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Report On Uvalde School Massacre Shows Systemic Failure In Police Response; Uvalde Shooting Report; State Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D-TX) Interview. Aired 4-5p ET

Aired July 17, 2022 - 16:00   ET

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

[16:01:47]

FREDRICKA WHITFIELD, CNN HOST: Hello, again, everyone. Thank you so much for joining me this Sunday. I'm Fredricka Whitfield.

And we're following breaking news on a damning new report with heartbreaking details into the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. The report just released by the Texas House Investigative Committee found systemic failures and egregious poor decision-making by multiple entities including law enforcement, the school and the shooter's family.

The report also says that the attacker likely murdered most of the victims before responders were able to get to the school. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in May when an 18-year-old gunman broke into the school and opened fire.

CNN's Shimon Prokupecz and Rosa Flores joining us now from Uvalde, Texas.

Shimon, you first. I mean, this is the first we're hearing now in this report that -- in this fact-finding report that the committee believes that most of those 18 children and two teachers killed were killed before the first responders got there even though in the surveillance video you can hear rounds of gunfire. So help us understand the report.

SHIMON PROKUPECZ, CNN CRIME AND JUSTICE CORRESPONDENT: Well, some of this is, sadly, they're basing this on the injuries of the children. I don't want to repeat, but basically based on some of the horrific, horrific injuries that these kids suffered. Probably that's what they're basing it on. They talk about that in the report and just how horrific and basically they would not have been able to survive those injuries.

However, there are some students, and there are others in that classroom who suffered and they say could have likely died because they were in that room for so long. So while, yes, many of -- they believe that many of the kids died, looked almost probably in the end they're saying 100 rounds were fired even before police got inside that room, before they entered the classroom, and in total 140 shots were fired.

And you can hear from the -- just the violence of that, from that hallway when he was firing his weapon and how many rounds were fired. So it happened quickly. And he was in that hallway and in that classroom for quite some time by himself. Right? He went in unimpeded, had a lot of time to do a lot of damage with that weapon that he had. So that's what they're basing that on. But they also say that there were some who could have survived.

But also let's not forget, I mean, there were children hiding under tables, scared for their lives that are now scarred forever because they were waiting for the police to come in and rescue them. So while the committee may make this point, we have to also understand that there were people who were in there and suffering for way, way too long. And that's sort of what this report talks about, the failures on the part of law enforcement in total, from the local law enforcement to the federal law enforcement officials who were there.

And the systemic failures on the part of the school making sure that doors were locked, making sure that their alert system for a lockdown was working properly, making sure that teachers were aware for a proper active shooting drills and responses.

[16:05:06]

All of that is highlighted and written about in this report, and really in the end what this highlights, this report highlights is that there was no command of the situation. There was no one leader who was leading the law enforcement response. It was a collection of agencies, of officers really kind of operating on their own. They talk about at one point it was like two different scenes. You had at one side of the hallway officers, and you had officers on the other side of the hallway, and no one was really working together.

So that's what this sort of report talks about, the collection of failures that we are now reading about. We certainly have seen and have heard about for nearly two months now. But this community, this community is still demanding a lot of answers and they're demanding accountability.

WHITFIELD: And, Shimon, what will happen next? So this report, fact- finding report now revealed, but then what?

PROKUPECZ: So what we're actually learning, the mayor just announced in his meeting with the family members about they want accountability, well, he just announced the city has suspended a lieutenant with the Uvalde Police Department, a man by the name of Mariano Pargas. He's a lieutenant with the police department, but he was the acting chief that day for the Uvalde Police Department because the regular police chief was on vacation. He was out of town so the lieutenant was acting as the leader of the Uvalde Police Department.

He is seen on that video, that hallway video, sort of in the hallway, kind of, you know, he's wearing a blue shirt. He's kind of to the side. But what I'm told is there was a lack of command. He was a senior member of the Uvalde Police Department. He should have taken control, and certainly officials were very disturbed by what they saw in his actions and so now the mayor announcing to the family members that he has suspended this officer, this lieutenant has been suspended.

I've reached out to Mariano Pargas. I've not heard back to get a comment. So we're starting to see some accountability as a result of this, as a result of the video being released. We're seeing local officials now start to take some action, but we're also told, look, families are very upset. They continue to be really upset because in the end it's taking so long to get some of these answers and it just continues to go on and on and on, and I'm not even sure they're getting all the answers right now. How could they, right? Right now that they want and that they need.

