Be sure and check out our new BUYERS GUIDE on Page 142. Sponsored by Datalink. ongoing investigations by making false statements about what had happened, the report states. The day after the massacre, an Uvalde Police Department lieutenant tasked with briefing Gov. Greg Abbott and other state leaders fainted just before the meeting began. DPS Regional Director Victor Escalon took his place, relaying the second hand accounts of police, as he had arrived at the school minutes before the shooting ended. Some of this information was inaccurate, which the committee said was the reason Abbott, in a news conference immediately following the briefing, presented a “false narrative” that the shooting lasted as few as 40 minutes thanks to “officers who rapidly devised a plan, stacked up and neutralized the attacker.” Abbott also said that the gunman had been confronted by a school resource officer before entering the school. At a news conference the following day, a DPS official said the exterior door through which the gunman entered had been propped open. Both statements were false. The committee criticized state officials for misleading the public. “A complete and thorough investigation can take months or even years to confirm every detail, especially when this many law enforcement officers are involved,” the report states. “However, one would expect law enforcement during a briefing would be very careful to state what facts are verifiable, and which ones are not.” Abbott’s office did not respond to a request for comment Sunday. The committee also refutes a significant revelation included in a report published last week by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALER- RT) Center at Texas State University. That report stated that an Uvalde Police Department officer with a rifle had an opportunity to shoot the gunman before he entered the school. However, when he asked a supervisor for permission to fire, he never received a response and the gunman slipped into the school. The committee noted that the ALERRT staff conducted no investigation on their own and relied entirely on information supplied by the Department of Public Safety. The committee concluded that the person the Uvalde officer saw was a coach who was ushering children inside and found no evidence that any law enforcement personnel had a chance to engage the gunman outside the school. The disastrous police response at Robb Elementary has set this mass shooting apart from so many that have become a regular occurrence in American life. It has renewed the debate over the role of police and cast doubt on the theory embraced by many Second Amendment advocates that good guys with guns are the best defense against active shooters. Yet the report concludes with a somber finding: Because the gunman fired the majority of his rounds before police arrived inside the school, about 100 in the space of three minutes, whether the death toll would have been lower had police breached the classrooms immediately is unknown. Most of the victims died quickly, torn apart by bullets designed for battlefields, and it is unclear whether a flawless police response would have saved any lives. But the report suggests that stopping the gunman sooner could have made a difference. “Given the information known about victims who survived through the time of the breach and who later died on the way to the hospital,” the committee wrote, “it is plausible that some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait 73 additional minutes for rescue.” Uriel Garcia contributed to this story. Reprinted from The Texas Tribune. 40 The BLUES The BLUES 41
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