DOJ Finds ‘Significant Failure’ in Uvalde Police Response to Shooting

A near-total breakdown in policing protocols hindered the response to the 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 21 people dead — and the refusal to rapidly confront the killer needlessly cost lives, the Justice Department concluded on Thursday after a nearly two-year investigation.

The department blamed “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” for the delayed and passive law enforcement response that allowed an 18-year-old gunman with a semiautomatic rifle to remain inside a pair of connected fourth grade classrooms at Robb Elementary School for 77 minutes before he was confronted and killed.

The “most significant failure,” investigators concluded, was the decision by local police officials to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff rather than an “active-shooter” scenario, which would have demanded instant and aggressive action. Almost all of the officials in charge that day have already been fired or have retired.

Attorney General Merrick B. Garland, speaking to reporters in Uvalde, said that the officers who converged on the school within minutes of the attack intended to storm the classrooms, but were told to stand down.

“Lives would have been saved, and people would have survived,” if officers had acted quickly to confront the gunman, Mr. Garland said. He related a timeline of several critical moments when officers outside the classrooms could have halted the rampage, but did not take action.

The main takeaway from the investigation, Mr. Garland said, was that officers who respond to an active shooting scene need “to immediately enter the room to stop the shooter with whatever weapons and tools the officers have with them.”

Since the shooting, blame for the delayed police confrontation with the gunman has shifted: In the immediate aftermath, the top state police official, Steven McCraw, blamed the local school police chief, Pete Arredondo. Then it turned out that state police officers were also among those who failed to actively confront the gunman. In its report, the Justice Department focused largely on decisions by Mr. Arredondo, finding that his decisions delayed the response.

The nearly 600-page report, compiled from 260 interviews and 14,000 documents and videos, represents the most comprehensive assessment to date of a killing spree that helped spur passage of new federal gun control legislation and that continues to haunt a community traumatized by the slaughter and the inadequacy of the police response.

The conclusions largely mirror those of a state investigation released last July. In accordance with department policy, it does not refer to the gunman by name.

The federal report puts a particular focus on the actions of law enforcement officials in the aftermath of the massacre, and outlines another set of mistakes and failures, including a disorganized system for tracking the whereabouts of students, which led to confusion over whether they were safe, and to one instance in which a parent of one victim was given false hope that the child was still alive.

Investigators also identified repeated incidents, captured on body cameras, of officials and other onlookers roaming through the school in the days after the shooting, forcing crime scene investigators to “continually stop” their evidence collection.

Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta, who oversaw the investigation, said the shooting caused “a loss of faith and trust” in law enforcement.

“It was an unimaginable failure,” she added.

The delay in confronting the gunman meant that the 19 children and two teachers who were fatally shot did not receive immediate medical care. One teacher and at least one student who were found seriously wounded but alive in the classrooms later died while being transported to hospitals. Seventeen others who were injured survived.

That question — could lives have been saved through swifter action? — still haunts many of the Uvalde families. It goes largely unanswered in the report, to the frustration of people in the community.

Leonard Sandoval, whose 10-year-old grandson Xavier Lopez was killed, said he believed that the boy was still alive when officers finally breached the classroom. Xavier was loaded into an ambulance headed for a hospital in San Antonio, Mr. Sandoval said, but died when the ambulance reached the town of Hondo, 40 miles away from Uvalde and less than halfway to the hospital.

“If they would have put him in a helicopter, he would have made it out OK,” Mr. Sandoval said. “They dropped the ball everywhere. Somebody needs to be held accountable and charged. They didn’t do that.”

The Justice Department offered a list of detailed recommendations in the report. They included requiring adherence to guidelines, created in the aftermath of the 1999 Columbine school shooting, that call for neutralizing the gunman immediately in any situation where an active shooter might be present.

Officers responding to such a situation “must be prepared” to risk their lives for the protection of their communities, the report said, even if they have inadequate firepower and are armed with only a standard-issue handgun to confront a gunman with a much more powerful weapon.

The report put some blame on state officials, who it said had shown “no urgency” about setting up an effective command structure at the scene of the shooting.

The report, known as a critical incident review and initiated 20 months ago at the request of the town’s former mayor, Don McLaughlin, also found fault with local and state officials who provided incomplete and at times inaccurate information to the families of students and the news media.