WHITFIELD: And Rosa Flores, you're in a location where many family members have been showing up to get their hands on the report. Tell me what they're saying, how are they feeling as a result of these findings that are now being announced?

ROSA FLORES, CNN CORRESPONDENT: You know, Fred, I've got to say a lot of these families don't have hope anymore that they are actually going to figure out exactly what happened and that they're going to find out the truth because the narrative has changed so many times. There's been so much finger-pointing between local officials and state officials, and they're really tired of that.

Now this is the first opportunity to actually ask someone questions. This is their first opportunity to ask officials questions. But one of the family members that CNN spoke to outside the Civic Center here where I am said that he really doesn't believe that he'd be able to get to the truth. Take a listen.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

VINCENT SALAZAR, FAMILY OF LAYLA SALAZAR: We're not going to get the truth because there is cover-up. Everybody is throwing everybody under the bus. The only ones that ain't under the because is because they're six feet in the ground now, and that's our children. And the two teachers.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

FLORES: Now, Fred, in this report there is one person that is highlighted for her heroic account. Now this is the account of a PE coach. This report says that this PE coach actually saw the shooter throw his backpack through the fence, get in, and that this teacher immediately got on the radio and started letting the school know that this intruder had entered the school property.

Now the report goes on to say that this was a great action, but what happened after was what went so wrong, according to this report. The teacher, her name is Ivette Siva, a coach, excuse me. She says that she didn't hear right away that the information that she was relaying over the radio was acted upon. Yet again another failure, but someone in this school was trying to do the right thing in those very chaotic moments. And of course we know of the catastrophic failures after -- Fred.

[16:10:05] WHITFIELD: Oh, my gosh, OK. Rosa Flores, Shimon Prokupecz, thank you so much. We'll return to you as you get more information, more reaction from family members there in Uvalde.

All right. With us now CNN senior law enforcement analyst and former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, and Juliette Kayyem, she's a CNN national security analyst, former assistant secretary at the Department of Homeland Security, and a professor at Harvard University.

Good to see both of you.

So, Andrew, your reaction to this report. Does it shed more light? Does it make you more curious? What are your thoughts?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, the report is incredibly damning and it is in ways that I think were largely predictable at least by those of us who spent a lot of time, you know, tracking the reporting coming out of Uvalde, and by examining the video footage that we were able to really go through last Friday. And basically it breaks down the criticism into kind of three buckets.

They very explicitly called the school out for what they referred to as a kind of lackadaisical attitude toward school safety. So they cite such things as the fence not being high enough to keep people off the property. The doors weren't routinely locked, even though there was a policy requiring them to be locked all the time. Things that were broken weren't actively, you know, reported and fixed in order to ensure a safe environment.

Then they talk about the responders. And this is really where it gets very tough. They come right out and say the responders failed to live up to the active shooter training, failed to follow through on that sort of immediate response to an active shooter event that we all expect to see now. We've all lived through, you know, so many of these things. And then just didn't move quickly enough to actually save lives.

And then finally, it does not spare any criticism from Pete Arredondo specifically but also the leadership level of the response to the incident. Incident command was never established. So essentially there was no leadership. There was no one there telling everyone else what to do. There was no formal collection and distribution of communication. So many of the people inside the school didn't really know what the victims were calling in in these panicked 911 calls.

It just describes overall at each of those three levels. A real mess. Just all three of those things leading to this horrible tragedy.

WHITFIELD: And Andrew, when you talk about incident command, are you talking about if there were 20 different law enforcement agencies there? And there is leadership amongst all of those different agencies when they arrive. There should have been some coordination between all of them, about how do we work together. Who is doing what? What kind of resources do we have? What are the tools that we have? Is that what you're talking about? MCCABE: Yes. So this is actually a very well communicated and

understood system all across the country. It's the incident command system, ICS, and it's established and organized and put out and trained by DHS. And that is the acceptable way of responding to any incident in any place with any group of law enforcement that doesn't work, you know, every single day shoulder to shoulder with each other.

