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Authorities Admit Failures in Uvalde Massacre. Aired 1-1:30p ET

Aired May 27, 2022 - 13:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

[13:00:02]

JOHN KING, CNN HOST: That, of course, was not done. And that is the grim news, the wrong decision.

And do not forget, do not forget -- and you see right there its awful consequences, 19 children killed at school, two of their teachers killed as well, a glaring law enforcement error. We will continue to push for more answers.

Thank you for your time today. Thank you for your time today on this sad day.

Ana Cabrera picks up our coverage right now.

ANA CABRERA, CNN HOST: Hello, and thank you for joining us. I'm Ana Cabrera in New York.

The wrong decision. Just minutes ago, Texas officials released stunning new details on Tuesday's shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. Chief among them, 19 law enforcement officers stood in a hallway outside the rooms where 19 school children and two teachers were flawed or they took no action to get into those classrooms as they waited for more equipment.

CNN's Shimon Prokupecz pressed for more of an explanation. And the response was devastating. Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Sir, you have people who are alive, children who are calling 911, saying, please send the police. They are alive in that classroom. There are lives that are at risk. That's not protocol, is it?

STEVEN MCCRAW, DIRECTOR, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY: We're well aware of that.

PROKUPECZ: Right, but why was the decision made not to go in and rescue these children?

MCCRAW: Again, the on-scene commander considered it a barricaded subject and that there was time and there were no more children at risk.

PROKUPECZ: And what time was that?

(CROSSTALK)

MCCRAW: Obviously, based upon the information we have, there were children in the classroom that were at risk, and it was, in fact, still an active shooter situation, and not a barricaded subject.

PROKUPECZ: Right. So, sir, sir, if I can follow up.

QUESTION: What can you tell parents that were here waiting and asking for the police to go in?

(CROSSTALK)

MCCRAW: There was 19 -- like I said, there was 19 officers in there.

In fact, there was plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done, with one exception, is that the incident commander inside believed they needed equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point.

That's why BORTAC was requested on the scene. As soon as they were there, they executed a search -- or at least a dynamic entry and went in. And, of course, that was not until 12:57.

(CROSSTALK)

MCCRAW: Hey, with the benefit of -- hey, with the benefit of hindsight -- hey, the benefit of -- hey, stand by. Stand by.

Hey, stand by. Hey, stand by. Right? I got it. I got it. OK. Hey, from the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period. There's no excuse for that.

But, again, I wasn't there. But I'm just telling you, from what we know, we believe there should have been an entry as that -- as soon as you can. Hey, when there's an active shooter, the rules change.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Let's bring in Shimon right now.

Shimon, your exchange just now that mistakes were made, that must be so heartbreaking for the parents of those students to hear.

PROKUPECZ: Yes, I bet it is.

We have seen the video of the parents who were outside the school on the day of the shooting. They knew something wasn't right by the way the police were reacting, right? They saw these officers standing outside, while they themselves were hearing gunshots, wanting to go inside and rescue their kids, save their children.

They were depending on the police to do that. And, clearly, that did not happen in this case. It took some pushing, took days of asking, but we finally have the answers, because something did not add up here. Something just didn't make sense.

And, finally, after yesterday avoiding that question, we got our answer today, and the police admitting here that it was a mistake. They should have gone in.

I have talked to several law enforcement officials, former. We have had people on our air. There is no sense in this kind of decision, a tactical decision to wait when students are inside a classroom with a man who is firing his gun. There is nothing tactical about that.

The rules are -- what they say you do and what the studies show is you get a team together and you get in there as quickly as you can to stop the threat. And, clearly, that did not happen here. And the police say so.

And then this timeline for this hour of 911 calls from students, children inside the classroom, teachers, people calling, saying that there was a gunman inside, whispers, someone calling at 12:47, 12:47, saying, please send the police.

[13:05:05]

The police were here, but they just didn't go inside. They stood in the hallway. They were outside while these parents were screaming for help for their children.

The big question now is, obviously, what's next? What kind of accountability will there be? What more can we learn about this police chief? He's the police chief of the school police. It's a very small department, six people. He's in charge of four police officers, a detective and a security guard. And then there's him.

And he is the one that was making this decision. He was the incident commander. So, clearly, we need to know. We need to know what he was thinking. We need to know what kind of training he has received in these incidents. Why wasn't someone, perhaps someone else, making these decisions?

We now know that the Border Patrol folks were on scene earlier. We need to find out if they wanted to go in and they we're told they couldn't go in. There are still a lot of questions.

