A6 BAKER CITY HERALD • THURSDAY, JUNE 23, 2022
NATION
Texas top cop: Police could’ve ended rampage early on
BY JIM VERTUNO
AND JAKE BLEIBERG
Associated Press
AUSTIN, Texas — Police had
enough officers on the scene of the
Uvalde school massacre to have
stopped the gunman three minutes
after he entered the building, and
they would have found the door to
the classroom where he was holed
up unlocked if they had bothered to
check it, the head of the Texas state
police testified Tuesday, June 21, pro-
nouncing the law enforcement re-
sponse an “abject failure.”
Officers with rifles instead stood
in a hallway for over an hour, waiting
in part for more firepower and other
gear, before they finally stormed the
classroom and killed the gunman,
putting an end to the May 24 attack
that left 19 children and two teach-
ers dead.
“I don’t care if you have on flip-
flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,”
Col. Steve McCraw, director of the
Texas Department of Public Safety,
said in blistering testimony at a state
Senate hearing.
The classroom door, it turned out,
could not be locked from the inside,
according to McCraw, who said a
teacher reported before the shooting
that the lock was broken. Yet there is
no indication officers tried to open
it during the standoff, McCraw said.
He said police instead waited for a
key.
“I have great reasons to believe it
was never secured,” McCraw said of
the door. ”How about trying the door
and seeing if it’s locked?”
Delays in the law enforcement re-
sponse at Robb Elementary School
have become the focus of federal,
state and local investigations.
Commander blamed
McCraw lit into Pete Arredondo,
the Uvalde school district police chief
who McCraw said was in charge,
saying: “The only thing stopping a
hallway of dedicated officers from
entering Room 111 and 112 was the
on-scene commander who decided
to place the lives of officers before the
lives of children.”
“Obviously, not enough train-
ing was done in this situation, plain
and simple. Because terrible de-
cisions were made by the on-site
commander,” McCraw said. He said
investigators have been unable to
“re-interview” Arredondo.
Elias Valverde II/The Dallas Morning News-TNS
People visit a memorial outside of Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on Sunday, May 29, 2022.
“I don’t care if you
have on flip-flops
and Bermuda
shorts, you go in.”
— Col. Steve McCraw, director, Texas
Department of Public Safety
Arredondo has said he didn’t con-
sider himself the person in charge
and assumed someone else had taken
control of the law enforcement re-
sponse. He has declined repeated re-
quests for comment from The Asso-
ciated Press. A lawyer for Arredondo
did not immediately respond to a re-
quest for comment Tuesday.
Texas lawmakers hearing the lat-
est details reacted with fury, some
decrying Arredondo as incompetent
and others pressing McCraw on why
state troopers on the scene didn’t take
charge. McCraw said the troopers did
not have legal authority to do so.
The public safety chief presented a
timeline that said three officers with
two rifles entered the building less
than three minutes after the gunman,
an 18-year-old with an AR-15-style
semi-automatic rifle. Several more
officers entered minutes after that.
Two of the officers who entered the
hallway early on were grazed by gun-
fire.
The decision by police to hold
back went against much of what law
enforcement has learned in the two
decades since the Columbine High
School shooting in Colorado in
which 13 people were killed in 1999,
McCraw said.
“You don’t wait for a SWAT team.
You have one officer, that’s enough,”
he said. He also said officers did not
need to wait for shields to enter the
classroom. The first shield arrived
less than 20 minutes after the shooter
entered, according to McCraw.
Also, eight minutes after the
shooter entered, an officer reported
that police had a “hooligan” crow-
bar that they could use to break
down the classroom door, McCraw
said.
Details from the day
The public safety chief spent nearly
five hours offering the clearest pic-
ture yet of the massacre, outlining
for the committee a series of other
missed opportunities, communica-
tion breakdowns and errors based
on an investigation that has included
roughly 700 interviews. Among the
missteps:
• Arredondo did not have a radio
with him.
• Police and sheriff’s radios did
not work inside the school; only the
radios of Border Patrol agents on the
scene did, and they did not work per-
fectly.
• Some diagrams of the school
that police used to coordinate their
response were wrong.
State police initially said the gun-
man, Salvador Ramos, entered the
school through an exterior door that
had been propped open by a teacher.
However, McCraw said that the
teacher had closed the door, but un-
beknownst to her, it could be locked
only from the outside. The gunman
“walked straight through,” McCraw
said.
Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the
entire premise of lockdown and
shooter training is worthless if
school doors can’t be locked. “We
have a culture where we think we’ve
trained an entire school for lock-
down .... but we set up a condition to
failure,” he said.
Bettencourt challenged Arredondo
to testify in public and said he should
have removed himself from the job
immediately. He angrily pointed out
that shots were heard while police
waited in the hallway.
“There are at least six shots fired
during this time,” he said. “Why is
this person shooting? He’s killing
somebody. Yet this incident com-
mander finds every reason to do
nothing.”
Questions about the law enforce-
ment response began days after the
massacre. McCraw said three days
after the shooting that Arredondo
made “the wrong decision” when he
chose not to storm the classroom
for more than 70 minutes, even as
trapped fourth graders inside two
classrooms were desperately calling
911 for help and anguished parents
outside the school begged officers to
go inside.
As for the amount of time that
elapsed before officers entered the
classroom, McCraw said: “In an ac-
tive shooter environment, that’s in-
tolerable.”
“This set our profession back a de-
cade. That’s what it did,” he said of
the police response in Uvalde.
