“Someone Tell Me What to Do”

by Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Jinitzail Hernández, The Texas Tribune

The children hid. They dropped to the floor, crouching under desks and countertops, far from the windows. They lined up against the walls, avoiding the elementary school doors that separated them from a mass shooter about a decade older than them. Some held up the blunted scissors that they often used to cut shapes as they prepared to fight. A few grabbed bloodied phones and dialed 911. And as students across the country have been instructed for years, they remained quiet, impossibly quiet. At times, they hushed classmates who screamed in agony from the bullets that tore through their small bodies.

Then, they waited. Waited for the adults, whom they could hear in the hallway. If they were just patient, those adults would save them.

Hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that day in May 2022. They, too, waited. They waited for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do. They waited for the right keys and specialized equipment to open doors. They waited out of fear that the lack of ballistic shields and flash-bangs would leave them vulnerable against the power of an AR-15-style rifle. Most astonishingly, they waited for the children’s cries to confirm that people were still alive inside the classrooms.

“I’m watching that door. No screams. No nothing. No nothing. You know. Things you would think you would hear if there had been kids in there,” Cpl. Gregory Villa, who had been with the Uvalde Police Department for 11 years, told an investigator days after the attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

If there were children inside, Villa said, officers would have probably heard the shooter saying, “‘Hey, everybody shut up,’ and then kids are like, ‘Oh no, I gotta, I want my mommy.’”

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Villa, who received active shooter training four years earlier, was among several officers who told investigators that they didn’t believe children were in the classrooms because they were so quiet. The children’s strict adherence to remaining silent was, in fact, part of their training. Officers’ own training instructs them to confront a shooter if there is reason to believe someone is hurt.

“I just honestly thought that they were in the cafeteria because it seemed like all the lights were off and it seemed like it was really quiet. I didn’t hear any screaming, any yelling. I literally didn’t hear anything at all,” Uvalde police Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales recalled to an investigator. “You would think kids would be yelling and screaming.”

The accounts of law enforcement’s actions during one of the worst school shootings in history are among a trove of recorded investigative interviews and body camera footage obtained by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE. Together, the hundreds of hours of audio and video offer a startling finding: The children in Uvalde were prepared, dutifully following what they had learned during active shooter drills, even as their friends and teachers were bleeding to death. Many of the officers, who had trained at least once during their careers for such a situation, were not.

Mass shootings have become a fact of American life, with at least 120 since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting. Debates often erupt along partisan lines as anguished communities demand change. When children are gunned down, calls for tighter gun laws are matched with plans for arming teachers and hardening schools.

One thing that seemingly unites all sides is the notion of better training for law enforcement. But, in actuality, few laws exist requiring such instruction.

In the wake of the Columbine shooting, law enforcement agencies across the country began retooling protocols to prevent long delays like the one that kept officers there from stopping the two shooters. Key among the changes was an effort to ensure that all officers had enough training to engage a shooter without having to wait for more specialized teams.

More than two decades later, law enforcement’s chaotic response in Uvalde and officers’ subsequent explanations of their inaction show that the promise of adequate training to respond to a mass shooting has yet to be fully realized.

Officers failed to set up a clear command structure. They spread incorrect information that caused them to treat the shooter as a barricaded suspect and not an active threat even as children and teachers called 911 pleading for help. And no single officer engaged the shooter despite training that says they should do so as quickly as possible if anyone is hurt. It took 77 minutes to breach the classroom and take down the shooter.

“It’s pretty stunning that we’re 24 years after the Columbine massacre and we’re still dealing with a lack of training on how to deal with these active assailants,” said Mo Canady, executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers. “I’m not sure who is to be held responsible for that, but it really is unacceptable that officers are not getting that training.”

A nationwide analysis by the news organizations shows states require far more training to prepare students and teachers for a mass shooting than they do for the police who are expected to protect them.

At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills. All but four of those states require them at least annually.

