HOUSTON, June 3 — The police chief in charge of operations at the Texas elementary school where a gunman murdered 21 people was not informed of desperate calls made by children trapped inside, a state senator said Thursday.
The 911 calls “were not being communicated to the so-called incident commander,” Senator Roland Gutierrez told a news conference, referring to the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo.
“There is human error, there is system error,” Gutierrez said, adding it was unclear exactly who all was receiving the calls, but that he had been told it was only the Uvalde city police.
Officers have come under intense criticism over why they waited more than an hour to neutralize the gunman after arriving at the school. Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) director Steven McCraw has admitted that delaying was the “wrong decision.”
Gutierrez said: “We need to know what law enforcement was doing, what radio procedures were followed and not followed.”
“We have all failed. There’s been a lot of failure here,” the senator said.
The US Department of Justice said Sunday that it would investigate the law enforcement response in Uvalde and issue a report. — AFP
