So, what about my series of posts on the McCraw hearing? Let’s call this Part I
I thought I’d get the first piece out today, but it may not be till next week – Monday, I hope. I was busy earlier today and got a very late start, and it’s one of the more complex issues I’ve tried to tackle. But I hope it will help readers here sort out an enormous tangle of information, and it will present some theories I’ve generated. The point is not just to evaluate what went so very wrong in the Uvalde response – and there’s plenty of that – but analyzing some of this may help somebody or other to come up with prevention and/or reaction strategies for the future.
But for today, I thought I’d just list a few somewhat random facts that McCraw mentioned in his lengthy lengthy testimony, things that have come up in discussions in the past on this blog and were considered somewhat mysterious. In no particular order:
(1) The perp had no trouble getting the money. It came from his fast-food job, and he had no rent or other expenses of the usual sort. He had stopped attending high school in his senior year and worked enough hours to save enough in a bank account (held jointly with his grandmother). He made many purchases online when he was seventeen – not of weapons but of accessories for the weapons he was planning to buy – and then after his 18th birthday he made the purchase of the items (including the firearms) that he was only able to buy after turning eighteen.
(2) He does not seem to have had any juvenile record. Apparently he kept a pretty low profile in the regard. Some acquaintances have reported animal abuse (carrying around dead cats in a bag and talking about it), but no one ever reported it to authorities. Also, despite quite a few apprehensive feelings about him on the part of online acquaintances alarmed by certain things he’d said, he was never reported to local or state or federal authorities for any of this.
(3) As I had guessed, there is no toxicology report yet on the perp because although it’s been done it takes a long time to issue results. He said the results will be made available after that.
(4) The questions of how the classroom door locks operated, whether or not the doors of those two classrooms were in fact locked, whether the officers knew whether they were or weren’t (or whether they even checked to see), and what should or could have been done by the officers to enter those classrooms, is such a big topic it will probably have its own post. But apropos of earlier discussions we had on this blog, a shotgun breach or an explosive breach of a locked door generally would never be used in a classroom situation. That wasn’t the issue here, however.
(5) Quite early on, there were at least two rifles, a Halligan, and several ballistic shields in the hallway of the school. Unfortunately – and this is one of my big criticisms of McCraw’s testimony – he doesn’t say where they were (the hallway had a bend in it), who had them exactly, to whom their presence was communicated, or whether it was in fact communicated to Arredondo or others in any possible coordinating position. McCraw did not even make it clear whether or not there was coordinated communication, and if so what its nature was (that is, how messages were conveyed), nor did he compare the communication that occurred within that hallway that day with what the officers would have been told to do in training in order to communicate under such circumstances. Perhaps there was someone else at the hearing who went into all of that; I only listened to McCraw, who spoke for about four and a half hours. If anyone has watched more of it and those things were touched on in any comprehensive way, please let me know.
(6) Police radios didn’t work in the school – not just the Uvalde police, but even the state police and the federal officers except for BorTac. And even the BorTac radios could not be reliably connected to each other while in the building, for a group call. What’s more, this is not an unusual problem in schools, and it’s somewhat expensive to solve (I’ve read that, anyway; there may be more creative cheaper solutions that haven’t been tried). McCraw also said that police radios are very chaotic in a crisis, with lots of communications coming in, and that can be a problem even if they are working. Quite a few of the officers in the hall had their radios with them, but they did not function and so were useless.
(7) Arredondo and others at the scene were in communication with headquarters by cell phone. But for some unknown reason, none of the content of the 911 calls from the classrooms where the perp was and where the massacre had occurred was ever relayed to Arredondo, so he was unaware of that or even their existence. Apparently there was only one person there (and I believe that person was outside the hallway and not in the building, although I didn’t hear McCraw directly addressing that question) who heard anything about those later 911 calls, and there is no indication that he or she ever relayed the information to anyone. My own thought is that the person may have assumed – and it would seem reasonable to have assumed – that the chief and others already had the same information and thus there was no need to try to repeat it. The lack of awareness of the 911 calls is a small but important point, and it is emblematic of the enormous and really shocking breakdown of communication that occurred on so many levels.