CABRERA: Yes.

PROKUPECZ: But accountability certainly is next.

And for these families, I cannot imagine, Ana, on what they must be going through hearing this today, because, like all of us, I'm sure this was the first time, the first time that they we're told of what happened, but they knew it. They knew it because they were out here that day, and they could see it, and they were trying to help their kids.

CABRERA: And just as far as this accountability goes, Shimon, I want our viewers to, again, just make sure they understand that the person who gave this press conference is the director of the Department of Public Safety for Texas, for the state agency.

So you're talking about accountability also with the police chief for Uvalde, because it was those officers that initially responded and didn't go after that suspect inside what they said was a barricaded classroom, even though there were children still alive inside.

I want you to stay with me, Shimon, because obviously there's some more new information we got at that press conference.

But I do want to bring in Juliette Kayyem, who's with us as well. She's a CNN national security analyst and former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security.

And, Juliette, I want to get your thoughts on this major news as we heard Shimon asked why officers didn't try to reach the barricaded classroom sooner, and he said the commander on scene considered a barricaded suspect and thought there was time and that there were no more children at risk.

What's your reaction to that answer?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Well, so my reaction is rage that everyone's feeling.

But let me take that out of the equation. So, what we know now is that an incident command was set up. The incident commander made the most horrific decision and incorrect decision one makes in that situation, which is, he made an assumption.

And this is where your mind kind of wanders and goes, well, under what theory do you think someone armed in a classroom is actually in any way safe alive? And he believes that it's a barricaded situation, and so he turns, essentially, this incident from an active shooter case in which rapid deployment response is the only right response, which is kill him, I mean, just as simple as that.

You're killing him. This is everything that law enforcement has been trained for 20 years since Columbine.

CABRERA: Yes.

KAYYEM: That is not done. And he thinks that he's in an active -- in a hostage situation.

How he thinks that, we don't know, because, simultaneously, one reporter in an answer to a question made it clear, simultaneously, there are 911 calls going on saying kids are alive in this classroom. We also know that at least one child died at the hospital. So, early help would have helped in that case.

So I want to be clear, I'm not defending it. I have wondered for three days, absent evil, right -- and maybe that was an explanation -- but absent evil, what could explain this really inexplicable time frame?

And this is the most reliable explanation we have gotten so far in a week in which all we have been hearing is inexplicable explanations.

I'm not defending it, but now it begins -- for someone like me, who knows this world, it begins to make sense. The incident commander made a horrible, horrible mistake -- that is essentially what we got out of this -- and believed that there was no immediate threat, erroneous, horrific. The consequences are now known.

But it is the most reliable time frame that I have heard so far, from a lot of spin from political and other actors throughout the week.

CABRERA: Juliette, just to be clear, when there is an active shooter, when do you storm?

KAYYEM: Yes.

CABRERA: And when do you treat it as a hostage situation?

KAYYEM: Yesterday. You -- and, I mean, I'm not joking.

[13:10:02]

It's -- I can't even explain to people well enough. Like, it's like there's not even a thought process going on. You are not weighing risk calculation when it comes to an active shooter situation. You're not thinking, oh, might he be OK? Might we be able to talk to him?

We have learned -- and this is, like, not new; 20 years of rapid deployment active shooter training is -- you're not asking questions. That's the point of it, is that is that person, the shooter, the gunman has forgone any opportunity to explain himself, to live, to defend himself, to try to come up with an explanation. It is an active shooter situation.

In limited circumstances, when that he is barricaded, and not with victims -- in other words, because around this situation, you want to start saving victims -- then you might -- then you might -- as the briefer said, you might what they call transition to a hostage situation or a barricade situation.

These are little kids. It's not like there's a -- like, it's not like they can defend themselves or try to get out on their own in other situations we have seen. So, I just want to make clear that there are protocols for transitioning from active shooter to not active shooter.

But there's no evidence yet what would justify in this case that transition, when you have babies, infants, young children in a classroom. I mean, he -- to be really stark about it, I mean, he basically made an assumption that all those kids were dead.

And we kind of -- we know now that that wasn't true, and it's just -- it's inexplicable. And they said it was inexplicable without saying it directly.

CABRERA: And, Shimon, obviously, it's been three days since the shooting. And the past two-plus days, we have received at times contradictory information about exactly what happened. And so here you have the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety attempting at this presser to give a minute-by-minute, detailed timeline of the school shooting. And we don't know why exactly it took this long to get that detailed timeline.

But does the timeline makes sense now?

