Uvalde Hypocrisy
The Hypocrisy of Uvalde
Three Texas lawyer-politicians recently released a report they sent to the Texas legislature of their determination after their prompt “investigation” of the massacre of children and teachers in Robb Elementary School on May 24th of this year. As a result of that report, the Uvalde school board decided to take action against the chief of the school police, Chief Pete Arredondo, because of the politicians’ accusations of improper actions against the chief and other law enforcement officers who, in the opinion of the three politicians, were negligent because of the 77-minute delay from the time the shooter, Salvador Ramos, entered the school and his death at the hands of a US Border Patrol tactical team. However, by taking action against the chief, the school board members are overlooking their own failures as reported in the same report.
In response to the 1999 shooting at the Columbine, Colorado high school, Texas schools, like schools all over the country, were fitted with self-locking doors that can only be unlocked with a key or key card, not only on outside entrances but on classrooms as well. All of the doors at Robb Elementary had been fitted with the “Columbine” doors, doors which lock automatically when they are pulled shut. The doors also are solid steel with narrow windows in the middle mounted in a steel doorframe. They open outwardly, rather than inwardly, which makes them more difficult to batter in or open with a prybar or sledgehammer. Although some schools are fitted with locks that can be opened with a key card, the Robb doors seem to require a key. Each teacher was issued a key to his or her room that can only be used for that particular door. The principal, custodian and other school staff were issued master keys that can open any look. Some school police officers were evidently also issued master keys. Teachers and other staff at Robb were under supposedly “strict” orders to keep all doors locked at all times. Responsibility for ensuring that those orders were carried out rests on school officials, including school police, the principal and assistant principal AND the superintendent of schools as well as the school board.
However, a lackadaisical attitude seems to have developed at the school (and possibly other Uvalde schools) in regard to security. Rather than ensuring that doors were locked, teachers were known to prop the outside doors open with rocks to allow students to return to the school. (Although there was a video of a teacher propping a door open with a rock, she was found to have pulled the door shut when she saw the shooter. However, the door had been unlocked and could not lock when she closed it.) Some allegedly kept their classroom doors unlocked because they didn’t want to carry a key. There was also a problem in that substitute teachers were not issued keys and were unable to gain access to their classrooms. They had to have a custodian or someone come and unlock the doors. A method of getting around the locks using magnets had somehow been developed at the school and substitutes were instructed to use the magnets.
Robb Elementary is a multi-building facility rather than a single large structure as most schools are. There are no less than FOURTEEN separate structures on the facility, all connected by walkways. The shootings were in the West building, the western-most of the facilities buildings. Although the school was built in 1955, the West building was more recent; it was built in the 1980s. The outside of the building is brick while the interior rooms seem to be of wooden frames with drywall. The building has three entrances, one on the west, another on the east (or northeast) and the third on the south end of the building at the end of the corridor where most of the classrooms are. Rooms were entered through a door in a vestibule off of the corridor. Adjoining classrooms have a door between them.
For some reason, all three doors in the West building were unlocked on May 24. Whether leaving the doors unlocked is common practice or they were left unlocked on this particular day is not revealed in the report. It was the last day of school and there were visitors on the campus, parents and family who were there for awards presentations and other formalities. District policy was for those doors to be kept locked and both the custodian and school police were required to ensure that they were. School police conducted routine walkthroughs of the district schools, checking doors to make sure they were looked. However, teachers had a practice of warning each other when officers were in the school so they could make sure their doors were locked or lock them if they weren’t.
The report states that there was a negligent attitude in the district regarding maintenance of the door locks. The locks used at Uvalde had been discontinued by the manufacturer but the real problem is that either teachers and staff weren’t reporting malfunctions or they were being ignored – or both. The door to room 111, one of the two rooms Ramos, the shooter, was in was known to require “extra effort” to ensure that it was locked. There is some question as to whether this issue had been reported to maintenance. The report does not state that the door would not lock, only that it required “extra effort” without stating what that effort was. I assume the “extra effort” was either pulling or pushing the door to make sure the lock engaged. Without evidence to indicate which of the two doors Ramos entered, the report assumes that he entered room 111 under the assumption that it was not locked. There have been media claims that the door was not locked although this is an assumption, not a fact.
Ramos entered the school through the unlocked west door of the West building. It is the closest door to where he entered school grounds after driving his grandmother’s truck into a ditch. He was shooting at the school in the some-five minutes from the time he crashed the truck until he gained entry through the unlocked door. His entry and stroll down the corridor to the vestibule of rooms 111 and 112 were captured by a school security camera. (One media article claimed the camera caught him “roaming the halls” of the school.) Although one little girl in another classroom claimed he tried the door to her room and fired a shot into the room, the video does not show this. The video shows him slowing momentarily possibly by a vestibule on the right (north) side of the corridor but he continues on to the vestibule for 111 and 112 without further pause. He’s too far from the camera and inside the vestibule so there’s no way to tell what he did from the video although he starts firing into one of the classrooms then walks in. After that, there are a couple of minutes in which he fires repeatedly.
By the time the first officers come in the building three minutes after Ramos entered, the firing has stopped and the screaming of children referenced in the video has ceased. The officers reported that the hallway was filled with smoke and debris from drywall in the air. Unfortunately, the editors placed lettering right over the most important point on the video and it’s difficult to see what happened by the vestibule of the two rooms. However, once the lettering is removed, the corridor in the vicinity of the vestibule appears murky. The released video is misleading because it’s so far from the two rooms and only shows the officers who came in the east and west entrances. Chief Arredondo and other officers came in through the south entrance and were in the immediate vicinity of the two classrooms the entire time, at least Arredondo was. The video shows at least two figures in the vicinity of the classrooms with four others initially entering through the west entrance, the same entrance used by Ramos. None of the six officers first on the scene in the north end of the corridor are armed with anything but pistols. While they are all wearing vests, some of which were armored, none wore rifle rated vests capable of stopping a rifle bullet. None were wearing helmets or leg protection.