I’ll stop there for today. This is just the very tippy tip of the big iceberg. Unfortunately, McCraw left out a great deal of information that would be extremely pertinent – I don’t know whether he already knows the answers to those things and just isn’t saying, or whether he doesn’t know yet. I plan to get into more of those issues later. His presentation was only based on video and audio evidence, however – not on any interviews with participants or survivors or anyone else, although he said that about 700 such interviews have been conducted so far. I am assuming those will be sorted out and incorporated into a final investigative report, but that will take quite a while.
Is there a list for item one?
Why should we care about McCraw? At this point in time? There are way too many unasked, unanswered questions about Ramos, local social “services” and his unreported behavioral track record.
But it seems clear the many cops standing outside were more worried about their own hides than saving children from gratuitous, random murder:”Uhhh, what should we do? And , duh, when?”
Thanks be to BP TAF for rushing into Robb (no door prob!) and killing the Ramos slaughterer. One of these three missed a fatal shot by Ramos by only a couple of inches before gunning him into oblivion.
Cicero:
It’s not a question of caring about McCraw himself. But so far he’s the source of the official and most complete information so far, based on videos and audios. If you’re not interested in what actually happened, and you’d rather go by what you think seems clear to you based on the limited information you have, be my guest.
Chases Eagles:
He didn’t have an actual list, but he discussed it verbally and listed the things that were bought and how they were bought. I think it starts at around 44:21 on this video (I took notes and that’s what my notes say, anyway).
Why would it take a long time to issue the results of a toxicology report?
I greatly look forward to your take on #4.
A full examination and publishing of #5 is critical to evaluating the police response.
#6;
Under the conditions described, positioning cops at key points to run messages back and forth is so obvious that a failure to do so is a sure indication of incompetence. Someone had to think they were in charge and a failure to establish recognition of authority and lines of communication is so basic as to be beyond credulity.
#7
911 calls from the classrooms where the perp was and where the massacre was occurring would be information that everyone involved would see as of supreme importance.
If they were all dead, then no need to risk officers lives in quickly breaching the room.
But 911 calls demonstrated the need for an immediate breaching of the room because the number of shots Ramos had fired proved his willingness to kill lots of children. The 911 calls confirmed both that and that people were still alive.
IF the doors were actually unlocked, then criminal negligence and therefore culpability in the slaughter is implied.
Geoffrey Britain:
Here’s why toxicology tests take so long.
As far as your comment on #6 goes, the problem is that we don’t know whether that happened or not. Were cops “positioned at key points to run messages back and forth” or were they not? I didn’t hear a word about it, yes or no, from McCraw (someone else may have gone into it, but I’ve never read or heard anything about it yet). I didn’t hear anything about how communications occurred, except the aforementioned radio problems and that no word of 911 calls came. Nor did he address which initial 911 calls were relayed to the team prior to arriving at the school – the call or calls which activated the whole response in the first place – either about the grandmother’s being shot or the truck crash or the perp’s shooting at the funeral home people or his shooting into some of the classroom windows of the school from outside the school. 911 calls all came in about those things and one or several of them set off the police response in the first place. They would also help set the initial tone for what police thought was happening or might be happening.
As we get word of an event or a sequence of events, we create a preliminary story in our mind of what’s happening. We need that perception to evaluate what’s happening and plan our response. But we can’t get locked into it. We have to take in new information – from what we observe at the scene, from what others are telling us (on phone or radio or in person) – and in real time, under pressure, revise our story of what’s happening and what’s an appropriate and effective response.
That’s of course where #7 comes in, the 911 calls and the fact that they weren’t relayed. That doesn’t mean it was impossible to evaluate the situation without them. But information about the calls would have made it a lot easier, and that information was not relayed, for reasons that are still unknown to the public. I really hope a final report explains it, because it needs to be prevented from ever happening that way again.
A person who doesn’t know the radio issue within the school and who is getting info on the cell phone may presume it’s superfluous since…radio is so official and stuff and the guys who need the information would be getting it on their dedicated commo gear rather than a device used for practically anything including the occasional actual phone call.
Richard Aubrey:
I don’t recall whether McCraw ever said how the one person who got the 911 information got it. He might have been outside and therefore his radio might have been working and he might have gotten it that way. But the same thing would hold – unless he somehow knew the other people weren’t getting the information, he wouldn’t think to relay it.
The question of the doors MAY be the one area that the police were most negligent on IMO. This was a six man school police force in a town with one high school. I don’t think it is too much to ask for all six of those officers to have complete command of the layout of that school including door locks and where the keys would be. I grew up in a town just a little bigger than Uvalde and we had four elementary schools, one middle school and one medium sized high school and no school police force so it’s not like they would have dozens of facilities to have command of and it’s not like a mass shooting is the only possible reason the school police may need to know this information.
