- The police chief in charge of handling the Uvalde school shooting was not aware of the 911 calls coming from inside the school.
- Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez called the response to the shooting a "system failure."
- During the 78 minutes the gunman was in the classroom, trapped students made multiple calls.
The Uvalde school district police chief who was handling the shooting at Robb Elementary School did not know about the panicked 911 calls coming from students trapped inside the building, Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said at a press conference Thursday.
"I want to know specifically who was receiving the 911 calls," Gutierrez said at the news conference, calling the entire response a "system failure" and adding that no individual is wholly responsible for the failure to act.
"There was human error and there was system error," he continued. "Systematically, we live in rural Texas, we don't have them talking on one uniform system. That's an absence."
The Texas state legislator added that the state officials do not know who the Uvalde Police Department was communicating the calls to, but "what we do know is that the 911 calls were not being communicated to Arredondo. They were being communicated to a Uvalde Police officer," who has not been identified.
"We need transparency and that hasn't happened here," Gutierrez said during the press conference.
The 18-year-old gunman was able to barricade himself in an adjoining classroom for up to 78 minutes before officials were able to enter the locked classroom with a key from the janitor, then shoot and kill the gunman, authorities said. At least 19 students and two teachers were killed in the incident.
A number of police officers arrived at the school in the early moments of the massacre. But in the moment, Pete Arredondo, the police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, made the choice to back off on confronting the gunman because he believed students inside the classroom were no longer at risk, Texas law enforcement said.
Last week, Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, called it the "wrong" decision.
"The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject," McCraw said, adding, "He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children."
"Obviously, based upon the information we have, there were children in that classroom that were at risk, and it was, in fact, still an active shooter situation," McCraw continued.
Since the shooting unfolded last week, authorities have been scrambling to piece together a public sequence of events that led to the deadly shooting, changing their story 13 times of what happened inside the elementary school on May 24.
State Sen. Gutierrez ripped into Texas police's handling during the press conference on Thursday, calling it "one of the worst investigations I've seen in just about any crime scene."
"We've gotten some answers, and we've gotten some bad answers," Gutierrez said. "We've gotten some information which the next day turns out to be different."
"We've got fingers pointed at teachers, we've seen that the teacher has now been vindicated," he added, referring to a disputed claim by police that a teacher left a door open, which allowed the gunman to enter. "We've seen a finger pointed at the local ISD police chief, and certainly, I think, Mr. Arredondo, whom I do not know, has a lot of responsibility to bear here as does every law enforcement unit that was at that property, at that school."
This story is developing. Please check back for updates.