There are some very basic steps that you are required to put in place when you have an incident that requires incident command. One of them is you set up -- physically set up a command post where all those leadership folks from the different agencies gather together so they can all understand the situation with the same information, and they can make decisions quickly and direct their own troops.

You also then nominate a tactical commander who is going to be the person in this case inside the school who is telling the operators where to stack up, what equipment they should have, and telling them to go assault the classroom. None of those things happened here because it was a complete failure to follow the incident command structure which, again, is something that is trained to every level of police department across the country.

WHITFIELD: And so, Juliette, given all of that, and we're talking about 376 law enforcement personnel, how do you explain that there was no leadership, that no one stepped up with some sort of instruction or path forward on how you get in to these, you know, places in the school to rescue kids, take down this gunman, do any or all of those things that Andrew just explained?

JULIETTE KAYYEM, CNN NATIONAL SECURITY ANALYST: Right, so Andrew perfectly described what should have happened. Right? So you set up an incident command post. And describing the incident command system what Andrew is describing is it's really plug and play.

[16:15:02]

So you could have 20 jurisdictions who have never met each other before. If you have an incident command post, you have an incident commander, they are directing what is going on and, of course, trying to figure out what the communications are telling them. So my read of the report right now is that initial failure, essentially an architecture failure, right, we just -- they didn't set it up, made everyone believe that they were in a barricade situation rather than an active shooter situation.

I'm not defending it but that's clearly what the timeline is telling us. So you have hundreds of people who have nowhere to essentially challenge that original belief that's out there. Everyone is now treating it like a barricade rather than an active shooter, and because you don't have anyone in charge, there's no -- no one steps forward of the hundreds of them and says essentially what the heck, like what is going on here?

And what's clear to me, just in reading the, sort of, you know, my first read of the report is that failure of anyone coming forward sort of bred more and more failure to come forward. In other words there was just a belief that this was the kind of situation that we're in. That structural failure from the get-go, and to reiterate what Andrew was saying, it's like -- this is like policing 101. Like it's literally you can't get past day one without understanding an incident command and the need for a command post.

So they don't have that structure, and so they're all just sitting around, and the report is pretty clear. Like, OK, so there's that initial failure. What the heck is going on for the hour plus after that that no one is stepping forward? So it's very critical of the federal law enforcement which has the strongest presence as well as state law enforcement. But it is -- you know, I don't want to say it's the original sin. Of course the shooter is the original sin, but it is something you see from the very moment that they can't fix after that. They cannot get ahead of that original failure.

WHITFIELD: So, Andrew, you know, this report makes no recommendations. Instead it lays out the facts and apparently there will be two other Texas legislative committees that will come up with recommendations. What -- among the recommendations, what do you see will have to be put in place as a result of what everyone seems to be in agreement is a real calamity?

MCCABE: There will be many recommendations, I'm sure. I think you'll see recommendations along the line of technical recommendations, right, so, in other words, there's a lot of references in the report, two failures of communications. The radio systems did not work inside the school. So that's something that can be easily fixed with an investment of some, you know, some size and technology that will allow police radios to function inside the schools. You have a school police department here. The idea that their radios don't work inside schools is --

WHITFIELD: That's hard to understand.

MCCABE: Is unthinkable.

WHITFIELD: Yes.

MCCABE: But, yes, but nevertheless, so there'll be those sorts of things. There will also be, I'm sure, many, many recommendations as to training. I mean, clearly -- and I'm not just referring to the operators who showed up and were not adequately led, there may be some training needed there as well. They obviously didn't comply with the Texas state policy about how to conduct active shooter response in a school.

It's laid out very clearly in this policy. It failed to do that. But also at the leadership level, like they have got to do some serious work on their understanding and application of ICS, the incident command system. Then that's going to require having actual training exercises where you bring in all those surrounding departments. You know, you do these things suddenly as if it's a real event.

It's actually not, but you call everyone in to kind of push them through, to develop that muscle memory of how to respond to a situation like this, force them to sit at the table with each other and argue out how these decisions are going to be made. So there will be a lot of that. And I think finally there should be some personnel recommendations here as well. I think there's a pretty solid argument to be made that there were a lot of folks, not just Chief Arredondo, but everyone at that leadership level who responded to the scene and really did nothing to fix these really tragic failures in leadership.

