Uvalde shooting hearing: Police response was 'abject failure'

Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw sought to clarify some confusion over whether the exterior and interior doors used by the Uvalde gunman to enter Robb Elementary School were locked -- and whether officers even needed keys to breach the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself.

According to McCraw, the door to the classroom containing the gunman could not be locked from inside, meaning it was likely unlocked for the duration of the shooting.

"I have great reasons to believe [the door] was never secured," he said.

McCraw later said it appears that officers on the scene never checked whether the door to the classroom was unlocked, even as they waited for additional equipment to breach it and worked to secure a set of keys.

"How about trying the door and seeing if it's locked?" McCraw said he would ask the officers who responded first.

Regarding the gunman's entry into the building, McCraw confirmed previous reporting that a teacher at one point propped a door open but later closed it before the gunman arrived. He did not clarify how or why the door closed but remained unlocked.

"The only way you can lock these exterior doors in the West building ... the only way to do that is from the outside. You can't do it otherwise," McCraw said. "So when [the teacher] knocked the rock out, it closed securely, but there's no way for her to tell that the door was unlocked. The only way to know that the door is unlocked is to go out, close the door, OK, then try it."

Texas Director of Public Safety Steven McCraw laid out a series of communications failures that exacerbated the decision-making missteps that hampered the police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School.

McCraw confirmed previous reporting that Pete Arredondo, the on-scene commander, arrived at the school without a radio. Later, according to McCraw, local police and Border Patrol lost radio communication signals inside the school.

Those circumstances ultimately led Arredondo and others to begin communicating with dispatchers on their cellphones, McCraw said.

"Cellphones did work, obviously, inside the school," he said. "It’s just the portable radio devices that first responders had didn’t."

McCraw also said "there was no duress system throughout the campus," which caused confusion among those inside the building. The principal of the school did trigger an emergency alert system called Raptor, but the program did not appear to sufficiently inform those inside the school about the shooting.

"It’s not the same as a direct system," he said.

Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw walked through an updated timeline of events from the Uvalde shooting and read aloud from a transcript of police radio communications.

The transcript describes Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo and other officers speculating on the status of those inside the classroom and painstakingly debating whether and how to breach the door.

Nearly an hour after the gunman entered the school, according to the transcript, an officer told Arredondo, "People are going to ask why we’re taking so long."

"We’re trying to preserve life," Arredondo replied, per the transcript.

Reviewing the timeline of the Uvalde shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, said that enough officers and equipment arrived on-site "within three minutes" of the gunman entering the school to "neutralize" him.

McCraw said the on-scene commander, Uvalde schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, was the "only thing stopping" officers from breaching the classroom.

Arredondo, McCraw said, "decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children."