Report: Officers In Uvalde Shooting Feared The Gunman’s “Battle Rifle”
A New report from the Texas Tribune reveals that officers who responded to the Uvalde school shooting last year were too scared to confront the teen shooter because he had a “battle rifle.”
One year ago, the country mourned the loss of 21 innocent lives when an 18-year-old armed with an AR-15 entered Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, and carried out the third-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. The anger and rage from this horrific event were not just focused on the perpetrator, but for the first time in recent memory, on the law enforcement officers who arrived on the scene.
The officers that responded to the deadly incident waited over an hour before breaching the classroom that the shooter and multiple students were in. Law enforcement refused to confront the shooter until nearly 400 officers were on the scene, including 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 Texas DPS officers. Security footage taken of the school hallways was previously released and showed officers standing by talking, smiling, and even using the hand sanitizer dispensers on the wall while the lives of the children and teachers were on the line.
The Texas Tribune reported that newly released body cam footage from the officers contains audio from law enforcement. The audio picks up one officer warning that the shooter, “has a battle rifle” and another officer responding, “What’s the safest way to do this? I’m not trying to get clapped out.”
The Uvalde Police Department previously justified their slow response time to the massacre by explaining that officers felt overpowered due to the shooter’s firearm. Detective Louis Landry told investigators, “Once we found out it was a rifle he was using, it was a different game plan we would have had to come up with.” He also stated that the officers on the scene were not equipped to breach the room the shooter was in without several casualties.
Law enforcement officials on the scene arguably had the capability to stop the perpetrator. Before tactical units arrived on the scene, over a dozen officers were already inside the school. Video footage of the first officers arriving on-site reveals that they themselves were armed with AR-style rifles, the very firearm they were so terrified of. Despite this, police officers waited for a Border Patrol SWAT team, which was 60 miles away, to arrive before taking action.
Meanwhile, the police were preventing individuals from interfering with the shooting. Officers arrested one mother who tried to enter the school to save her children. Eventually, the determined mother escaped custody and was able to rescue her children. One particular officer, Ruben Ruiz, was the husband of a Robb Elementary school teacher. Footage shows Ruiz checking his phone the moment his wife notified him she was shot. When Ruiz tried to enter the classroom to save his wife, other officers held him back. His wife later died.
Following the shooting, the Uvalde school board fired school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo. Despite the massive failure on the part of Uvalde law enforcement officials, Arredondo immediately requested to be reinstatement after he was fired. Arredondo has received death threats for his handling of the situation, and massive criticism for his response to the school shooting.
“My first thought is that we needed to vacate”
“We have him contained. … There’s probably gonna be some deceased in there, but we don’t need any more from out here.”
Former school police chief Pete Arredondo in response to not treating the incident as an active shooter event
Survivors of the Uvalde shooting have filed a $27 billion lawsuit against the law enforcement officers for their slow response. The lawsuit states that survivors and their families “have sustained emotional and psychological damages as a result of defendants’ conduct and omissions on that date.”