The officers advance down the corridor looking for the shooter. They peer into the glass in doors. After they reach the vestibule for rooms 111 and 112, Ramos somehow becomes aware of their presence and fires a burst of fire at the doorways. Two officers are hit by flying debris, none seriously. The officers retreat out of the line of fire. It is at this time that the officers become aware that Ramos is armed with a rifle. One says “that’s an AR” meaning an AR-15.
There is no fire from Ramos and officers said they heard no screaming and no voices to indicate there were children alive inside the two rooms. It’s not until a half hour later that one of the victims calls 911 on her cell phone. (She was apparently in room 112 while Ramos was in 111.) Whether this changes the situation is debatable. Although he said he did not consider himself the on-scene commander – there were other officers in the building from both the school police and the Uvalde police department who got there the same time he did or perhaps slightly before – Chief Arredondo took action. He sent a man outside to call for a SWAT team. Ironically, the Uvalde police SWAT commander was already in the building. He also requested a Halligan tool or some other means of breaching the door, although he didn’t consider it likely they would be able to break the door down considering their construction. Arredondo said he now considered that the shooter had been neutralized in that he was inside a locked classroom and was no longer a direct threat to those in other rooms. He said he believed the most important thing was to evacuate the school and he sent officers outside to initiate an evacuation using the school windows out of fear the shooter would hear children in the hallway and fire through the walls. There were children in room 109 and their teacher had been hit by a bullet that came through the wall. Not all classrooms were occupied. Ramos entered the school at 11:33. Some children were in the cafeteria and others had been on the playground.
The authors of the report somehow jumped to the conclusion that room 111 was not locked. They saw reports that the lock wasn’t working properly and assumed the door had not been locked when Ramos arrived and that he entered through that door. The teacher in the room, who was wounded but survived, said the door was locked. He also said Ramos came into his room from room 112. The “investigators,” if they should be called that since they are lawyer/politicians, concluded the door had been unlocked and that it remained unlocked. They never acknowledged the possibility, at least not in the report, that Ramos could have found the door unlocked but then pulled it shut as he entered, thus causing it to lock. (The door was unlocked by the BORTAC agent in charge of the team so it would have been unlocked when investigators looked at it.) Chief Arredondo was close enough to the door that he could see the cylinder protruding into the door frame. The Border Patrol tactical team commander, who physically unlocked the door with a key, said the door was locked. In short, the report authors and the “experts” who scrutinized some investigative reports are second-guessing.
The criticism of the officers is that they didn’t take action soon enough but chose to protect their own lives. Media reports often mention that there were 379 officers involved, without acknowledging that some of those officers came from as far as an hour away and didn’t get there until near the time when Ramos was finally shot. The BORTAC team that finally ended the incident came from Del Rio, a border town some 70 miles to the west. Map Quest shows a driving time of one hour and six minutes. Granted, the agents were no doubt driving at much higher speeds but by the time they learned of the situation and got there, at least an hour had elapsed. There were other Border Patrol agents at the school but they were from the local station. Some were parents of children in the school. One group of Federal marshals came from San Antonio, which is 84 miles and an hour and 25 minutes away. It wasn’t until the Federal marshals arrived that a rifle rated shield became available. Other shields had been brought in but were not rifle rated.
Critics and “experts” advocate that the officers should have breached the door and rushed right in but they didn’t always have the facts. ALLERT, a law enforcement academic department at Texas State University at San Marcos, put out an unfactual report claiming officers should have used equipment they did not have. [1]
Then there is another issue: There is evidence to indicate that the Uvalde school system failed Salvador Ramos. His school records indicate that he had a learning problem but no action was ever taken to help him. He wasn’t placed in a special education class nor was he offered any tutorial help. His situation was complicated even further because of the bullying he received, not only from fellow students but also allegedly from teachers. His family says that both he and his female cousin were bullied, perhaps because they were poor. Ramos’ grandmother was a Uvalde school system employee who retired with 27 years’ service according to the report. His mother, however, who worked as a waitress and was known in the community, had a reputation among some neighbors as a drug user. His parents had split up at some point while he was a child. He had an older sister who had finished school. He was found to have researched the learning comprehension problem dyslexia, a medical condition that causes the person to misunderstand words. Dyslexia can be overcome; there have been people in history who were dyslexic, General George S. Patton for one, famed physicist Albert Einstein for another. Ramos stuttered; stuttering can be dyslexia-related. Following are symptoms of dyslexia:
Withdrawal from peers
Misbehavior or acting out
Self-esteem issues
Peer and sibling relationship difficulties
Loss of interest in school
Appearing unmotivated or lazy
Salvador Ramos exhibited many, if not all of these symptoms.
In short, there were many failures at Uvalde and a lot of people should be held responsible, including the staff and teachers at the school and even the school superintendent as well as Chief Arredondo and others.
[1] I have read the ALLERT report and found it to be mostly theory and little fact. For example, they state that Ramos entered through room 111 then went back out and shot in 112 and went back in when there is no proof of such an action. The video does not show what took place in the vestibule for the two rooms. They also state that the rooms had to be locked from outside without recognizing that the complaint about the room 111 lock was not that it wouldn’t lock, but that it took additional effort to ensure that it engaged.