Shades of Parkland: Cops in Texas face scrutiny over response to mass shooting at school

After a teenager wielding an assault-style rifle stormed Parkland’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High in 2018 in the state’s worst school massacre, parents, pundits and politicians pilloried the police response.

A Broward Sheriff’s school resource officer was charged criminally for failing to enter the freshman building to try and stop the gunman. A state commission found some officers acted heroically, others did not, and the scene was marred by confusion, poor training and even defective radios.

Fast-forward to this week, and the same questions are being raised after parents at the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, accused first responders of failing to quickly enter Robb Elementary, where gunman Salvador Ramos — also armed with a powerful AR-15-style weapon — barricaded himself inside a classroom. He was ultimately shot dead about an hour later, authorities say, but not before murdering 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.

Even though police officers around the nation have been increasingly trained on how to respond to active shooters, the Uvalde case — as with the Parkland massacre — nevertheless underscores the challenges first-responding cops face when confronting a heavily armed gunman in confined spaces. Law-enforcement experts say concerns about the police response are legitimate, although it’s too early to definitively pass judgment on whether officers acted appropriately.

“We don’t have all the information yet. And when we get all the information, it will be better than what the officers had at the time,” said Pete Blair, the executive director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center at Texas State University.

The school massacre, yet another mass shooting in the United States, has sparked uproar among the public, reignited long-standing calls for gun control and again focused attention on how police officers respond to active shooters.

The scrutiny was not lost on former BSO Deputy Scot Peterson, who is facing a September trial on accusations he failed to intervene in the Parkland massacre, the worst school shooting in Florida history. Peterson has long maintained he acted appropriately. On Wednesday, he forwarded a news story about criticism of police to his defense attorney, Mark Eiglarsh.

“Most law enforcement officers are dedicated and well-intended, doing the best they can with the limited information they have while encountering the most extreme and stressful of situations,” Eiglarsh said. “The court of public opinion is unfortunately so quick to judge and assess blame to responding officers who are operating with the best of intentions on behalf of the public that they serve.”

What we know about the shooting and response

Precise details on how officers in Uvalde responded remain fuzzy.

Police have said the first report of an armed gunman crashing a truck and approaching the single-story brick school came in around 11:30 a.m. Authorities initially said a police officer tried to stop him from getting into the school.

But on Thursday, a Texas safety department official said Ramos walked from the crash site, jumped a campus fence and fired shots at the building before entering the school unobstructed at 11:40 a.m., through an apparently unlocked door.

Police first attempted to enter the school at 11:44 a.m., Victor Escalon, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety South, told reporters on Thursday. But they were pushed back by gunfire and were forced to take cover, he said.

Ramos then “barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom,” a safety department spokesman told CNN. “It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”

Officers evacuated students and staffers from other parts of the school as they scrambled to call in reinforcements, Escalon said. About an hour after the gunman entered, according to Escalon, a heavily armed Border Patrol tactical team shot him dead. Escalon said the gunman was in the school for about an hour.

What happened in that window will undoubtedly be dissected in the months to come.

Parents in the small town near San Antonio told The Associated Press that they quickly gathered outside the building and angrily urged gathered officers to enter. One father — who lived across the street and whose daughter was killed — described the scene to the AP.

“There were more of them,” Juan Carranza said of officers. “There was just one of him.”

Gathering more information

Since the Columbine school shooting in 1999, law enforcement agencies largely changed policies, training officers to actively engage shooters. Still, experts say, there may have been reasons to wait for a heavily armed tactical unit.

Blair, of Texas State University, said officers are taught that if a gunman has barricaded himself — and the shooting has stopped — waiting for backup might be the right call. That’s what happened at Texas’ Santa Fe High school, where a gunman killed 10 people in 2018 before barricading himself, allowing officers to talk him into surrendering, Blair said.

But Blair cautioned that the timeline and details in the Uvalde shooting are unclear, and officers may well have needed to enter the building earlier.

“If it’s active gunfire, it’s not really a barricaded subject,” Blair said. “Also, if there are cornered people in the room and they are wounded, it takes longer to get to them for treatment.”

Dave Magnusson, a retired Miami police major and former chief at El Portal police, said initial reports of a wait between 40 minutes and an hour are nevertheless hard to swallow.

“That’s an awful long time. There may have been difficulty getting into the classroom, but you have to think of something. Something has to be done,” he said.

Escalon, the Texas safety department official, said on Thursday that the “majority of the gunfire was in the beginning” but some came later “to keep officers at bay.” He added that the gunman did not respond to attempts to negotiate.

Pressed on whether officers should have gone in sooner, Escalon said investigators will be interviewing officers and reviewing surveillance video. “I don’t have enough information to answer that question,” Escalon said.

Blair also said it remains unclear whether there were indeed officers inside, and the cops being harangued by parents were simply staging. He said that mass shootings often lead to an “over-convergence” of officers, dubbed a “blue tsunami,” and on-scene commanders may have been trying to create a more effective, measured response.

“Every cop who is in radio range rushes to the scene to try and help,” Blair said. “There comes a point where the first set of officers are in, and more officers just rushing into the building is not helping things. It can actually create problems.”

The scrutiny on police response has been agonizingly familiar for relatives of the victims in the Parkland massacre.

Ryan Petty, whose 14-year-old daughter Alaina was murdered at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High, tweeted that “reports on the response to Robb Elementary makes Parkland response look like a well-oiled special ops mission.”

In an interview, Petty said Texas officials need to explain the timeline quickly.

“In Parkland, we learned the shooter was only in the school for six minutes. Six minutes is an eternity,” said Petty, who is now a school safety activist and Florida state education board member. “Why was [the Uvalde shooter] inside for 40 to 60 minutes? Why did it take a team from the Border Patrol to engage him. These questions need to be answered, very quickly. These families deserve answers.”