Details about the gunman
Police haven’t found anything
that would be a red flag in Ramos’
school disciplinary files but learned
through interviews that he engaged
in cruelty to animals. “He walked
around with a bag of dead cats,” Mc-
Craw said.
In the days and weeks after the
shooting, authorities gave conflicting
and incorrect accounts of what hap-
pened. But McCraw assured lawmak-
ers: “Everything I’ve testified today is
corroborated.”
McCraw said if he could make
just one recommendation, it would
be for more training. He also said a
“go-bag” should be put in every state
patrol car in Texas, including shields
and door-breaching tools.
“I want every trooper to know how
to breach and have the tools to do it,”
he said.
Baker County
CHURCH
DIRECTORY
Elkhorn Baptist
Church
Sunday School 10 am
Morning Worship 11 am
Evening Worship 6 pm
Discovery Kids Worship
6:30 pm
3520 Birch St, Baker City
541-523-4332
Baker & Haines
United
Methodist
Churches
Baker UMC, 1919 2nd St, at 11am
Haines UMC, 814 Robert St, at 9am
To join us on Zoom email
bakerumc@thegeo.net
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EARLY WORSHIP
GATHERING
WORSHIP
GATHERING
8:30 AM
10:00
AM
SECOND WORSHIP GATHERING
Harvest Cafe Open
10:30 AM
AM
- 9:50
Harvest 9:00
Cafe open
30 minutes
before AM
each service
3720 Birch St, Baker City
541-523-4233
www.BakerCityHarvest.org
CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE CHURCH
Sunday Service
10:00 am
www.ChristianScience.com
3rd & Washington, Baker City
541-523-5911
Pastor Michele Holloway
Sunday Worship
First Service 8:30 am
2nd Service & Sunday School
10:00 am
Jr. High & High School Youth
Tues 6:30 pm
Youth Pastor Silas Moe
675 Hwy 7, Baker City • 541-523-5425
SEVENTH-DAY
ADVENTIST
CHURCH
Saturday Worship
11:00 am
www.bakercitysda.com
17th & Pocahontas, Baker City
541-523-4913
St. Francis De
Sales Cathedral
Daily Masses:
M, T, Th, F 9 am
Day Chapel in Cathedral
Wed Daily Mass 9 am
at St. Alphonsus Chapel
Sat 8 am at Day Chapel
Baker City Saturday Mass 6 pm
Baker City Sunday Mass 9:30 am
St. Therese in Halfway 2 pm Sat
St. Anthony's in North Powder
11:30 Sun
541-523-4521
Corner of First & Church, Baker City
Established
1904
FIRST
PRESBYTERIAN
CHURCH
Sunday Worship Service
10:30 am
1995 4th Street, Baker City
541-523-5201
firstpresbaker.blogspot.com
Sunday Worship
9:45am
Sunday School
8:30am
Coffee is 9:15 AM - 9:45 AM
Pastor Troy Teeter
1250 Hughes Lane, Baker City
(Corner of Cedar & Hughes)
541-523-3533
www.bakernaz.com
AGAPE
CHRISTIAN
CENTER
Sunday Services
10:00 am & 6:30 pm
South Highway 7,
Baker City
541-523-6586
SAINT
ALPHONSUS
HOSPITAL CHAPEL
Service at 11 am
Open to all patients,
family and friends for
reflection and prayer.
Live Streaming on
Facebook
St. Alphonsus Hospital in
Baker City
1734 Third Street, Baker City
541-523-3922
firstlutheranbakercity@gmail.com
St. Stephen’s
Episcopal
ST. BRIGID’S IN THE
PINES COMMUNITY
CHURCH
11:30 a.m. Services
1st & 3rd Sunday
Holy Eucharist
Services at 9 am
1st & 3rd Sundays, Holy Eucharist
2nd & 4th Sundays, Morning Prayer
5th
(541) Sunday, Morning Prayer
East Auburn Street, Sumpter
541-523-4812
2177 First Street • Baker City
Entrance on 1st Street
Corner Church & First Streets
541-523-4812
A Mission of St. Stephen's Episcopal
Church in Baker City
THE CHURCH OF
JESUS CHRIST OF
LATTER-DAY SAINTS
FIRST
LUTHERAN
CHURCH
Third & Broadway
541-523-3891
9 - 11 AM - Baker City 1st Ward
10:30 AM - 12:30 PM - Baker City 2nd Ward
Noon - 2 PM - Baker Valley Ward
EVERYONE WELCOME
Third & Broadway
Sundays
541-523-3891
Family History Center
Everything Free
Tues & Fri 1-4 PM
Wed & Thurs 10 AM - 1 PM
Wed Evenings 5-8 PM
9 AM Sunday School
10 AM Worship Service
Mondays
6:30 - 8 PM
Baker Teens Underground
Wednesdays
5:30-6:30 PM Dinner & Prayer Time
Thursdays
5 - 6 PM Free Community Dinner
6 - 7 PM Celebrate Recovery
2625 Hughes Lane, Baker City
541-523-2397
bakercalvarybaptist.com
The church directory is published once monthly. Information for this directory is provided by participating churches, please call 541-523-3673 for more information.
Thank you to the participating churches and these sponsors:
Cliff’s Saws & Cycles
Whelan Electric, Inc.
523-5756 • CCB 103032
2619 Tenth • 523-2412
1950 Place • 523-4300
1500 Dewey • 523-3677