and even they did not work perfectly.
Some diagrams of the school that police were using to coordinate their response were wrong.

Why would the commander on the scene not have a radio?

Why was the security risk of radios not working within the school building not noted and addressed earlier? Seems like something any local cop at the school should notice fairly quickly and report.

Where did they get the wrong plans/diagrams for the school building?

"There's no way for her to know the door is locked," McCraw said. "He walked straight through."

Reminder: The teacher cops kept trying to blame for "propping the door open" did not prop the door open and is not to blame.

Arredondo later said he didn't consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the law enforcement response. Arredondo has declined repeated requests for comment to The Associated Press.

Jesus christ on a stick, at this point I wouldn't be surprised if this was the result of him day-drinking on the job or something.

[Poopymonster]

I will continue to have some sympathy for the Uvadle police for their actions at the time. I keep saying "average American with a weapon of war" but let's be honest, a mass murderer appeared in their quiet little school district out of fucking nowhere and had dozens hostages and hundreds of rounds before anything remotely like a plan could reasonably be formed. That's legit terrifying. I get freezing up, I get wanting to know what's going on before rushing in, and I get the confusion. Even from a police precinct.

Then, they lied about it. I am far less forgiving of that.

That's what they had training for a few months for. To know what to do. How to react. If you freeze up in a situation like that, that you've had training recently for, then you are unsuitable for the job.

[Edge-]

https://www.npr.org/2022/06/21/11063...pete-arredondo

How long COULD IT have taken to stop the shooter? Apparently, around 3 minutes.

Not an hour+ as actually happened.

Uvalde PD...



Yeah, they've got some 'splainin to do.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.insider.com/lawmaker-sla...d-doors-2022-6

Lawmakers seem unhappy that Chief Arredondo won't testify publicly and will only testify behind closed doors.

However, one of the lawmakers present behind those closed doors had this to say about Chief Arredondo -

"I don't believe there's any training in the world that could have helped this incident commander," Bettencourt, a Republican, said during the Texas Senate committee meeting held in response to the shooting.

Which brings up the same question: Why is he still the police chief?

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/sp...a8w1b15f31n1wy

So Uvalde PD can't stop a bad guy with a gun, but they're very good at stopping good guys with guns.

[Xyonai]

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/sp...a8w1b15f31n1wy

So Uvalde PD can't stop a bad guy with a gun, but they're very good at stopping good guys with guns.

I was wondering what the follow-up to that story was going to be, because all we heard before then was that the wife got her call out and her husband got wind of it, but not why he didn't seemingly do anything.

And now we know, and holy shit I cannot imagine what'd be worse: His guilt at being unable to help or his sheer fucking fury at being denied the ability to.

[Edge-]

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/sp...a8w1b15f31n1wy

So Uvalde PD can't stop a bad guy with a gun, but they're very good at stopping good guys with guns.

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022...-to-save-wife/

More on this that I didn't see in the report I linked: The husband that was detained is apparently a fuckin officer of the Uvalde school district PD.

At this point it's going to be hard to keep track of how many times cops could have ended this earlier and possibly saved lives, but actively chose to do nothing. While preventing others from doing anything either.

Until federal law enforcement got tired of waiting and finally ended this.

Honestly struggling to figure out why most of these officers still have jobs, and why the Uvalde school districts response to the abject failure of their police department...is to propose hiring even more cops.

[Evil Midnight Bomber]

I will continue to have some sympathy for the Uvadle police for their actions at the time. I keep saying "average American with a weapon of war" but let's be honest, a mass murderer appeared in their quiet little school district out of fucking nowhere and had dozens hostages and hundreds of rounds before anything remotely like a plan could reasonably be formed. That's legit terrifying. I get freezing up, I get wanting to know what's going on before rushing in, and I get the confusion. Even from a police precinct.

Then, they lied about it. I am far less forgiving of that.

I have zero sympathy for them.

Yeah, it's scary to have to face an armed assailant that has no misgivings about taking human life.

But they signed up for that when they joined the police force.

Kids are getting shot. Do something about that.

Lying about it afterward makes it worse, sure... but even if they were honest from the get go and were like "we didn't go in cuz we wuz all scared" it wouldn't make it much better.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.ksat.com/news/local/2022...-to-save-wife/

More on this that I didn't see in the report I linked: The husband that was detained is apparently a fuckin officer of the Uvalde school district PD.

At this point it's going to be hard to keep track of how many times cops could have ended this earlier and possibly saved lives, but actively chose to do nothing. While preventing others from doing anything either.

Until federal law enforcement got tired of waiting and finally ended this.

Honestly struggling to figure out why most of these officers still have jobs, and why the Uvalde school districts response to the abject failure of their police department...is to propose hiring even more cops.

On the one hand, I agree with stopping that guy from recklessly charging in and possibly making the situation worse. He's not in the best mindset.

But on the other hand, If you're going to tell the man to stand down... he should at least be able to see that you're doing something to save his wife and all those kids.

[Edge-]

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06...ndo-leave/amp/

Pete Arredondo has been placed on leave.

Anne Marie Espinoza, director of communications and marketing for the school district, would not confirm if the leave was paid or unpaid.

Why does the school district need a marketing staffer? Either way, weird that Uvalde is still trying to be as opaque as possible in everything they do.

[Belize]

https://www.texastribune.org/2022/06...ndo-leave/amp/

Pete Arredondo has been placed on leave.



Why does the school district need a marketing staffer? Either way, weird that Uvalde is still trying to be as opaque as possible in everything they do.

I'm not saying that the Uvalde local government looks like a corrupt shithole, but the Uvalde government sure looks like a corrupt shithole.