AUSTIN, Texas — A state investigation into the Uvalde school shooting revealed the elementary school had been placed on so many emergency alerts for police chases of human smugglers transporting illegal immigrants through town that on the day of the May massacre, it assumed the digital alert was no different than the others.
In the three months leading up to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, the school had used its digital notification system to issue more than 40 alerts for those inside to “secure” or “lock down” due to high-speed police chases of vehicles trying to get away after illegally crossing the nearby U.S.-Mexico border, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo told Texas House lawmakers. The report did not specify the difference between securing and locking down a building through locking down is viewed as the more stringent approach.
The chase alerts were so frequent that on the day that a former student walked into the school and opened fire on a classroom of fourth grade students and teachers, those inside received an alert but likely “assumed” it was about another border-related police chase than an active shooter because the alert system does not specify the cause of the emergency, the report said.
“The alert system does not differentiate its signals between bailouts and other kinds of alerts, such as an active shooter situation,” the lawmakers’ report says. “The series of bailout-related alerts led teachers and administrators to respond to all alerts with less urgency — when they heard the sound of an alert, many assumed that it was another bailout.”
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The prevalence of police chases in the vicinity was a well-known problem in town before May. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin told the National Review in March that the town was seeing two to three chases per day as more noncitizens crossed into the United States without permission.
Drivers who work for the Mexican cartels are paid to pick up illegal immigrants after they have crossed the border and transport them to major cities such as San Antonio and Houston. Although many illegal immigrants, including families, immediately seek out and surrender to Border Patrol agents at the border, others evade law enforcement and attempt to get into the interior of the country without being found.
Human smugglers coming from the border town of Del Rio will arrive in Uvalde on Highway 90, while smugglers from the border town of Eagle Pass arrive on Highway 83. Because both highways intersect in downtown Uvalde, roughly half a mile from the elementary school, authorities proactively issued emergency alerts to ensure students and staff were safe should the passengers “bail out” and run into the school.
The Uvalde school district began using a Rapid Technologies alert system for emergencies last fall. Robb Elementary Principal Mandy Gutierrez and other school staff could trigger a schoolwide alert by tapping a button on the phone app. School officials learned of external threats from police and other community officials outside the school.
Of the 47 emergency alerts to take cover since February, 90% were issued after learning of a “bailout,” in which illegal immigrants in a vehicle bail and run from police.
“Chief Arredondo explained it was important to notify schools in the vicinity of the highways about bailouts because the passengers would scatter everywhere, and the school district police did not want them coming on campus,” the report states. “While there have been no incidents of bailout-related violence on Uvalde CISD school grounds, there have been examples of high-speed driving that sometimes crossed school parking lots and reports of some bailout incidents involving firearms in the surrounding neighborhoods.”
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The state legislature released its 77-page preliminary report Sunday, nearly two months since the incident and amid criticism of how local, state, and federal law enforcement responded to the shooting. Nineteen children and two teachers died in the massacre, and parents have slammed school officials and police for not doing more to prevent and respond to it.
The report “found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making” in how police and school officials responded that day.
Among those failures was the delay in police running inside and stopping the attack as well as rescuing victims. The shooter went unstopped for 73 minutes, according to the state’s findings, confirming earlier reports about the police’s delayed response.
An incident commander should have taken control of the situation, which would have been Arredondo’s responsibility. However, that did not happen. Angry school district parents demanded Arredondo be fired from his post during a heated school board meeting Monday evening.
Ultimately, Border Patrol agents stormed into the classroom and were credited for taking down the gunman. More than 370 police had been on the scene that day.
