Robb Elementary Schoolwill be torn down, the mayor ofUvalde, Texas, said just under a month after a horrific shooting left 19 students and 2 teachers dead.
“My understanding — I had a discussion with the superintendent — that school will be demolished,” McLaughlin said. “We could never ask a child to go back, or a teacher to go back into that school ever.”
Also on Tuesday, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw appeared before a Texas Senate committee tospeak about the police responseto the May 24 mass shooting, stating that officers could have stopped the gunman if the commander had not hesitated.
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McCraw was blunt, saying that the law enforcement response was “an abject failure” and claiming that police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes after arriving at the school.
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McCraw placed the blame squarely on Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police ChiefPete Arredondo, who was the commanding officer at the scene — even though he later said that hehad no idea he was in charge. In his testimony, McCraw said that Arredondo placed the lives of his officers before those of the children.
He methodically laid out undisputed facts: officers with rifles were on the scene within moments, and the classroom doors could not have been locked from the inside.
Surveillance video from the scene seems to indicate thatofficers did not even try to open the doors— which were likely already unlocked — and instead waited for more than an hour to receive keys to the classrooms.
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“I don’t mean to be hyper-critical of the on-scene commander,” McCraw testified on Tuesday morning. “But those are the facts. This set our profession back a decade.”
The investigation into the police response is ongoing.
source: people.com
