They entered the room and killed the gunman.
The actions by Chief Arredondo and the array of officers he suddenly directed — which grew to number more than 140, from local, state and federal agencies, including state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, constables and game wardens — are now the subject of overlapping investigations by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department and the local district attorney’s office.
Chief Arredondo did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the chief of the Uvalde Police Department, Daniel Rodriguez, or the county sheriff, Ruben Nolasco. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is overseeing the Rangers’ investigation and had a large presence of state police at the scene, referred questions to the district attorney’s office, which did not comment.
“I think they’re unfair to accuse anybody until we know all the facts,” said Uvalde County’s top executive, Bill Mitchell. “We have agencies coming out and saying there were mistakes. How do we know, days after, what mistakes?”
The fact that control of such a complex and prolonged scene of violence fell to the head of a police force with six members who are employed by the local school board seemed unusual in the aftermath of the tragedy. But it was in keeping with the way such events are expected to be handled in their early stages, according to policing experts and the leaders of school district police departments around Texas.
In cases where a shooting drags on, and more experienced departments establish themselves at the scene, control may sometimes be handed over to a larger department. That did not happen in Uvalde, officials have said.
School district police departments have jurisdiction over school campuses — in Uvalde, there are eight — as well as anywhere that school buses travel.
“If we should have a situation like that, we would go in, handle the situation, stop the kill, and at that point we would probably look to the state or the feds to assist us with the forensics,” said Chief Solomon Cook of the Humble Independent School District Police Department, in the suburbs of Houston.
But while the presence of a school district police chief atop the hierarchy at Robb Elementary was not out of the ordinary, other elements of the response in Uvalde struck Chief Cook as concerning. One was the need to use a janitor’s keys to ultimately gain entry to the classrooms. “All my people carry keys,” said Chief Cook, who is president of the state’s association for school district police chiefs.
Another was the uncertainty about whether Chief Arredondo had been receiving messages from police dispatchers about the children still in the classrooms pleading for help.
“We have direct communication with the P.D. dispatch, and we’re about the size of Uvalde,” said Chief Bill Avera, who runs a force of four school district officers, including himself, that covers eight campuses in Jacksonville, Texas.
A review of the response in Uvalde shows that the school acted almost immediately after the gunman hopped a fence and approached Robb Elementary after crashing a pickup truck and firing shots outside.
Adam Pennington, an 8-year-old student, was in the front office when the school received what appeared to be the first alert. “A phone call came in and said a man jumped the fence holding a gun,” said Adam, who said he hurried to shelter under a table.
An employee on the campus used a cellphone to open a district security app, selecting a red “lockdown” button and a second button warning that there was an active shooter, according to David Rogers, the chief marketing officer for Raptor Technologies, the company that provides the security app.
That warning tool was part of an extensive effort to enhance security in the Uvalde school district, which also included two-way radios for “key staff,” two new school district police officers and requirements that all classroom doors remain locked.
But Chief Arredondo had no police radio when he arrived, according to the latest information gathered in the investigation, and the door to the classroom where most of the killing occurred, Room 112, was unlocked when the gunman arrived.
The lockdown alert was sent at 26 seconds past 11:32 a.m., about two minutes after the initial 911 call from outside the school. It triggered an immediate mass distribution of emails, text messages and notifications that included blaring alarms sent to the cellphones of other school employees, Mr. Rogers said.
Less than a minute later, the gunman was already inside the school.
Khloie Torres had been watching a movie with her fourth-grade classmates in Room 112 when her teacher, Irma Garcia, told the class to go into lockdown. Ms. Garcia turned off the movie, and then rushed toward the classroom door to lock it. But she struggled to find the right key for the door. Gunfire could be heard in the hallways.
Ms. Garcia finally got hold of the right key, but the gunman was already there. “He grabbed the door, and he opened it,” Khloie said. Ms. Garcia tried to protect her students. The gunman began firing.
Khloie hid under a table, listening to more gunshots. “You’ll die,” the gunman said to the room.
He shot one of Khloie’s best friends, Amerie Jo Garza, and the other teacher in the class, Eva Mireles. Then the gunman said “Good night,” Khloie said, and began firing at students across the classroom.
One child shouted, “I’m shot,” catching the attention of the gunman. He came back to the spot where the child was lying and shot the student again, killing him, Khloie said.
Chief Arredondo arrived at 11:35 a.m., as the first officers began moving into the hallway outside the classroom door. Two minutes later, a lieutenant and a sergeant from the Uvalde Police Department approached the door, and were grazed by bullets.
Shortly after that, Chief Arredondo placed a phone call from the scene, reaching a police department landline. He described the situation and requested a radio, a rifle and a contingent of heavily armed officers, according to the law enforcement official familiar with the initial response, who described it on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly disclose the details.
The decision to establish a perimeter outside the classroom, a little over five minutes after the shooting began, shifted the police response from one in which every officer would try to confront the gunman as fast as possible to one where officers treated the gunman as barricaded and no longer killing. Instead of storming the classroom, a decision was made to deploy a negotiator and to muster a more heavily armed and shielded tactical entry force.
“They made a poor decision, defining that as a hostage-barricade situation,” said Bill Francis, a former F.B.I. agent who was a senior leader on the bureau’s hostage rescue team for 17 years. “The longer you delay in finding and eliminating that threat, the longer he has to continue to kill other victims.”
Inside, the gunman moved between the two adjoining classrooms. After he left her room, Khloie said, she called out quietly: “Is anybody OK? Is anybody hurt?”
“Yeah,” one classmate replied.
“Just be quiet, so he doesn’t come back in here,” Khloie remembered responding. Another child asked for help getting Ms. Garcia’s body off her.
