UVALDE, Texas — The commander at the scene of a shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, was not informed of panicked 911 calls coming from children trapped inside the building as the massacre unfolded, a Texas state senator said Thursday.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez said the pleas for help from people inside Robb Elementary School on May 24 did not make their way to school district police Chief Pete Arredondo. The Democratic senator called it a “system failure” that calls were going to the city police but were not communicated to Arredondo.
“Uvalde PD was the one receiving the 911 calls for 45 minutes while officers were sitting in a hallway, while 19 officers were sitting in a hallway for 45 minutes” Gutierrez said. “We don’t know if it was being communicated to those people or not.”
Gutierrez said emergency services contract with different radio companies and they don’t talk to each other on one uniform system.
“There is blame enough here to go around. There was human error and there was system error," he said.
Nineteen children and two teachers died in the attack at Robb Elementary School, the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade.
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The gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, spent roughly 80 minutes inside the school, and more than an hour passed from when the first officers followed him into the building and when he was killed by law enforcement.
Since the shooting, law enforcement and state officials have struggled to present an accurate timeline and details of the event and how police responded, sometimes providing conflicting information or withdrawing some statements hours later. State police have said some accounts were preliminary and may change as more witnesses are interviewed.
Much of the focus turned to Arredondo. Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said Arredondo believed the situation had turned into hostage situation and made the “wrong decision” to not order officers to attempt to breach the classroom as 911 calls were being made to the outside.
Gutierrez said it's unclear if any details from the 911 calls were being shared with law enforcement officers from multiple agencies on the scene.
But, the senator said, the Commission on State Emergency Communications told him school district police chief did not know.
“He’s the incident commander. He did not receive (the) 911 calls,” Gutierrez said.
Funerals for the victims began this week. Three more children were laid to rest on Thursday.