Maybe would be different if they were just regular city police with other duties but they were school police.
Maybe they did know all this but it doesn’t seem like they did.
Griffin. The cops, in your view, should have command of where the keys would be. But that depends on the school not changing the location.
This is a freaking SCHOOL staffed by educators, normal people. Not a nuclear sub carrying out some espionage move in enemy shallow waters crewed by trained and selected nukies. Where everybody is expected to note everything that is or might be going not according to plan. And either fixing it or reporting it.
As has been said, the school was the subject of frequent lockdowns over stuff happening in town, not in the school.
Eventually, the fun stops, the novelty wears off and….things get slack.
What if the cops can make the case they thought they knew where the keys were because that had been the agreement with the school, and never inspected the school for compliance, including the key location.
Can you magine the head of the school cops saying to the principal, “We’re having a surprise inspection top to bottom, everybody to be standing in their classroom or other assigned location and not moving until we’re done. Should take about half an hour.”?
“Oh, yeah. We’ll be randomly questioning people about their assigned duties and checking for their Stop The Bleed certs.’
That, and the threat thereof, is the only way that the “should-haves” would have been as the Mon AM QB would have had them.
You don’t have responsibility if you don’t have authority. And if the principal can tell you, “not this week”, you don’t have authority.
Also, despite quite a few apprehensive feelings about him on the part of online acquaintances alarmed by certain things he’d said, he was never reported to local or state or federal authorities for any of this.
The Gabby Giffords shooter was repeatedly reported to the Pima County Sheriff but his mother worked in the Sheriff’s office and concealed the complaints. I fear the “red flag laws” will involve complaints by ex-wives and angry ex-girl friends.
Richard Aubrey,
Yes, and that is why I said they MAY have been negligent.
But, if I am a school police force chief with six officers and a relatively small number of schools I am meeting with the prinicipal, vice principal and maintenance head of every school and doing a walk through and establishing the lock and key situations and setting up a protocol so the situation could be quickly established in an emergency. This should be rather obvious with all of the lockdowns these schools were in during the last few months. Maybe they did these things and still it all got screwed up so I don’t know.
I have a hard time believing that the school police chief didn’t have the authority to at least establish some standard protocols and if some principal complains then the chief should go to the school board.
About those doors. I saw a photo (a still from the video) showing the doors (plates with the numbers 111 and 112 on them); I cannot find that photo now. The doors shown were in a recessed alcove off the main hall; it looked to be between 3 and 4 feet deep and just wide enough to include the 2 doors with just enough room for normal amounts of casing and trim, maybe 8 ft wide max.
I believe it is required that such doors open out, not into the room. This precludes a crowd rushing to exit from preventing the door to open. This places the hinges on the outside, and means that forcing it from the outside means displacing the door jambs. If the school building meets code the jambs are steel and the doors are steel-clad. Forcing from the outside is very difficult… having been in that position before.
COP Arredondo would have been inside that alcove if he tried the keys as he stated. He most likely would have known whether or not the door was latched, and maybe unlocked.
Being in that alcove when shots were coming through from inside would most likely get one killed, at least badly wounded. Taking a Halogen tool to it or cutting the hinges required such placement, if those were the actual doors in question.
[I get the feeling that Richard Aubrey and I share some similar experiences.]
As far as the school police I am referring more to the seeming confusion about whether the door was locked or even could have been locked and the search for the key that may or may not have been needed and not as much to whether they should have stormed the door. For me that is a different question.
My point is the second that school police chief was in the hall he should have known what kind of door it was and whether it had a functioning lock and also where the key was if needed.
Then the next move could be decided on.
The cops should have known where the key(s) should have been. Is that the same as the keys, in the charge of educators, were where they should have been?
Another Mike. I was on our church security team whose recommendations were met with an Islamic doctrine, Inshallah, unofficially. But while we were at it, we learned a lot about doors.
Back to the Coconut Grove, from which a relation escaped by sheer luck.
Yeah, busting that door open would require busting the door into pieces. Displacing the jamb would take more explosive than would be appropriate.
And shooting a spray of door pieces into the room wouldn’t have sounded like a good idea, either.
