Uvalde Report

Full report at cnn.com: READ: The Uvalde report

Of necessity, this report will describe the shortcomings and failures of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and of various agencies and officers of law enforcement. At the outset, we acknowledge that those same shortcomings could be found throughout the State of Texas…

“There is no one whom we can attribute malice or ill motives. Instead, we found systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.”

Wow. Harsh words but nowhere near the anger I feel for the cowards that stood hiding from the shooter while children died.

There is a screen capture of one officer checking his phone constantly as he stands behind the corner far from the shooter. He has the Punisher screensaver. There was an article that stated the reason that he kept checking his phone was he was waiting for a message from his wife, a teacher at the school. The report implied that his wife was one of those killed.

If his wife was one of those killed I feel for him. I also hope he lives in torment for the rest of his life because he stood there with his body armor, his side arm, with access to a rifle and refused to advance to the sounds of gun fire. He refused to save his wife and those children.

Checking his phone for a message from his wife isn’t an excuse, it is condemnation..

… While the school had adopted security policies to lock exterior doors and internal classroom doors, there was a regrettable culture of noncompliance by school personnel who frequently propped doors open and deliberately circumvented locks. At a minimum, school administrators and school district police tacitly condoned this behavior as they were aware of these unsafe practices and did not treat them as serious infractions requiring immediate correction. In fact, the school actually suggested circumventing the locks as a solution for the convenience of substitute teachers and others who lacked their own keys.

It wasn’t that some teacher left the door propped open, it was that the door didn’t lock like it was suppose to. It didn’t lock like it was suppose to because the school didn’t get the doors repaired. The door to room 111 had a faulty lock. It had been discussed but nobody had bothered to write up a work order to get it fixed.

In addition to all of the above there were around 50 security alerts at the school between February and May of 2022. These were caused by “[the] frequent occurrence of human traffickers trying to outrun the police, usually ending with the smuggler crashing the vehicle and the passengers fleeing in all directions.”

That is almost one every other school day. Given the holidays in that time period darn close to one per day. No wonder the teachers were tired of security alerts.

Other factors delayed the reporting of the threat to the campus and to law enforcement. …

What??? We have the 911 call made while the shooter is still outside the building. That isn’t a delay. The most you can say is that the first shots at the men coming to the crash scene might have been delayed, but there was at least one teacher on the phone with 911 within a few minutes of the shooting starting, outside the building.

His entrance into the building that morning was unimpeded because ALL of the exterior doors to that building were unlocked. In violation of school policy.

At Robb Elementary, law enforcement responders failed to adhere to their active shooter training, and they failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety.

Cowards, all of them.

… The chief of police was one of the first responders on the scene. But as events unfolded, he failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander. This was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in the plan mentioned above, yet it was not effectively performed by anyone. …

Looks like the Chief wanted the glory but when it came to perform he failed at every level.

The US military is given training on “illegal orders”. Every member of the US military understands that “I was just following orders.” Is not a defense. Thus they are required by law to evaluate every order given to make sure they are legal. In addition they are trained to work as a team and as individuals and to work without a leader.

One of the more interesting aspects of this is that killing leaders in the US military does not cause as much devastation to the battle as in other armies.

This style of leadership supposedly is followed within Law Enforcement.

There was no Incident Command Post on scene. No officer responding took it upon themselves to establish that command post nor to make sure that there was an actual incident commander. The Chief was the first domino of cowardice. There were more that fell from his failures.

There is a show I watched The Closer. One story arc details how they are going to get money for their budget by doubling as part of the terrorist response team for the LAPD. These officers went through the training, had all the documents and plans and people in positions of power signed off on it.

They were not actually qualified to be a part of a terrorist response team. They had those qualities on paper only.

That was a fictional story.

Uvalde is more of the same. It looks like there was money dangled in front of the school system for having an active shooter plan in place. So the chief had one of his minions write it up, likely cutting and pasting from other plans they found. The chief assigned himself to the part of “incident commander” and handed out parts to his other officers in the play they had written.