I think those people should be, you know, whether or not some of those people should remain in leadership positions is something that should be considered.

WHITFIELD: Juliette, do you have a last thought?

KAYYEM: I mean, so we talk about structure all the time, incident command. But what's interesting about the report is also part of incident command is absorbing new information and pivoting because of it. Right? In other words, we're not robots. We know, we take information in a crisis or disaster --

WHITFIELD: So like that example, if your radios are not working, then there's a plan B and a plan C on how you communicate.

[16:20:05]

KAYYEM: And a plan B. And this is where this sort of robotic responsiveness where everyone is looking to someone else, right, I mean, another, rather than, you know, what is essential, which is the children, right. It's not the process that you're protecting. It's the children you're protecting. And I think that's really important that we don't -- you know, a system, a program, a training, they're only going to be so good.

They knew they were in a situation that required them to pivot or be flexible because it was, you know, from the beginning it was flawed. And that kind of creativity, I guess, is the right word. That comes also through just a sense of who is your target? Your target is protecting those children, not the incident command.

WHITFIELD: Right. All day I've been using the word instinct. It's your instinct to protect these children, to go in and help them and the teachers, and I've been asking, you know, it seems this was a moment in which the instincts should have superseded, overridden all kinds of other failures. But I defer to you all who are the experts in law enforcement, but that's what I'm hearing based on all the assessments that so many of you are giving.

Thank you so much, Andrew McCabe, Juliette Kayyem. Appreciate it.

And of course we'll continue our breaking news coverage of -- hold on. I think we are now going live to location? OK. We'll try to bring that to you. We will be giving you more on this report that has just been revealed to us. At some point, it could be in 30 minutes, that when it's scheduled. There might be a briefing and, of course, we'll take you to Uvalde when we get that.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[16:25:55]

WHITFIELD: All right. Welcome back. We're following breaking news out of Uvalde, Texas, where we are now waiting for officials and families to address, take that podium right there, to address this preliminary report by the Texas House into failures during the response to the Robb Elementary School shooting that happened in May, two months now since that horrible massacre.

And now this Texas House report, which is a fact-finding report, which says there were multiple failures involving multiple agencies. Of course we'll bring that press conference to you live as soon as it begins.

All right, so back with me right now CNN senior law enforcement analyst Andrew McCabe and CNN national security analyst Juliette Kayyem.

And Andrew, before the break, you know, you were talking about these 20 agencies, what we now to be 20 agencies that responded to this massacre at Uvalde at Robb Elementary School, and you said it's time for them to either revisit or now get training in incident command. And I wonder what might be taking place as a result of the failures of this Uvalde school shooting. What other jurisdictions might be doing right now to make sure that there isn't a repeat of the failures like what we are learning unfolded there two months ago.

MCCABE: Well, you know, Fredricka, my experience in law enforcement has shown me time and time again that the law enforcement community is an incredibly supportive one. So jurisdictions that operate in the same general area are often called to help each other on big operations or at times under, you know, events that stress any individual agency's resources and they have these cooperative relationships that are built up over a long period of time.

I would expect that the Uvalde community, the greater community around Uvalde, the law enforcement community will come together in a legitimate and earnest way to really shake these things down, to kind of brush up their understanding and ability to execute incident command, to understand, to perfect the methods of communications between departments, and, you know, look, every major crisis I've ever responded to included an overwhelming response from law enforcement.

So the fact that you had several hundred law enforcement officers that ended up at this scene eventually is not surprising to me at all. Officers hear a call like that go out on the radio and they dispatch themselves. They just go. They go to where they think they could be of most assistance. So that's going to continue to happen. But it's being able to work with that response and organize it and direct it in an effective way and that's what they need to be able to get to.

WHITFIELD: So, Juliette, among these 20 agencies we know Border Patrol, always one of the federal agencies that was part of this, you know, consortium of law enforcement agencies that were there. In what way do you see the federal government will play a role in assessing what went wrong here, what will be the better approach so that all these agencies would be able to coordinate and work together, heaven forbid something like this is to happen again?

KAYYEM: Well, from the report you do get the sense because they did interview a lot of these law enforcement agents, you do get the sense that a lot of them did know better. I mean, in other words they kind of knew that this was probably a not legitimate performance. Obviously that's an understatement, but that the incident command system had broken down from the beginning, that you just didn't have leadership.

