The Uvalde Police Response Looks More and More Incompetent

CLAY: We are gonna continue to monitor this. But, again, the details at play here: There was no locked door, no locked classroom door, no school security officer present. There was a substantial amount of outside shooting. A door was evidently propped open by a teacher that ended up being the door that this gunman entered. And when I look at the notes that I jotted down during this discussion, a teacher called 911 at 11:30.

At 11:33, the suspect enters the school. So there was, in theory, three minutes there. Was there a lockdown order that was given in the school? Why were the doors all not immediately locked when a teacher is calling 911 about the shooting that is going on outside? The suspect enters the school at 11:33. Again, the crash scene is at 11:28. He opens fire. This is according to the Texas police here, their timeline. At 11:33, the suspect enters the school, immediately starts to fire off and as he moves towards classroom 111 or 112 — these were linked classrooms inside the school — fires more than a hundred rounds there.

By 11:35, three police officers have entered the school, a couple of them get grazing bullet wounds. That’s only two minutes after the suspect entered the school. Then many more officers arrive. The rounds continued to be fired inside the classroom. It appeared this man locked the door. But they did not actually breach the door and kill the suspect until 12:50. So he appears to have been locked in a classroom with these kids for at least an hour and 15 minutes. How in the world is that possible?

Also, chilling details provided — this is the first time I’ve heard this — that there were 911 calls being made from inside of these classrooms. I jotted down at least 10 different calls, some of which were from students. One of them said, “Please send the police now.” There also is a report that these gentlemen from Border Patrol who eventually made their way into the classroom were there potentially an hour before they were allowed to actually breach the door.

This is from the New York Times that just broke a couple of minutes ago, “When specially equipped federal immigration agents arrived at the Uvalde, Texas, scene, local police would not allow them to go after the gunman, according to two officials briefed on the situation.” Those agents were there between 12 and 12:10, according to the New York Times. I believe the spokesperson just said they were there by 12:15. This is… I mean, the details on this story continue to get uglier and uglier in terms of the response. We know this awful murderer created this situation. But the police response looks and feels more and more incompetent the more we hear these details.

BREAK TRANSCRIPT

CLAY: It just gets messier and messier for these police, and I want to reemphasize, look, the person who’s responsible for this entire situation is obviously the mass murderer. But the response that is involved in this situation is massively important because we learn from it what exactly happened that allowed this to occur. And it feels like, on many levels, an all-systems failure in terms of the response once this madman crashed his car near the school, that he was allowed to enter the school, that the classrooms weren’t locked, that the school itself was not locked. It’s all a huge, cataclysmic series of failures.