- A Texas State Senator slammed Uvalde police for their handling of the school shooting at Robb Elementary.
- Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez said it is "one of the worst investigations I've seen."
- The Democratic lawmaker specifically took issue with the decision not to send police in to confront the shooter.
Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez ripped the police's handling of the Uvalde school shooting, calling it "one of the worst investigations I've seen."
"We've gotten some answers, and we've gotten some bad answers," Gutierrez said of the police response and subsequent information releases the Uvalde Police Department has given since the May 24 massacre that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The Democratic lawmaker noted law enforcement's shifting stories around how they responded to the shooting.
"We've gotten some information which the next day turns out to be different," Gutierrez — who represents the Uvalde area — said. "We've got fingers pointed at teachers, we've seen that the teacher has now been vindicated.
Gutierrez also said school police chief Pete Arredondo who coordinated the response and reportedly didn't order cops to confront the gunman for over an hour has "a lot of responsibility to bear here, as does every law enforcement unit that was at that property, at that school."
Gutierrez revealed that the panicked 911 calls from students inside the classroom where the gunman was barricaded never reached Arredondo.
Instead, the Uvalde Police Department was fielding those calls, Gutierrez said, and they were never shared with Arredondo. It is still unclear who the exact recipient of these messages was.
"In this instance, it was Uvalde Police. The state authority does not know who Uvalde Police was communicating the 911 calls to. What we do know is that the 911 calls were not being communicated to the so-called incident commander, Officer Arredondo. They were being communicated to a Uvalde Police Officer," Gutierrez explained.
But the 911 calls, Gutierrez noted, were not the only problem.
"My biggest concern was at 12:03 p.m. when there were 19 officers for 45 minutes in a hallway that didn't do anything," Gutierrez of the delayed response, which has been largely blamed on Arredondo by Texas authorities.
Gutierrez said he has requested the names of the 19 officers who stayed back in the hallway as the gunman opened fire inside of the fourth-grade classrooms, and added that he will release the list of names as soon as he gets it.