The officer in charge at the scene of the shooting at a Texas elementary school last week was not aware of the frequent and frantic 911 calls being made by students trapped inside, a Texas lawmaker said.
State Senator Roland Gutierrez said Thursday that Uvalde school district’s police chief Pete Arredondo was not informed of the 911 calls students inside Robb Elementary School made begging for police to take action after the gunman entered.
The gunman 19 students and two teachers.
‘My question specifically was: Was the [school district] police officer . . . on duty told about the calls? I was specifically told no,’ said Gutierrez.
Instead of alerting the police chief in charge of the school, calls were relayed to the Uvalde Police Department, which is a separate operation from the school district’s police.
At least two children made phone calls to police after a gunman barricaded himself inside their fourth grade classroom. One student called back several times, at one point begging for someone to come save them.
One of the students who called for help, .’ She covered herself in a dead friend’s blood in order to appear dead to the gunman and survived.
The school district’s police chief has come under fire for his immediate response to the massacre.
Officials say that Arredondo had determined that the situation had shifted from the threat of an active shooter to a barricaded subject. Under this assumption, he believed there was time to retrieve keys to the classroom from a janitor and for the Border Patrol tactical team to arrive and enter the classroom behind shields.
As a result, students were locked inside the classroom with the gunman for over an hour while nearly 20 officers stood outside the building waiting.
Gutierrez insisted that he was not ‘covering’ for Arredondo, but that what happened was a result of a ‘system failure.’
‘We need to know what law enforcement was doing, what radio procedures were followed or not followed, who were the 911 operators and such,’ Gutierrez said.
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