The reason for the police waiting to enter the classroom, according to Uvalde’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, was a key to a locked classroom door.
A mass shooting occurred at Robb Elementary School in Texas, killing 19 students and two teachers.The police chose to wait 77 minutes before entering the classroom to kill the gunman and the reason for it was a hard-to-find key to a locked door of a classroom, said the under-fire police chief.
Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief of Uvalde was in charge during the mass shooting that occurred on May 24, Uvalde, Texas. He has been heavily criticized for his delayed response in taking down Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old shooter.
These critics believe that if the police would have acted faster and helped the injured quicker, lives could have been saved. “Not a single responding officer had hesitated, not even for a second, to risk their lives to save the children. We recognized and acted on the information we possessed and had to adjust to whatever we faced.” In an interview, he stated.
He further mentioned that the door of the classroom had a steel jamb and was difficult to be kicked in. Arredondo said he spent more than an hour trying dozens of keys in the hallway to get into the classroom Ramos was in.
“Every time I tried a key, I was also just praying because the only thing that mattered to me at the time was saving as many children and teachers as possible.”
The police had managed to breach the door of the classroom and take action against the gunman an hour and 17 minutes after the shooter already murdered students with a gun AR-15 style. The Texas Department of Public Safety is further investigating the following police response and the shooting incident and the police response of Arredondo is not supported by them.
DPS had mentioned that the police chief of Uvalde had treated the shooting inaccurately by responding to it as a barricaded suspect incident, where the gunman is negotiated by law enforcement.
By contrast, the incident should have been treated as an active shooter situation, where the officer’s number one priority should be to shop the shooting by either executing the gunman or taking him into custody.
Col. Steven McCraw DPS told a press briefing on May 27 that “Comsidering the hindsight from where I’m sitting now, I know it was not the right decision. It was the incorrect decision, period”
Arredondo had also mentioned that he tried talking to the gunman through the wall but was given no response. He also attempted to justify his decision by claiming that he did not bring his police radio to the school because he believed he needed both hands to take down the shooter. He believed that holding devices that could give away his location if the gunman heard his presence. The school district police chief was also not wearing a bulletproof vest.
“Our main goal was to save as many lives as possible, and to extract the students from their classrooms by all who were involved, and we saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we managed to get access to the shooter and eliminate the threat” Arredondo said.
However, his decision to not take his radios inside with him meant he was not aware that there were students inside calling 911 from two classrooms that the gunman had targeted, helplessly waiting for the police to help them.