So one of the things that's obviously -- you know, how do you assert authority. You know, why did the federal agents not feel like they could. Part of that is there's a strong deferential allegiance to the local first responders and then state then federal, just the way we think about it.

[16:30:00]

So, you know, how would we -- you know, in those instances where you do have a breakdown of local command authority, what would trigger the federal response?

I also think that there is a -- it's not stated directly but one of the things, when we say there's 20 law enforcement agencies in this small little community in Texas, one of the reasons why training -- even though we know what it is and what it should be, one of the reasons why training is failing is because, honestly, we have too many police departments in this country.

And so, you know, you have a school district police department that is asserting its own authority and has its own incident command, there are six members of it. So, one thing to think about -- and I -- is do -- does each small school district actually need its own school department in which they're relying on a totally different jurisdiction from, say, the locals?

Because, remember, here, you have a separate, local police department. I can understand for a place like L.A. or New York, where you have hundreds of thousands of facilities.

But thinking about ways in which we can rethink, once again, architecture and structure, what happened? Because that original breakdown, once again, cannot be overcome over the course of an hour. No one asserts the incident command post. No one asserts incident command. And nobody says this is broken, right. This is just absolutely broken.

And all of those things might be fixed by actually greater integration, rather than 30, 20, whatever, jurisdictions showing up at this small community. So, that's one of the takeaways we should consider is, are they police departments too small and, therefore, the training is not good, the professionalism is not as strong, and things like that.

WHITFIELD: And, Andrew, what's the most, I guess, glaring or revealing bit of information about this report to you?

MCCABE: You know, I can't get past the -- just the facts of how the response conducted itself inside the school, which -- you know, which, as I said before, we now know, from having been able to watch all 77 minutes of that video from inside the school. You can sit there and watch the entire thing and there's many things you can criticize.

But the thought that keeps coming back to me is the biggest -- the mistake, the tragic mistake, was -- happened in the first five minutes. And that was when your first responders, you had six people go into the building, initially. At least six, maybe seven or eight. And only three went down the hall and attempted to make entry into the room. And then, they received incoming fire and reasonably backed up to, kind of, re-assess to protect themselves.

But, at that point, they should have gotten every other body in that school marched down that hall and gone in that door, no matter what it was going to take and what it was going to cost them. And they didn't.

Instead, they holed up and stood there for over an hour as those children and teachers died. And I just -- of all the problems that we're going to uncover here, and things that can be remediated with training and resources and restructuring, there is that fundamental failure that happened around lacking the, call it what you want, understanding, fortitude, courage, whatever, to go in there and follow through on that sacred trust that you hold with the public as a member of law enforcement.

And I'm not sure how you adequately think after this, OK, that won't happen again. I think they need to do some really serious soul- searching over that one.

WHITFIELD: Juliette, do you see the representation from each of these, what we now know to be 20 agencies who responded, will all have to respond or somehow defend their actions or lack thereof, especially as a result of this report? I mean, they can't -- they cannot remain silent. Can they? I mean, they have to explain every action and every allegation or every fact that has now been included in this report, right?

KAYYEM: That's exactly right. I mean, I think what's going to start, on the federal side, you have -- you have the presence of border patrol because of the location of where it is. You're just going to have a massive amount of border patrol agents come forward.

And one of the interesting things or one of the narratives in is, is the extent to which border patrol is so activated in that area because of border -- unlawful border crossings.

So, they are well aware and they're very present in a way that those of us who don't live in border communities don't really encounter border patrol agents like this. So, you have border. You have state. And then, you have local.

But then, remember, you have, like, sublocal. Right? You have the school district. So, you're having so many levels that are going to have to respond.

But it is -- once again, it is -- you -- there's no overcoming that failure in the first moments to not set up an incident command and an incident command post.

[16:35:06]

KAYYEM: You cannot overcome that deficiency, and that's what you basically see.

So, one of the reasons why people are trained in incident command over and over again, even non-first responders, but people who are in the place, were trained in it over and over again, is because you don't know what will happen. In other words, that structure lets you maneuver, be flexible, make decisions in real time. And, therefore, you don't have to -- you don't have to re-create the wheel. And what they did is they threw out the wheel. And we don't know why. We don't know what led to that.

