‘SYSTEM FAILURE’

Texas Lawmaker: Uvalde School Police Chief Had No Clue Trapped Kids Were Calling 911

Sen. Roland Gutierrez said that it remains unclear whether the officers inside the building were aware of the desperate 911 calls.

A Texas state senator said that Uvalde’s school district police chief—who was the incident commander during the massacre at Robb Elementary—was not made aware of 911 calls coming from children within the building. Democratic Sen. Roland Gutierrez said that the Commission on State Emergency Communications told him that Chief Pete Arredondo did not know of the calls, a lack of communication he deemed to be a “system failure.” It remains unclear, Gutierrez said, whether the officers who were inside the building knew about the calls. Arredondo has received intense backlash for his decision not to storm the classroom for over an hour, and law enforcement officials have taken heat for repeatedly changing their timeline of events. Gutierrez said that while no singular person or entity is entirely responsible for the botched police response, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott “has plenty of the blame in all of this.”