Testimony before the Texas State Senate on Tuesday revealed that a police officer attempted to reach his injured wife in the midst of the Uvalde shooting, but was detained when he arrived on the scene.
The husband of slain teacher Eva Mireles, a police officer, knew his wife had been shot when he arrived at Robb Elementary School on May 24, according to KHOU 11 news. He was detained when he tried to enter the school and had his gun taken away by other officers who waited nearly an hour before breaching the classroom themselves, the outlet reported.
“We got an officer whose wife called him and said she’d been shot and she’s dying,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw testified, according to KHOU 11 news. “He tried to move forward into the hallway. He was detained, and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”
BREAKING: In the strongest terms possible, the head of the Texas state police has just condemned the law enforcement response in Uvalde, calling it an “abject failure and antithetical to everything we have learned over the past two decades.”
— Tony Plohetski (@tplohetski) June 21, 2022
Calling the response an “abject failure,” the head of the Texas state police told the Senate that there was enough fire power to end the massacre just three minutes after the shooter entered the building. Instead of trying to see if the classroom doors were unlocked, McCraw said police waited for keys, according to the Associated Press (AP).
McCraw further criticized the inaction of Uvalde School District police chief, Pete Arredondo, after offering the Senate a more detailed timeline of what occurred on the day of the shooting. “The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” McCraw said, according to the AP. (RELATED: Police In Uvalde Never Tried To Open Door To Classrooms Where Kids, Teachers Were Being Shot: REPORT)
McCraw pointed out that the officers had weapons and armor while the children had none. “The officers had training, the subject had none,” he said, KHOU 11 reported in another article.
Mireles was one of two teachers killed in the shooting. Mireles had worked in the school district for 17 years, according to The Texas Tribune.