I would not be surprised if the classroom walls were cinderblock, and could have been breached with a hammer. A brick wall would not have been impassible either.
I would be surprised if the walls were 8 inch thick steel-reinforced concrete, but I don’t know, so until I do know, I won’t assume they were rice paper either.
Hrefn
Probably true, but the first breach is a small hole–maybe a few inches–and then you enlarge it. Lots of room for bulets to come through.
Each block or brick is a separate piece and it’s not likely that cracking one will run the crack across the mortar or other sealant into the next brick or block.Best that happens is the the items next to the hole lose support of the neighboring brick which is now gone. Things speed up, but…. Lot of time necessary.
Done that, busting through masonary walls with sledge hammers etc. without some armed murderous psycho on the other side (just the foreman). It takes a while. It isn’t stealthy.
IIRC the military uses explosives to go thrpugh walls and isn’t concerned about the health of people on the outer side, “mouseholing” its called.
om
The breaching charge commandos in this case seem not to have thought that far ahead.
om. Off topic but I recalled the term “mouseholing”. In the ETO, pretty much every building was pretty sturdy. As my father (Infantry platoon leader and occasional company commander until they could find another captain) said, it might take a week to go a block.
So the idea of mouseholing across Europe, house to house, block to block, was worked out. Avoid the streets with your Infantry and the resulting casualties. Turned out the amount of explosive necessary was far beyond any conceivable structuring of the supply system. Couldn’t possibly have done it, so only occasionally when enterprising officers had some friends in the Engineers or something.
Richard Aubrey:
Regarding explosives and their uses and limitations (from an amateur) the book “Closing With The Enemy” by Michael D. Doubler 1994 is a good introduction an summation of tactics learned in the ETO 1944-45. On page 43-44 it goes into the attempt to use 30 to 50 pound HE charges to blow gaps in hedgerows (not enough HE in the theater to clear the Bocage). On page 93 it describes the use of explosives to breach walls in and between buildings. Battle of Aachen IRC.
It appears the Canadians came up with the method in Italy in 1943.
https://mwi.usma.edu/urban-warfare-project-case-study-5-battle-of-ortona/
IIRC the method was used in the second battle to clear Falluja, Iraq. Marines and soldiers still had to go room to room, deadly work.
Richard Aubrey:
Continued off topic …
A self propelled 155 mm gun in direct fire worked pretty effectively in Aachen too. Soviets used the ISU-152 for that purpose when taking Berlin. Not a precise limited approach.
“Closing with the Enemy” goes into that tactic.
om
“Direct fire” means the other guys can see you. I think a lot of the red legs, but they work better when not under return direct fire.
I’ve seen the Sov footage. They’re vulnerable and either things were cleared out to a certain extent in front of them, with the associated costs, or they needed frequent replacing.
Even tanks don’t like the middle of the street.
When I was in, a dedicated shaped charge, not small, had been developed. Make a heck of a hole, but a couple were a heck of a load.
Richard Aubrey:
It was used in Aachen (Doubler p. 100) and on the Siegfried Line
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M12_Gun_Motor_Carriage#Use
I am still curious about the posed and professional-looking photo of the shooter in a girl’s outfit. Someone was helping his delusions along. He was able to purchase/get two rather expensive rifles. Even if he wasn’t paying rent to his druggy Mom or compliant Granny, there is something going on. A review of credit card or checking records should be informative. The police may be too embarrassed to follow up.
Was he a “mule” for a cartel? Was he getting cash for playing as a sex toy for someone in the area? The savage violence does suggest the involvement of stimulant drugs, in addition to “crazy”.
Mike-SMO.
It’s been reported he could have earned enough to buy the guns. He worked at Wendy’s. I have no idea what he was getting paid, but in our area, McD’s is offering $12/hr. to start. The term “full-time” is used, but that may mean only a lot of hours. Most places, if you do over 30 hours/week, you qualify for benefits, presuming the employer has any. Most benefit plans are only partly tethered to your wage. Disability income, for example, pays a percentage of your income and the more you make, the more coverage there is. But health insurance is not. Consequently, adding benefits to a low-income worker’s comp is a big hit, relatively speaking, which is why part-time work is the norm.
So that would be maybe $350/ week. Maybe he was actually full time. That could be up to $500/week.