They then went and performed the full dress rehearsal to qualify for the (assumed) money.

When it was time to actually perform, they failed at every level. It all started at the top and the rank and file refused to accept responsibility for following IMO illegal orders.

Page 22 of the document is a massive condemnation of the chief. He had all the training required to do the right thing. Every failure that happened at Robb Elementary is discussed in the training he received. There is no excuse for his behavior that day.

He took an entire module on how to enter locked buildings and rooms with outward opening doors. He had the training to know that you don’t wait for keys. If you have them, great, if not move on. The module included information on how to breach using physical means.

… Uvalde CISD parents became so concerned about the number of bailouts occurring near the elementary-school campuses that they offered to hire off-duty police to supplement the Uvalde CISD police presence.

It appears that the offer to provide more security was turned down by the school district police. It makes you wonder why?

When the Internet was first being introduced to the world at large the people that had been using it were all the same sorts of geeks and nerds. Nobody would ever consider doing bad things on the internet. Besides, we’ve secured our equipment.

And then Windows got internet capability and all that changed. Windows had(has?) horrible security. The answer was firewalls. Put a moat around your campus and everybody inside would be safe.

At our campus Wi-Fi was just starting to be used, it required a boatload of paperwork to get an access point installed and more money than people wanted to spend.

Instead people hooked up their own modems to the internal network, bridging the moat/firewall, with no security. They plugged access points they purchased at Best Buy/Circuit City into the local network, letting anybody sitting in the picnic area to connect to the network, with no security.

The security policies did not take into account humans. When you get in the way of a person that wants to do something they will find away around it. Even if the thing they are doing is destroying security.

Th Uvalde CISD purchased an alert system that required a smart phone with a good signal or to be logged into a computer in order to receive or send alerts. They had such poor wi-fi in most buildings that teachers turned off their phones. Teachers didn’t carry their phones with them.

The alert system was bound to fail because the human factor was ignored. In addition, everybody that was able to receive alerts through the system could initiate an alert. This lead to alerts when a user heard about bailouts near the school campuses.

Over used and not handy, the alert system was a failure and nobody noticed.

Page 32 of the document describes the asshole. If you want to know more about him, read if from the linked document.

This 18yo dropped over $3k on rifles and ammunition. He didn’t have a car, he didn’t have a license, he didn’t know how to drive. Yet somehow he saved up over $3K. It is an interesting question of where he got his money.

At approximately 11:37a.m., the officers converged from both sides of the hallway on Rooms 111 and 112. Coming from the north, Lt. Martinez peered into the vestibule for Rooms 111 and 112, and he faced gunfire, getting grazed by fragments of building material on the top of his head. He immediately retreated to the north end of the hallway. On the opposite of the hall, fragments also hit SSgt. Canales on his ear. He likewise retreated and exited the building on the west side. No shots were fired at that time toward the attacker by the law enforcement responders.

And there we have the names of the cowards that were shot at and ran.

The report confirms that BORTAC made the decision to breach. They stacked up. When they did others stacked up with them. BORTAC made the breach. The chief testified that he did not give BORTAC the order to breach.

Cdr. Paul Guerrero stands as somebody who actually did. His is the first discussion that seems like he knew what he was doing and took charge. He was the acting commander of BORTAC. He arrived at 12:30 and by 12:35 was already testing a Halligan breaching tool. He then ordered Border Patrol agents to start setting up triage and medical. He and another agent were at the head of the stack unlocking the door and opening it for the breach.

This guy arrived and took charge of his men, evaluated the situation and did. Read page 61.

The chief appears to be in complete CYA. His basic statement is “I was just a police officer doing a police officer’s job. I was never in charge.” He failed completely at his duties.

Notes: The report on CNN is a series of images of the report. I transcribed the blockquotes and quotes from the images. Any errors in grammar or spelling in the quotes is entirely my fault.