Schoolchildren around the country are taught in active shooter drills to stay quiet until the threat ends. That's what the Robb Elementary students in Uvalde, Texas, did last year when a gunman entered their school and started shooting. They even shushed classmates who screamed after being shot. But the children's ability to do precisely what they'd been trained to do confused the law enforcement officers standing in the school's hallways during the siege. That's one of the findings of a new investigation by the Texas Tribune, ProPublica, and PBS' Frontline.
Officers later said the silence made them think no students were in the classrooms, or at least none still alive. That's one of the reasons they gave for why 77 minutes passed before officers broke into the classroom where the gunman was, with children, and stopped him. Uvalde police Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales told investigators he thought maybe the students were all in the cafeteria. "I didn't hear any screaming, any yelling. I literally didn't hear anything at all," Canales said. "You would think kids would be yelling and screaming." Khloie Torres, 10, who had been wounded by shrapnel, reassured her classmates that they wouldn't die. "Just be as quiet as a mouse," she told them.
There were other major flaws in the law enforcement response, the investigation found, including the fact that no officer took charge of it. Most of the hundreds of responding officers had active shooter training, though in some cases it was years before. Misinformation about the gunman's location in the building caused problems. Radios malfunctioned. "There's got to be someone else that's in charge," one officer recalled thinking. "Someone tell me what to do." Two teachers and 19 children were killed. The ProPublica report can be found here and the Frontline program here. (More Uvalde mass shooting stories.)
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