Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, where a teenage gunman killed 19 children and two teachers will be demolished. The city’s mayor informed about this decision on Tuesday.
The mayor’s announcement came several hours after a senior Texas official said the law enforcement response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School was “an abject failure.”
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin did not give a timeline for when the school would be demolished.
“My understanding – and I had this discussion with the superintendent – is that school will be demolished. You can never ask a child to go back or teacher to go back in that school ever”, he said.
The school has nearly 600 students in the second, third and fourth grades.
Robb Elementary will not be the first school to be demolished after a mass shooting. Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, was demolished after 20 students and six staff members were shot in 2012.
In a separate Texas state Senate hearing into the May 24 shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steven McCraw said the onsite commander made “terrible decisions.” Additioanlly, officers at the scene lacked sufficient training, costing valuable time during which lives may have been saved.
The law enforcement response to the attack was an “abject failure”
“There is compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned,” McCraw said.
Many parents and kith and kins of the children and staff have expressed anger over police action after the gunman entered Robb Elementary School and began shooting.
One delay McCraw discussed was the search for a key to the classroom where shooting took place. He noted that the door was not locked. (https://experience.afrotech.com) Moreover, there was no evidence officers tried to see if it was secured while others searched for a key.
“There’s no way … for the subject to lock the door from the inside,” McCraw said.
The Texas DPS informed a few days after the shooting that as many as 19 officers waited for more than an hour in a hallway outside classrooms; 111 and 112 before a U.S. Border Patrol-led tactical team finally made entry. McCraw reiterated that in the hearing on Tuesday.
“The officers had weapons, the children had none. They had body armor, the children had none. The officers had training, the subject had none. One hour, 14 minutes, and eight seconds – that is how long the children waited; and the teachers waited, in Room 111 to be rescued,” the DPS director said.
“Three minutes after the subject entered the west building, there was a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract and neutralize the subject,” McCraw added