But you can't -- they cannot overcome that original decision. And I'm not defending (INAUDIBLE) people should have stepped forward. There's just too much allegiance to process, as you see throughout the report, rather than protecting the children. And we're going to have to learn how to overcome that. And have people feel confident in saying, OK, there's a process. But, you know, I've got bleeding children, right? And that gap is just -- it's unimaginable, by the time we finish the report.

WHITFIELD: And, Andrew, while that report places, you know, shared blame, they also include blaming, in part, Robb Elementary. And I'm pulling just a quote from that report saying, "Robb Elementary had a culture of noncompliance with safety policies." Is that enough? I mean, and among those safety policies, requiring doors to be kept locked which turned out to be fatal.

MCCABE: I am sure that not just Uvalde but school districts all over the country are going to look very closely at their own safety and security policies. And how well those policies are being observed and executed.

I mean, here, you know, they go into great detail calling out the fail -- not just the failure to keep doors locked as they're supposed to be. You know, there were people who were actually encouraged to prop doors open, because people, like substitute teachers, didn't have the requisite keys they needed to get in and out of the doors. So, the administration would actually encourage the other teachers to prop doors open. They knew that the door lock on room 111 wasn't working. It could work, if it was, like, forced in the right way. But people typically didn't do that.

So, the likelihood here is that that room was never actually locked which is, ultimately, how the shooter got in. So, you have layers and layers of detail about how that lackadaisical approach to school safety can really leave you vulnerable to a motivated and determined attacker. It's very hard to keep someone like that out. But you can at least do the minimal things, like locking the doors. And having the right people have the right keys in the right places.

WHITFIELD: All so terribly sad. All right, thank you so much. Andrew McCabe, Juliette Kayyem, appreciate you both. Thank you. All right, when we come back, I'll speak to Texas state senator,

Roland Gutierrez. He represents Uvalde residents. We'll get his reaction to this preliminary report on the Robb Elementary school massacre next.

[16:36:52]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

WHITFIELD: All right, welcome back to the CNN NEWSROOM. We're continuing our breaking news coverage of the Uvalde report released just hours ago. Joining me right now is Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez. His district includes Uvalde. Senator Gutierrez, good to see you. Your reaction to this Texas house report.

STATE SEN. ROLAND GUTIERREZ (D), TEXAS: Well, sadly, Fredricka, just more of the same, right? I mean, at least in this report, we don't get any more finger pointing. We get an acknowledgement that everybody screwed up here. That every law enforcement agency acted inappropriately and didn't follow their protocols.

What we've seen from the Department of Public Safety since day one has just been pointing at cops, pointing at teachers, pointing at the police, and never looking in the mirror and looking at themselves. And I think that the state of Texas has its own responsibility to bear, including the policymakers even as high as the governor's office.

WHITFIELD: Does this make you more enraged, more upset? And I wonder, you know, of that question posed to the family members, too. What are you hearing from them?

GUTIERREZ: The family members are very upset, Fredricka. I mean, this has been something that we're now here eight weeks now and beyond. We could have known all of this through briefings in about a week's time.

And, yet, through obfuscation, through innuendo, through pointing -- finger pointing, because people don't want to acknowledge that we had systemic failure. That we had human error. That we had communications' errors. Those are the weaknesses in our system that we have to fix. And we'll never be able to bring back these lives, these poor little babies back. But we, as Texas representatives and senators, need to figure out what we're going to do to fix the problem going forward.

As I questioned Steve McCraw, he acknowledged that we had done no joint training. We spent $10 billion on this Operation Lone Star that Greg Abbott wants us to have on this border. And they do no joint training with other agencies. That is absurd.

WHITFIELD: Yes, that coming from your state public safety head.

So, I just want to, kind of, summarize for people who just -- maybe just now tuning in to hear more about your reaction to this Texas House report.

[16:45:02] WHITFIELD: And this is, really, a fact-finding report. It doesn't offer recommendations. But this committee has assessed that there were something like 376 law enforcement representative there, representing 20 different agencies from the local level, through the state, and even federal. That there appears to have been no leadership on the scene. There was no unified response involving those who were there. There was poor cell service. Coordinating communication was complicated.