PROKUPECZ: I think in the end, right now, yes.

I think there's going to be some changes, I'm sure, along the way. And perhaps, maybe if we hear from the chief of police, though I'm not hopeful, that we will get more information as to what he was thinking and the things that he was seeing and what he was feeling to make this decision.

I'm not sure the director here of DPS is in a position to talk about that. He didn't seem like he wanted to talk about it. They may have interviewed him. We don't know. He should have been interviewed by now.

But when you think about this situation, Ana, here, we continuously received bad information from the police here almost immediately, that there was this resource officer on the scene. That wasn't the case. The timeline didn't quite add up. They wouldn't respond to a question certainly yesterday about that hour gap.

So we were never getting a full account here from the beginning. And, finally, today...

CABRERA: But on the resource officer, we have information now about that resource officer and what was going on. Fill us in on that.

PROKUPECZ: Right.

So that information is that that resource officer, they're investigating why that resource officer wasn't here. By all accounts, it seems like that resource officer should have been at the school and was not, was in a car and responded after the calls were received to 911.

They only spoke to the resource officer, we're told, on Wednesday. So the day after the shooting, they spoke to the resource officer. And that's when they learned that this resource officer was not on the scene, as initially thought. We don't know why they initially thought that.

I just want to make a point to what Juliette said about what police officers are supposed to do. I was talking to a former law enforcement official who did this for a living. He was part of an NYPD emergency services unit. This is what they trained for.

And he said, basically -- I think he put it the best, is that you push to press the fight. That's what you're trained to do in these situations. You go, you fight, you get in there. And, clearly, that wasn't done here. And I think accountability is

what everyone's going to be discussing now. And, obviously, I think there are still a lot of questions. We need to know what this -- what the chief here of the school police was thinking and what the other officers were thinking. And perhaps, for the families, they will get those answers.

But, again, I think, for the families, I can't imagine, hearing this, how they must feel.

CABRERA: All right, Juliette And Shimon...

KAYYEM: If I can...

CABRERA: Go ahead quickly, but we're going to come back, and we're going to continue our conversation, but just to button it up for now, go ahead.

KAYYEM: I just -- oh, OK.

I just wanted to -- we could pick up on -- we could pick up on what Shimon was talking about, about that 12 minutes before he enters the school, because that also over needs better explanation.

[13:15:02]

CABRERA: OK, let's do that on the other side of this quick break.

Guys, Juliette Kayyem, Shimon, stay with us.

Much more to discuss right after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

CABRERA: Moments ago, Texas officials detailed the chilling timeline of the massacre in Uvalde, Texas, and described some of the 911 calls that children inside the school made.

Listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MCCRAW: At 12:19, a 911 call was made, and another person in room 111 called. I will not say her name. She hung up when another student told her to hang up.

At 12:21, you could hear over the 911 call that three shots were fired. At 12:36, 911 call that lasted for 21 seconds. The initial caller called back. The student, child called back, and was told to stay on the line and be very quiet. She told 911 that he shot the door. At approximately 12:43 and 12:47 she asked 911 to please send the police now.

[13:20:38]

At 12:46, she said she could not -- that she could hear the police next door. At 12:50, shots are fired that can be heard over the 911 call. And at 12:51, it is very loud and sounds like the officers are moving children out of the room. At that time, the first child that called was outside before the call cuts off.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

CABRERA: Juliette and Shimon are both back with us now.

Juliette, so at 12:15, this caller says there are nine to 10 students still alive inside that classroom with the gunman. Another 30 or so minutes passes before law enforcement breach the classroom and kill the gunman. How does that happen?

KAYYEM: Well, it shouldn't. And

And one of the reporters who asked the question, do we have a sense of how many died in that interim period, and the state official did not know and said, we're going to figure that out.

Someone reminded me in the break that, in medical care, in emergency care, you have this concept of the golden hour, right? That is just that time period of needing to get resources to people, to children who are harmed. And I think that that is -- we are going to see that, in that period, it was still an active shooter situation because children could have been saved.

They may have been harmed by then, but they could have been saved. And, to be clear, it's -- I'm not a police officer. So I don't have this mind frame. I just want to be clear. They do. That's what they're trained for. And the mind frame is, you're ignoring everything else, everyone who needs help, all the phone calls, everything.

And you're just going in, on an active shooter case, rapid deployment, and you are eliminating the threat, because, once you eliminate the threat, then you can get resources in, like the parents, who are trying to get in to help these kids.

