Up to 13 state troopers waited in Uvalde school hallway during shooting: senator

Texas state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D) said there were as many as 13 Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) troopers in a hallway during last month’s school shooting in Uvalde that left 19 children and two adults dead.

Gutierrez, citing a recent interaction with DPS Director Steven McCraw, said more than a dozen troopers were in the hallway at Robb Elementary School as law enforcement delayed its response to the mass shooting.

“He told me there was enough people and equipment to breach the door,” Gutierrez said of his encounter with McCraw, according to the San Antonio Express-News. 

Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde, has previously said that the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, who was overseeing officers at the scene, was never informed that children were calling 911 from inside the school.

He has also previously told The Associated Press that a state agency investigating the shooting found Arredondo was not carrying a police radio during the shooting.

Since the shooting, law enforcement has been sharply criticized for not immediately going into the classroom and taking down the shooter. Police did not breach the classroom for over an hour.  

“They’re cowards,” Arnulfo Reyes, a teacher at Robb Elementary School, said of police. 

All of Reyes’s 11 students were killed in the shooting, and he was injured. 

“They sit there and did nothing for our community,” Reyes said. “They took a long time to go in. … I will never forgive them.”