If, as you say, he was living rent-free, he may have had, not full time, $300/wk to put away if he had the discipline. Didn’t know how to drive, so he didn’t t have a car nor was likely to be contributing to the family’s gas money bill.
And he may have had an installment plan at the gun shop.
You have to be somewhat organized to be in the mental health system; student, involved parent, so forth, so it’s possible he would have qualified or needed help and wasn’t getting it. So we wouldn’t necessarily know, as we do wrt Lanza and the Colorado theater shooter, and several others whether he was clinically nuts.
The drug question is quite apt considering what’s out there and the different results in different individuals.
But, still, as with other cases, there is evidence of planning–not as much as the Buffalo shooter but some–which means a certain rational capacity to accomplish a goal.
See, as has been said, 1964. 240,000 M1 carbines dumped by the military into the civilian market. Small rifle firing a small round, semi-auto. The thirty round mag developed for the M2 carbine fit the M1. The NRA would sell you one for twenty bucks as a premium for joining. Ammo was a drug a the market. Assault weapon to perfection (some purists objected as the cartridge wasn’t necked down).
Nothing like this happened. Nothing.
(2) He does not seem to have had any juvenile record. Apparently he kept a pretty low profile in the regard. Some acquaintances have reported animal abuse (carrying around dead cats in a bag and talking about it), but no one ever reported it to authorities. Also, despite quite a few apprehensive feelings about him on the part of online acquaintances alarmed by certain things he’d said, he was never reported to local or state or federal authorities for any of this.
Gee, so a hispanic male is
protected” from the “school to prison pipeline”, until he uses that to kill people
Then the response is to demand “red Flag” laws that will never be applied to the people who are actually the threats.
Mike SMO:
It’s easy to take a photo with a timer.
Investigators have tracked his money and know how he made it, when and where he made deposits, what he bought, when he bought it, where he bought it, and how he paid. There is no mystery about the money part whatsoever. And he did it alone.
neo:
Uvalde Groundhog Day.
sigh.
There has been so much intelligent commentary here, about breaching walls and doors and the structures thereof, but, dear friends, we are talking about Uvalde Texas. It is not just the root end of Texas. It is the root-end of the world. It’s not Dallas, not even Austin. A chief of school district police who did security checks, etc, would have been seen as sort of a Barney Fyfe character. “We don’t need all that bother here, at the root-end of the world.” The drugged out mother is a new phenomenon in most of rural America, South, rural Northeast, Midwest. Sending a kid for a psyche eval would also look like over-reacting.
I think most of the readers and commenters here would begin by agreeing that disarming the people who did NOT shoot anybody looks pretty stupid, except to people with media-induced hoplophobia, and there are millions of those unfortunates, but the idea that a kid could be so drug or otherwise addled that he would go and shoot up a bunch of little kids is not to be believed. Somebody help me here with the term for this,, but it describes a a tendency to believe that whatever was normal in the past will continue to be normal in the future. Telling people with an established fear of the government that it is dangerous to believe that government when they tell you to get on a freight train to an unknown destination is another very well-known example of this. I think it was our own dear Neo who described it thus. “You get on a train. You get off the train. They gas you” Who would have believed this? But, of course, it did happen. I would hope that nobody would believe that, now. However, hope is not a basis for policy.
Nevertheless, whatever else was going on, it took a member of the Border Patrol, a well trained Federal agency, to end the massacre. Even the local and UISD cops, many of them military veterans, seemed to suffer from some sort of mental paralysis. I can believe that some of the men were frightened, but all of them? Just not likely at all. Stopping parents from entering the school to rescue their children is beyond crazy. I don’t understand it. Nor can I understand why or how the perp shot in through the windows, but nobody shot at him the same way? Whaaat?
I know that, when Whitman was shooting at people from the top of the UT Tower, students went to their dorm rooms and got their rifles and came out and shot at him from three sides of the Tower, keeping him pinned down so that Austin police could come out of the elevators and get him from both sides. However, let the record show that it took about an hour and a half for this response to organize itself. Who can say how long it would have taken to get up something like this, when there were kids inside, and everyone was petrified with fear of hitting one of them, and the cops were actually, actively blocking this sort of action?
Did he speak about the lady who supposedly rushed in to save her kids ( i think youve discussed a little)
https://foxsanantonio.com/newsletter-daily/mother-speaks-about-saving-her-children-from-uvalde-gunman
Adams.
Any number of proposed actions would have looked better had there been no kids in the room.