Uvalde investigation continues #Uvalde #DPSStevenMcGraw #PeteArredondo #Gunman #ActiveShooter HD

Uvalde investigation continues #Uvalde #DPSStevenMcGraw #PeteArredondo #Gunman #ActiveShooter AUSTIN, Texas — The head of the Texas State Police on Tuesday offered a pointed and emphatic rebuke of the police response to a shooting last month at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, calling it “an abject failure” that ran counter to decades of training. In his comments before a special State Senate committee in Austin, Steven McCraw, the director of the Department of Public Safety, provided the most complete public account yet of his agency’s month-old investigation and a forceful argument that officers at the scene could have — and should have — confronted the gunman without delay after arriving. Just minutes after a gunman began shooting children on May 24, he said, the officers at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm into the classrooms. “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” Mr. McCraw said. But the commander “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children,” he said, delaying the confrontation with the gunman for more than an hour while he “waited for a key that was never needed.” Most of the victims appear to have been shot in the gunman’s first few minutes in the classroom. But Mr. McCraw’s testimony addressed a central, and painful, question that still hung over the massacre and the delayed police response, one that investigators have attempted to answer through interviews with officers and reviews of video: Were the doors to the classrooms locked, preventing police officers from entering in time to save others? “I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said of the classroom door that the gunman entered. “The door was unsecured.” He said classroom doors in the school ordinarily would have been set with a key to lock automatically when closed. But the gunman had been able to enter the classroom, he noted, suggesting that either the door had not been set to lock, or was not fully closed. A teacher had made a request before the shooting that the lock be fixed, he said, adding that the lock was not broken but the so-called strike plate was “dysfunctional,” requiring someone to pull on it to get it closed. In any case, he said, “There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside.” Mr. McCraw focused his blame on the on-scene commander, whom he identified as the chief of the Uvalde school district’s Police Department, Pete Arredondo, who he said was the highest-ranking person at the scene. The chief has said he did not consider himself in charge, but Mr. McCraw disputed that. “If you’re going to issue commands, if you’re going to direct action,” he said, “you’re the on-scene commander.” The delayed confrontation with the gunman, Mr. McCraw said, was “antithetical to everythi