911 Calls Made During Uvalde Shooting Never Reached Police Chief

On Thursday, officials released statements in regards to 911 calls made from the inside of Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas. During the shooting in the elementary school, phone calls to 911 were made and sent to city police, but were never shared with the campus law enforcement chief. Both students and teachers called 911 in an attempt to receive help and protection during the shooting, but were unfortunately not helped fast enough.

According to the Texas Tribune, State Senator Roland Gutierrez, D-San Antonio said “the school district police chief in charge of the scene at the Uvalde school shooting last week was not informed of the multiple 911 calls made,” by those inside the school during the shooting. Uvalde school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo, was “left in the dark” when pertaining to the calls made 30 minutes into the mass shooting. Across the media, Arredondo is being criticized by many for taking more than an hour to respond to the mass shooting. It was reported that Arredondo treated the shooting as a “barricade suspect”, meaning resources such as body armor, a tactical team, and specific equipment took longer (over an hour) to put together. Because it was not yet released to the public that Arredondo was unaware of these 911 calls, many believed he did not take the situation seriously enough. In this school shooting, 19 children and 2 teachers were killed.