“The door was unsecured.”

Texas Public Safety Director Steven McCraw in testimony before the Texas legislature.

 

...McCraw’s testimony addressed a central, and painful, question that still hung over the massacre and the delayed police response, one that investigators have attempted to answer through interviews with officers and reviews of video: Were the doors to the classrooms locked, preventing police officers from entering in time to save others?

...
“I don’t believe, based on the information that we have right now, that that door was ever secured,” Mr. McCraw said of the classroom door that the gunman entered. “The door was unsecured.”

“There’s no way to lock the door from the inside. And there’s no way for the subject to lock the door from the inside.” "How about trying the door and seeing if it's locked?"

Mr. McCraw focused his blame on the on-scene commander, whom he identified as the chief of the Uvalde school district’s Police Department, Pete Arredondo, who he said was the highest-ranking person at the scene.

...

"You don't wait for a SWAT team. You have one officer, that's enough. I don't care if you have on flip-flops and Bermuda shorts, you go in," McCraw said in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing. He also said officers did not need to wait for shields to enter the classroom. The first shield arrived less than 20 minutes after the shooter entered, according to McCraw. Also, eight minutes after the shooter entered, an officer reported that police had a "hooligan" crowbar that they could use to break down the classroom door, McCraw said.

...

The chief has said he did not consider himself in charge, but Mr. McCraw disputed that. “If you’re going to issue commands, if you’re going to direct action,” he said, “you’re the on-scene commander.”

Several of the senators reacted with shock and anger. “Every shot is a death,” said Senator Paul Bettencourt, a Republican from the suburbs of Houston. “And yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing.”

“I challenge this chief to testify in public,” Mr. Bettencourt said loudly at one point, referring to Chief Arredondo. The chief was also in the State Capitol on Tuesday, testifying before a closed-door hearing of a Texas House investigatory committee. He did not speak to the news media before or after.

...
Texas Sen. Paul Bettencourt said the entire premise of lockdown and shooter training is worthless if the doors can't be locked. 

 

Pretty pithy point there by Sen. Bettencourt. 

He angrily pointed out that shots were heard while police waited in the hallway.

...

"There are at least six shots fired during this time," he said. "Why is this person shooting? He's killing somebody. Yet this incident commander finds every reason to do nothing."

…
Mr. McCraw said that just minutes after a gunman began shooting children at Robb Elementary School on May 24, the police at the scene had enough firepower and protective equipment to storm the classroom.

…

Arredondo had arrived at the school without his police radio and focused on finding keys to the classrooms, even though it was not apparent in the videos that anyone had checked the classroom door to see if it was locked.

Chief Arredondo said that the classrooms had been locked and that he knew this because he and another officer had checked both doors. He said he then focused on finding keys, testing dozens of them, he said, in an effort to find one that would work on the doors. Eventually one was located…

But Mr. McCraw said there was no indication, either from video or interviews, that anyone had in fact checked the doors. “Moreover, you don’t need a key,” he said, pointing to the availability of breaching tools and the possibility of entering through the windows.

That has always been the most puzzling specific part of Arredondo’s story. You need keys?! You’re a cop and you need keys?! Do you have to ring the doorbell too and ask permission?

...police supervisors had been told there were people alive but wounded in the classrooms; that an officer had been on the phone with his wife, a teacher, after she was shot but before she died, and that he had told other officers about this at 11:48 a.m., providing them with a clear indication that people inside the classrooms were in urgent need of help...