A Uvalde police officer requested permission to shoot the armed gunman as he approached Robb Elementary on May 24, but he didn’t receive a response from his supervisor, according to a new damning report from Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center. The shooter went on to kill 19 students and two teachers inside the school.
The report, released on Wednesday, provides a timeline that mirrors in some ways the one provided by Steve McCraw, the Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, during his testimony to a Texas Senate committee on June 21. The ALERRT report detailed its timeline minute-by-minute based on internal school surveillance (ISS), video footage from a nearby funeral home (FH), body-worn cameras (BWC), radio logs (RL), officer statements (OS), and interviews were used to determine the timeline.
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The report revealed a major delay in police response that could have saved lives — and it happened before the shooter entered the building, suggesting the massacre could have been prevented altogether.
“Prior to the suspect’s entry into the building at 11:33:00, according to statements, a Uvalde Police Officer on scene at the crash site observed the suspect carrying a rifle outside the west hall entry. The officer, armed with a rifle, asked his supervisor for permission to shoot the suspect,” the ALERRT report reads. “However, the supervisor either did not hear or responded too late. The officer turned to get confirmation from his supervisor and when he turned back to address the suspect, he had entered the west hallway unabated. (OS per investigating officer interview).” The report does not identify Arredondo as the supervisor in the passage.
But the problems didn’t stop there. The report went on to chronicle more mistakes, stating that when a group of armed officers eventually entered the school, they did so ineffectively by going down the opposite ends of the hallway “resulting in a high likelihood of officers at either end of the hallway shooting officers at the other end” if the suspect had come out from the classroom, according to the report.
“Ideally, the officers would have placed accurate return fire on the attacker when the attacker began shooting at them,” the report read. “Maintaining position or even pushing forward to a better spot to deliver accurate return fire would have undoubtedly been dangerous, and there would have been a high probability that some of the officers would have been shot or even killed. However, the officers also would likely have been able to stop the attacker and then focus on getting immediate medical care to the wounded.”
Ultimately, the report concluded that after the gunman entered the building, the officers did not properly engage the shooter and lost momentum.
“Ideally, the officers would have placed accurate return fire on the attacker when the attacker began shooting at them,” the report read. “Maintaining position or even pushing forward to a better spot to deliver accurate return fire would have undoubtedly been dangerous, and there would have been a high probability that some of the officers would have been shot or even killed. However, the officers also would likely have been able to stop the attacker and then focus on getting immediate medical care to the wounded.”
Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez and Arredondo’s attorney George E. Hyde did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s requests for comment.
ALERRT’s findings drew similar conclusions as McCraw’s: That police led by on-scene commander Uvalde school district chief of police Pete Arredondo, could — and should — have confronted the shooter much sooner, which could have saved countless lives.
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