In contrast, only Texas and Michigan have laws requiring training for all officers after they graduate from police academies. Texas’ law is the strongest in the country, mandating that officers train for 16 hours every two years. That requirement came about only after the Uvalde massacre.

The absence of legislation has created an uneven and inconsistent approach, which fails to ensure that officers not only receive the training they need to confront a mass shooter, but drill often enough to follow it in the adrenaline-soaked atmosphere of a real shooting, law enforcement experts said. Some also emphasize the importance of multiagency training so that officers are not responding to a crisis alongside people they’ve never worked with before. Yet few states, if any, require agencies to train together.

About 72% of the at least 116 state and local officers who arrived at Robb Elementary before the gunman was killed had received some form of active shooter training during their careers, according to an analysis of records obtained by ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE. Officers who received training before the Uvalde shooting had most commonly taken it only once, which law enforcement experts say is not enough. Only three officers would have met Texas’ new standard for training.

The news organizations reached out to each of the officers in this piece. An attorney representing officers with the Uvalde Police Department said the city has ordered them not to comment because of an ongoing internal investigation. Officers with other agencies did not return phone calls, texts and emails or declined to comment.

Across the country, officers are increasingly responding to situations with active shooters, some of whom have access to weapons originally designed for war. In the absence of gun control legislation, sales of these types of weapons have increased.

Unlike military service members who spend the majority of their time training for the possibility that they may someday see combat, police spend the bulk of their days responding to a variety of incidents, most of which do not involve violent encounters. Experts say that leaves many unprepared as the nation’s tally of mass shootings grows.

No clear consensus exists on just how much training is sufficient, though experts agree on the need for repetition. Even then, consistent training cannot guarantee that officers will do everything right, said John Curnutt, assistant director at Texas State University’s Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, which is rated as the national standard by the FBI. Still, Curnutt said, routine training is the best way to improve officers’ response.

“It has to be really driven into somebody to the point where it becomes instinctive, habitual,” Curnutt said. “Before you really get a chance to think about it, you’re already doing it. And it takes more than 10 or 11 times to get that good at something like this that is going to be incredibly difficult to do when you know that, ‘I’m about to die, but I’m going to do this anyway.’ Who thinks like that? Not everybody. We know that. Not everybody that’s in uniform does.”

Praying for Help

It was 11:30 a.m. on May 24, 2022. The timer that Elsa Avila set had just gone off, notifying her fourth grade class that the extra minutes she’d given them to make shoes out of newspapers for a STEM challenge had drawn to a close. Now they were going outside to test how long the shoes held up on the school track.

Avila gathered the children for a photo before they formed a single-file line. At the front, one of the students peered into the hallway. “Miss, there’s a class coming in and they’re screaming and they’re running to their room,” Avila recalled the student saying as the teacher of 27 years described the details of that day to investigators.

Elsa Avila’s students pose for a picture in their newspaper shoes moments before the shooter entered their school. Children’s faces are shown with parental consent.

(Courtesy of Elsa Avila, pixelated by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune, and FRONTLINE)

“You let their teacher worry about them,” Avila replied, believing that the student was simply reporting unruly behavior.

This was different, the girl insisted. The children were scared. So, Avila peeked into the hallway.

“Get in your rooms!” Avila heard a woman scream.

“So I just slammed my door back in, turned off the lights and, at that time, the kids know, because we practice these drills, they know: ‘OK, shut the door, you know. Slam the lights. We’ve got to go into our positions,’” Avila recalled.

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The educator and her students formed an “L,” crouching down against the two walls that were farthest from the doors and windows. It was a drill they’d practiced so much that, at times, it had become tiresome. The training that Avila had hoped they’d never have to use: Run. Hide. Fight.

For now, they hid.

Avila stood up momentarily to make sure that her students were safe.

It was then that a bullet pierced the wall, ripping into the teacher’s stomach.

Avila fell to the ground and dropped her phone. After dragging herself to the phone, she scrolled through previous texts to find one that included a group of teachers from the school.

“Im shot,” she wrote at 11:35 a.m., mistakenly texting her siblings before eventually also messaging her colleagues.

