HOUSTON — Days after the massacre at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, leaders of the grieving city were outraged during a closed-door meeting with Steven McCraw, the state’s top police officer.
They objected to the public criticism of Mr. McCraw on city police officers’ response to the May 24 massacre that killed 19 children and two teachers and, in a one-page document, set out their own version of events, one praising the officers for initially rushing to the gunfire. and saved hundreds of other children in the school.
The document, prepared by Uvalde officials and labeled a “narrative,” was obtained by The New York Times after a public request for information. The report of events differed in important ways from the report described by Mr McCraw’s office, the Department of Public Safety, which is leading the police investigation into the shooting and law enforcement’s response.
Uvalde officials pushed the document across the table to Mr McCraw and asked him to publicly endorse it, according to a state police officer who requested anonymity to describe the June 2 meeting. Mr. McCraw refused.
The heated meeting at Uvalde Town Hall, which has not been previously reported, was one of the first signs of a simmering feud between state and local officials that has since exploded in public opinion over who should be blamed for the 77 minutes that heavily armed officers. to kill the shooter after he first attended Robb Elementary School.
The competing reports have obscured the police’s actions and angered the families of the victims, who have argued for reliable information. The clearest picture yet is expected to come on Sunday when a Texas House committee will report the results of its investigation, one of several overlapping investigations into what happened.
The commission’s report was expected to spread the blame beyond chief Pete Arredondo, the chief of small police force of the Uvalde school district, whom McCraw said was primarily responsible for a law enforcement response he called a “abject failure.”
Instead, the commission was generally expected to find fault with the various law enforcement agencies and officers who responded, including dozens of officers from the U.S. Border Patrol, the local sheriff’s office and the Department of Public Security, according to a person familiar with the investigation. .
The conclusion, the person said, would be that the delayed response was not the failure of one person, but that of dozens of trained officers and supervisors. No one knew what was going on and no one tried to take charge, the person said, citing the agencies’ failures of inaction and communication.
Such a finding would align with what others have already concluded after considering the sometimes conflicting versions of events offered by state and local officials.
“There was no incident commander, that’s the truth of the matter — it was a complete system failure,” said Senator Roland Gutierrez, who represents the area and has been critical of the version presented by the state police that has no other law enforcement agencies. responsible. “Why haven’t they taken command and control of the situation?” he asked.
Mr McCraw had said that Chief Arredondo had been in charge on the spot and had “the wrong decision‘ by treating the gunner as being barricaded in the classroom—a situation that would require a more careful, tactical approach—rather than as someone actively firing, and those officers are trained to deal immediately. Chief Arredondo has not spoken publicly, but said: in an interview with The Texas Tribune that he did not see himself as the incident commander.
In the account that the Uvalde officials set out in their story, they focused on the rapid arrival of officers at the school and their success in keeping the gunman in a few connected classrooms while taking children away from the rest of the school. They described a scene that was dangerous for officers and a response that was not chaotic, but aimed at getting children to safety.
“There was no hesitation on the part of these officers, they headed straight for the gunfire,” the document said, but were repelled when the gunman fired at them. Two of the officers were grazed by debris from the gunfire.
“The total number of persons rescued by the heroes of the local law enforcement agencies and the other support agencies is more than 500 per UCISD,” the document said, citing the department of chief Arredondo, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department. “But if UPD and UCISD were on the scene IMMEDIATELY, that shooter would have had free range at the school.”
The document also stated that specially trained Border Patrol officers had urged the evacuation of other classrooms first. “BORTAC insisted that all rooms be evacuated, ie all children and teachers removed, BEFORE the shields were used and room 112 was breached,” the document reads.
“Without the shields, every UPD officer believed that breaking through the door was suicide and every Texas Ranger or DPS agent who recorded their statements agreed,” the document read. “Not a single officer present, including DPS troopers and Texas Rangers, believed they could save lives by approaching that door and being killed one by one.”
That description contradicted the account Mr. McCraw presented of officers who did not receive standard training developed after the deadly 1999 Columbine High School shooting, which called on officers to quickly confront a gunman and end the shooting. During a state capitol hearing last month, Mr. McCraw said the officers had enough firepower to confront the gunman. within three minutes of entering the schooll, but was prevented by Chief Arredondo.
Uvalde officials did not mention in their document the lack of keys as the reason for the delayed confrontation with the gunman, which Chief Arredondo had said in his interview was another major reason for the delay.
Instead, they defended the lengthy response, saying the extended time before confronting the gunman “wasn’t wasted, but every minute was used to save the lives of children and teachers.”
Some footage of the scene raises questions about the city’s bill.
Video from Robb Elementary’s hallway — which was reviewed last month by The Times and published this week by The Austin American-Statesman — made it clear that shields in the hallway outside the classrooms had begun long before the officers entered.
And several Border Patrol officers had… expressed frustration about the long delay in getting permission to enter the class, one person who was aware of the investigation told The Times.
The Uvalde City Hall meeting was hosted by Governor Greg Abbott’s office amid rising tensions between Uvalde officials, including Mayor Don McLaughlin and District Judge Bill Mitchell, and state police officials.
At the time, more than a week after the shooting, Mr. McLaughlin asked the Justice Department to assess the shooting itself, an indication that he did not trust state police to impartially assess the officers’ actions.
And some key points about the shooting and police response had already changed during a series of press conferences convened by the state. For example, a day after the Uvalde massacre, Mr Abbott said that “the reason it wasn’t worse is because law enforcement officers did what they do”, praising “their quick response”. The governor later said he was “misled” about the facts.
After the video emerged from the hallway, Mr Abbott told reporters on Thursday that “none of the information in that video was shared with me on that day.”
The local prosecutor, Christina Mitchell, was also present at the June meeting Busbee and Uvalde’s city attorney. The mayor, the district judge and the local prosecutor did not respond to requests for comment. A police spokesman declined to comment.
Mr. Abbott’s chief of staff attended the meeting, as did his general counsel, who wanted to play the role of mediator.
But things quickly got out of hand, the senior official said.
Uvalde officials expressed their deep dismay at Mr McCraw. Early in the roughly hour-long meeting, the city attorney presented the document, which was the product of interviews with police officers responding to the scene, the senior official said. The Uvalde officials wanted Mr McCraw to hold another press conference in which he would present the story from the document. He told them he disagreed with the summary, the senior official said.
Ms. Busbee, the district attorney, also objected to the release and discussed the point with the city attorney, the senior official said. Some in the room raised their voices.
“I objected to the release of information as the Texas Rangers had just begun their investigation and there was no way to judge whether that story was true,” Ms. Busbee said in an email. “I was concerned about releasing inaccurate or incomplete information that would adversely affect the investigation and further traumatize the families.”
The document was not made public at the time.