But just hours later, Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin slammed the DPS’s lack of transparency and accused its director, Col. Steven McCraw, of intentionally minimizing his agency’s mistakes.
“Col. McCraw has continued to — whether you want to call it — lie, leak, mislead or misstate information in order to distance his own troopers and Rangers from the response. Every briefing he leaves out the number of his own officers and Rangers that were on-scene that day,”
“Col. McCraw has an agenda and it is not to present a full report on what happened and give factual answers on what happened to this community.”
The mayor’s criticisms add further turmoil to a tragedy that has become a case study in bad policing and worse communication. Nearly a month has passed since an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School. He remained inside the classrooms from 11:33 a.m. until 12:50 p.m. — when police finally breached the door and killed him, according to a DPS timeline.
Yet authorities have repeatedly changed their account of key facts about what happened inside the rooms and what police did in response during those 77 minutes.
Earlier Tuesday, McCraw testified before a Texas Senate committee that the response from law enforcement was an “abject failure” and violated commonly taught protocol to stop the shooter as quickly as possible.
He accused Uvalde school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who McCraw and others have identified as the on-scene commander, of ordering police to wait in a nearby hallway for unnecessary equipment and keys to a door that was not even locked.
“Three minutes after the subject entered the West building, there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject,” he said. “The only thing stopping the hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
CNN has reached out to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the district attorney’s office, the chair of the Texas House investigating committee and the San Antonio office of the FBI for further comment.