The local district attorney, Christina Mitchell, has been conducting an investigation to determine whether any state criminal charges should be brought.

Mr. Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta met on Wednesday with the families of some of the students who were killed or injured, as well as survivors, before releasing the report.

For some of the Uvalde families, like the parents of one of the survivors, Noah Orona, the findings supported what they had been saying since the shooting. “It’s not just us saying, ‘Somebody failed,’ but now the federal government has come and said, ‘Hey, this was a colossal failure,’” said Oscar Orona, the boy’s father.

Some of the report’s recommendations have already been implemented, and several police officials in Uvalde — including Mr. Arredondo and the acting Uvalde police chief Mariano Pargas — have already been fired or have resigned.

The department’s conclusions echoed the findings of a July 2022 investigation by a special committee of the Texas House of Representatives. The committee’s report chronicled a perfect storm of dysfunction and circumstance that led to the delayed response, despite the presence of more than 370 local, state and federal law enforcement officers on the scene, including the federal border agents who eventually burst into a classroom and killed the gunman.

The report found that Mr. Arredondo had been the “de facto on-scene incident commander” and that, before the shooting, the small school police department had provided active shooter training that “seemed to suggest, inappropriately,” that an active shooter situation could become a barricaded subject situation.

That training was wrong, the report said.

That view agreed with a directive issued by the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw, a few months after the shooting at Robb Elementary. “D.P.S. officers responding to an active shooter at a school will be authorized to overcome any delay to neutralizing an attacker,” Mr. McCraw wrote in a July 2022 email.

The Texas House committee report cited a range of factors unrelated to law enforcement that contributed to the sluggish response, including the remote location of Uvalde, a small city of 14,000 about 120 miles west of San Antonio, and its relative proximity to a border crossing with Mexico that has been a popular gateway for illegal immigration.

Low-quality internet service and poor mobile phone coverage in the city “led to inconsistent receipt of the lockdown notice by teachers,” the Texas House committee report found. In addition, “bailout” alarms — notifications about chases involving migrants attempting to escape Border Patrol agents — occurred so frequently in Uvalde that they “contributed to a diminished sense of vigilance about responding to security alerts,” according to state investigators.

The committee did not find any “villains” other than the gunman, but “found systemic failures and egregious poor decision making.”

The failures extended far beyond the response on the day of the killings, reflecting a familiar pattern of missed opportunities seen in many mass shootings, including a racially motivated massacre at a supermarket in Buffalo by another 18-year-old man 10 days before the shooting in Texas.

There were significant signs that the Uvalde killer, a troubled and bullied loner nicknamed “school shooter” by some acquaintances, would pose a deadly threat.

He had recently dropped out of high school, and used money saved from fast-food jobs to buy an arsenal that included two semiautomatic weapons, conversion devices used to increase rates of fire, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. In the days leading up to the shootings, he made menacing remarks to co-workers and talked openly about being suicidally depressed, federal investigators found.

At 11:10 a.m. on May 24, 2022, he shot his grandmother in the face, then texted a 15-year-old girl in Germany whom he had met online that he planned to “shoot up” an elementary school. His grandmother survived.

The gunman then drove her pickup truck to the nearby school, crashed it in a ditch, hopped a fence, entered the school building through an unlocked door and began firing indiscriminately at young students gathered in the pair of connected classrooms.

Law enforcement officers arrived almost immediately, and approached the classrooms. The shooter fired at them, and they retreated down a hallway. Then, for more than an hour, local, state and federal officials, including agents from the U.S. Border Patrol, discussed how to deal with the situation — and made the fateful decision to classify the incident as a barricaded standoff, requiring negotiation, rather than an active-shooter scenario, which would demand an immediate and aggressive response.

Justice Department officials initially said that their investigation, led by the department’s office of community-oriented policing, would take about six months to complete. The investigation turned out to be more complex, and information harder to obtain, than they originally thought, according to an official familiar with the situation.

After Mr. Garland spoke to reporters on Thursday, some of the victims’ families gathered outside. While the report provided many answers, Veronica Mata, whose daughter Tess died in the attack, said on behalf of the others that the fight for closure was far from over: “We have nothing left, but to fight for them.”