He said police instead waited around for a key. Yet there is no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff, McCraw said. 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. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing. “I don’t care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in,” Col. 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 teachers dead. (AP Photo/Eric Gay)ĪUSTIN, Texas (AP) - 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 state police testified Tuesday, pronouncing the law enforcement response an “abject failure.”
Two teachers and 19 students were killed in last month's mass shooting in Uvalde. Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw testifies at a Texas Senate hearing at the state capitol, Tuesday, June 21, 2022, in Austin, Texas.