And that -- this is going to be inexplicable. I -- as I said, I'm not defending it. I'm trying to explain how wrong it is from the protocols, because you're just -- some assumption was made that the situation was safe.

CABRERA: Right.

KAYYEM: And no one should be making that assumption. There's no risk calculation in rapid deployment. You're just going in.

(CROSSTALK)

KAYYEM: That's what you're supposed to do.

CABRERA: It just seems like there's so many missed opportunities to have saved more lives here.

And I want to back up, Shimon, to earlier in the timeline, because this was another period of time that just begs for more answers before the shooter even entered the school. We did learn that the school resource officer arrived at the scene.

And we learned, according to the director here of public safety in the Department of Public Safety and Texas, that that school resource officer actually drove past the gunman towards another person, who turned out to be a teacher who was outside the school, but was responding, knowing that there was an active shooter on school grounds, and that, in fact, this shooter was firing shots outside the school after the school resource officer arrived.

So, how did the shooter end up inside the school?

PROKUPECZ: Right. And that's a great question also, Ana.

What the police say is that the gunman was -- he was hunkered down behind a vehicle at 11:31 or so. He was hunkered down. The suspect, they say, was hunkered down behind the vehicle, insinuating that the resource officer missed the gunman and that, just minutes later, the government enters a school.

We know the door was propped open by a teacher. A lot of this, they know because they have video. They have video from inside the school, outside the school. They can hear the gunshots that were being fired on this video. There's audio that they now have describing some over 100 bullets, shots being fired.

So they have all of this. They have the video. They have the fact that the teacher propped this door open. We need an explanation on that. Grabbing a phone -- the teacher was grabbing a phone, a cell phone.

So there's a lot, a lot of questions obviously on that as well. In those crucial beginning moments of when the resource officer eventually arrives. What does the resource officer do? What happens in those moments are very crucial, because those are the beginning stages of this incident, what allowed the government to eventually enter the school, and then we know what happens.

[13:25:06]

CABRERA: Juliette, we know that Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro is asking the FBI to conduct a federal investigation into the law enforcement response, especially given all the contradictory information we have received in the past few days.

Do you think a federal investigation into the response and the timeline is warranted?

KAYYEM: I think an independent investigation is warranted, but what entity it is, I don't know at this stage, maybe FBI or some other entity within Department of Justice.

This is a police department that receives federal funds. Presumably there is some federal nexus to justify or at least to get investigators in, and, hopefully, the state -- unlikely, but the state would want to welcome in at this stage, because I think exactly what you're saying, Ana. And outside of the political lane, it's just important that we understand how momentous the last hour has been to undermine two narratives that had already sort of creeped up. One was sort of the more weapons will help in schools. And I think what we're seeing here is, you really couldn't have had more weapons in this school.

You had lots of police officers with weapons, that it really does come down to human conduct and courage and training. And one aspect of that is just trying to lower the possibility that someone can enter a school and kill children that quickly.

The second narrative that is just very important that was undermined today was the narrative that it could have been worse. This is -- I'm just quoting Governor Abbott, this idea that, but for the public safety entities -- in some ways, that's obviously true, right? It could have been worse. More kids could have been killed.

But that -- as public officials, that really shouldn't be our standard. Our standard should be, could it have been less bad? Could we have made it better? And I think that now, after an hour ago, we now know that to be true, that it actually could have been a lot better, that that decision to end rapid deployment and to kill the gunman, period, no calculations, no questions, no negotiations, just kill him, that decision to turn it into a barricade ultimately resulted in more harm than if they had followed the protocols.

CABRERA: Shimon, final thought?

PROKUPECZ: So, an independent investigation.

I asked the police here, the director here of DPS. He wouldn't answer that question. But that is why I asked the FBI to take the podium. They don't have jurisdiction right now. So it would involve some kind of effort by either a local entity.

It's a little complicated, but, certainly, I think the families are going to want an independent investigation that makes sense, for one. But we asked. This was a question that I kept asking. Will there be an independent investigation? Unclear.

Certainly, I'm sure the families would want one, because we need a better accounting of certainly this issue, this issue, the fact that the police here, the chief of police for the school, decided to treat this -- this is this is law enforcement language, right?

You treat this as a barricaded situation, instead of an active shooter-type situation. Those are very two different things. And that, we need some explanation for from the incident commander who was here making that decision. That person needs to explain why they made that decision.

CABRERA: Shimon, keep asking the tough questions. Thank you for all your hard work there in Uvalde.

And, Juliette Kayyem, thank you for your expertise and insights and being part of this discussion. We will be right back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)