Ron's Log

« More Slides | Main | Inevitable Hijinks On The New 6th Street Viaduct »

July 17, 2022

Records from the attacker’s early school years reveal varied accounts of his character and school performance. His pre-K teacher’s report described him as “a pleasure to have ... a wonderful student ... always ready to learn,” and it praised his “hard work and positive attitude in the classroom.” Yet early assessments showed he was behind other students academically, and by third grade, school officials already had identified him as “at-risk” due to consistently poor test results. School records reveal that someone may have requested speech therapy for the attacker, and his later internet searches show he himself sought information on dyslexia. Ultimately, he received no special education services.

Finally, the attacker developed a fascination with school shootings, of which he made no secret. His comments about them coupled with his wild threats of violence and rape earned him the nickname “Yubo’s school shooter” on that platform. Those with whom he played games taunted him with a similar nickname so often that it became a running joke. Even those he personally knew in his local chat group began calling him “the school shooter” after he shared pictures of himself wearing the plate carrier he’d bought and posing with a BB gun he tried to convince them was real.

The owner of the gun store described the attacker as an “average customer with no ‘red flags’ or suspicious conditions”—just that he was always alone and quiet. The owner of the store remembered asking how an 18-year-old could afford such purchases (the rifles alone were over $3,000), and the attacker simply said he had saved up. Patrons of the store who saw him told a different story in FBI interviews, saying after the tragedy that the attacker was “very nervous looking” and that he “appeared odd and looked like one of those school shooters”; another described his all-black clothing as simply giving off “bad vibes.”

Just minutes before, Chief Arredondo had been in his office at Uvalde High School when he heard “shots fired” on the radio. He rushed out, heard something about Robb Elementary School, and drove toward the school. He arrived with his radios, but as he exited his vehicle, he was fumbling with them and they bothered him, so he dropped them by the school fence knowing that Sgt. Coronado, the sergeant on patrol, was there and “fully uniformed” with his radio.

Principal Mandy Gutierrez had just finished an awards ceremony and was in her office when she heard Coach Silva’s report over the radio. She attempted to initiate a lockdown on the Raptor application, but she had difficulty making the alert because of a bad wi-fi signal. She did not attempt to communicate the lockdown alert over the school’s intercom. By phone, she called and spoke with Chief Arredondo, who told her, “shut it down Mandy, shut it down.” She told head custodian Jaime Perez to ensure that all the doors were locked. She initially locked down in her own office, but she later moved to the cafeteria.

Uvalde CISD Police Chief Arredondo quickly arrived as the incident moved to school property and the law enforcement response evolved. This made him a natural person to assume command over an incident as it developed. But Chief Arredondo does not consider himself to have assumed incident command. He explained to the Committee:

[W]hile you’re in there, you don’t title yourself ... .I know our policy states you’re the incident commander. My approach and thought was responding as a police officer. And so I didn’t title myself. But once I got in there and we took that fire, back then, I realized, we need some things. We’ve got to get in that door. We need an extraction tool. We need those keys. As far as ... I’m talking about the command part ... the people that went in, there was a big group of them outside that door. I have no idea who they were and how they walked in or anything. I kind of – I wasn’t given that direction.
***
you can always hope and pray that there’s an incident command post outside. I just didn’t have access to that. I didn’t know anything about that.

Other people could have assumed command, including the next people in Uvalde CISD’s preassigned line of command for active shooter response or others on the scene with more experience or training. ALERRT training teaches that any law enforcement officer can assume command, that somebody must assume command, and that an incident commander can transfer responsibility as an incident develops. That did not happen at Robb Elementary, and the lack of effective incident command is a major factor that caused other vital measures to be left undone. Also, the misinformation reported to officers on the outside likely prevented some of them from taking a more assertive role. For example, many officers were told to stay out of the building because Chief Arredondo was inside a room with the attacker actively negotiating.

But nobody ever checked the doors of Rooms 111 or 112 to confirm they were actually locked or secured. Room 111 probably was not. Chief Arredondo’s search for a key consumed his attention and wasted precious time, delaying the breach of the classrooms.

Nobody called Principal Gutierrez to ask about the location of a master key. She had a key, and the head custodian had a key. Yet despite all the effort to find a key, nobody called her.

Filed under Public Safety | permalink | July 17, 2022 at 08:51 PM

Comments

The comments to this entry are closed.