Only five minutes had passed since Avila’s timer rang for what was intended to be a celebratory moment.

In that time, the gunman had entered the building after crashing a truck into a nearby ditch and police had received their first 911 call from a teacher informing them that the shooter was in the school. In those five minutes, the teenage shooter unleashed nearly 100 rounds of gunfire.

A child’s drawing for investigators shows how students in Room 109, two doors away from the shooter, followed their training.

Children and teachers formed an “L,” crouching against the walls farthest from doors and windows.

In the drawing, the child wrote “hide,” reflecting a key part of the training.

One of Avila’s students was among those injured. Bullet fragments struck 10-year-old Leann Garcia on the nose and mouth. Blood dripped onto her clothes as her friend, Ailyn Ramos, held her and tried to keep her from screaming out in pain.

“If I die, I love you,” Leann whispered to Ailyn.

“As long as you’re in here with me, you’re not going to die,” Ailyn later recalled responding in an interview with the news organizations. (Ailyn’s account, like those of all the children named in this piece, is included with the permission of a parent.)

With their teacher flitting in and out of consciousness, the children huddled together. For a moment they did something that their lockdown training had not taught them, but that their teacher had always told them to do in difficult times, Ailyn told the news organizations.

They prayed.

“Please let the cops come in.”

Diverting From the Training

Outside of the school, Uvalde police Sgt. Daniel Coronado heard the unmistakable gunfire from the shooter’s semiautomatic rifle. “Oh, shit, shots fired! Get inside,” Coronado yelled at about 11:35 a.m. while breathlessly running toward the building.

Entering a smoke-filled hallway, Coronado, a 17-year veteran of the department, walked past printouts of summer sandals that had been brightly colored by children, who were now nearing their last day of school. Seconds later, there was another round of gunfire from rooms 111 and 112, the adjoining classrooms from which the shooter was terrorizing teachers and children.

The shots injured Canales and Lt. Javier Martinez, two Uvalde police officers who had initially approached the classrooms. Blood trickled from Canales’ ear and bullet fragments grazed Martinez’s head. Both officers retreated. Though hurt, Martinez again ran toward the door. No one followed. He eventually pulled back. The officers had taken active shooter training only once: Martinez in 2014 and Canales the year before the shooting.

The failure to engage the shooter was the first in a handful of critical missteps by officers in the initial 10 minutes. Each ran counter to what the training teaches.

Among the missteps was the fact that no one took charge or set up a command post to guide the response, which experts say should happen quickly after arrival. Another was Coronado’s decision to relay an unconfirmed report from a school resource officer that the suspect was holed up in an office. The information proved to be inaccurate, and the misunderstanding helped shape officers’ approach to the incident.

“Male subject is in the school on the west side of the building,” Coronado radioed at 11:41 a.m. “He’s contained. We got multiple officers inside the building at this time. Believe he’s, uh, barricaded in one of the offices. Male subject’s still shooting.”

Though some officers struggled with malfunctioning radios, Coronado’s words reached enough of them to contribute to a widespread belief that the shooter was possibly alone inside a room with no victims, even as evidence mounted that children and teachers were in danger.

Initially believing he was responding to an active shooter, Texas Department of Public Safety Special Agent Colten Valenzuela told an investigator that his mindset changed after arriving at the school.

“When we did get there, we were told that it was a barricaded subject, so that kind of flipped the direction,” Valenzuela said.

Asked by an investigator about the determination that the shooter was barricaded, Coronado, who completed active shooter training a decade earlier, said: “I don’t know where that came out of, you know what I mean? You’re just reacting to what you’re dealing with at that moment in time.”

“You don’t see any bodies,” Coronado added. “You don’t see any blood. You don’t see anybody yelling, screaming for help. Those are motivators for you to say, ‘Hey, get going, move,’ but if you don’t have that, then slow down.”

Continue reading, listening to police chatter and watching police video

This article originally appeared here and was republished with permission.