A decision has been made about Robb Elementary!
According to People Robb Elementary School will be torn down, the mayor of Uvalde, Texas, said just under a month after a horrific shooting left 19 students and 2 teachers dead.
During a city council meeting on Tuesday evening, captured on video by CBS affiliate KENS in San Antonio, Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin was asked by an attendee about the school being “demolished.”
“My understanding — I had a discussion with the superintendent — that school will be demolished,” McLaughlin said. “We could never ask a child to go back, or a teacher to go back into that school ever.”
Also on Tuesday, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw appeared before a Texas Senate committee to speak about the police response to the May 24 mass shooting, stating that officers could have stopped the gunman if the commander had not hesitated.
McCraw was blunt, saying that the law enforcement response was “an abject failure” and claiming that police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes after arriving at the school.
“The officers had weapons; the children had none,” McCraw said during the hearing, watched by PEOPLE. “The officers had body armor; the children had none. The officers had training; the subject had none. One hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds. That’s how long children waited, and the teachers waited, in Room 111 to be rescued.”
McCraw placed the blame squarely on Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was the commanding officer at the scene — even though he later said that he had no idea he was in charge. In his testimony, McCraw said that Arredondo placed the lives of his officers before those of the children.
He methodically laid out undisputed facts: officers with rifles were on the scene within moments, and the classroom doors could not have been locked from the inside.
Surveillance video from the scene seems to indicate that officers did not even try to open the doors — which were likely already unlocked — and instead waited for more than an hour to receive keys to the classrooms.
“I don’t mean to be hyper-critical of the on-scene commander,” McCraw testified on Tuesday morning. “But those are the facts. This set our profession back a decade.”