There was even some blame being placed on the school, itself, that it had poor wi-fi. It had broken locks. Noncompliance with safety policies. So, all of these things. So, failures all the way around. While this promotes even more frustration, I'm wondering how this can also, then, promote some real accountability. Do you see this more likely to happen?

GUTIERREZ: Well, I certainly hope so. With Greg Abbott at the helm, I'm not sure. Listen, we've been going at this now for many, many years, where we've asked for radio systems in rural Texas that work. Greg Abbott has known about this. He put a million-dollar band-aid on a $10 million request two years ago. We know that from McCraw's own testimony that our radio systems do not work in rural Texas. They -- DPS is the largest user of this system, and, yet, they don't pay into maintaining it and keeping it up.

This story is a story of neglect. We rural -- we, senators and representatives that represent rural Texas, have been complaining about wi-fi in our communities. All of the things that this report talks about are a story of neglect in Texas, and Greg Abbott has been at the helm of that.

And I don't want to understate that. And I don't want to seem like I'm being political here. But we have asked for -- time and time again, for mental health dollars for rural -- for rural communities, for radio systems for rural communities, for just joint training amongst officers. And, yet, we have received nothing in response, other than the nice photo office from Greg Abbott on the border stopping the hoard of immigrants coming across.

We have real problems in Texas, and we have to start looking at them and addressing them. And let's not forget, we have a proliferation of this type of weaponry in the hands of 18-year-olds. We cannot forget that we have to change that law now.

WHITFIELD: There will be two other subcommittees, is my understanding. Other committees that will, then, make some recommendations based on this report. What are the recommendations you're hoping might be forthcoming?

GUTIERREZ: We have something called the LBB, the Legislative Budget Board. It's made of the governor, the lieutenant governor, and the speaker of the House. They spent $50 million, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, on ballistic shields. We had plenty of those. We need radios in south Texas. We need radios all through rural Texas that function properly, so that we don't have this problem happen again. I hope that that's something that happens. We need to take money from the border, because we're spending billions of dollars and not having a very good effect down there, and give it to our schools for school hardening. In 2019, we spent $100 million in school hardening. And yet, we spent $4 billion last summer on the border.

If we spent $4 billion on school hardening and having appropriate fencing, that chain linked fence that that young man jumped over, that's endemic of every school that we have in Texas, just about. We need to have the kind of fencing that's appropriate. That we can safeguard our children.

This notion of one door. Well, that's just ludicrous. We've been hearing that from people in Austin and that just doesn't make sense. But we can secure our schools better. I don't want to make them into prisons.

And I don't want to build walls around our schools. But I want to do things that make sense. We can't just be so haphazard and say, we need to spend $50 million today. We saw what happened three weeks ago. We need to do things the right way, the smart way.

WHITFIELD: Texas State Senator Roland Gutierrez, thank you so much for your time.

GUTIERREZ: Thank you so much, Fredricka.

WHITFIELD: And stay with us. Live pictures right now from Uvalde, Texas, where officials and families will address the preliminary report at a press conference. We'll bring that to you live as soon as it happens.

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WHITFIELD: All right, this week's CNN Hero is someone who is bringing hope and help to the village where she grew up in extreme poverty. She is a software engineer, using recycled hardware and innovative techniques to end intergenerational poverty, and lift up an entire rural Kenyan community.

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NELLY CHEBOI (voice-over): Most of these computers are ending up in landfills. Well, we have kids here, myself included back in the day, who don't even know what a computer is. We refurbish them. We install our own custom operating system that is geared towards teaching our kids self-efficacy, troubleshooting, and Internet skills. We are working with institutions, colleges, companies, even individuals. And then, we bring it to the schools.

(on camera): All of you want to be graphic designers today.

(voice-over): They can go from doing a remote class with NASA, to music production, video production, coding, personal branding and so on. The thing that was really frustrating me growing up, not seeing change, not seeing hope, not even seeing progress. I feel like with these kids, I can see a path. Like, I can see a way where they can make a living online.

[16:55:00]

CHEBOI (on camera): And that is really, like, why we're doing this work.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

WHITFIELD: And to see Nelly's full story and see how she brings hope into classrooms across Kenya, go to CNNheroes.com. And while you're there, nominate someone you think is deserving as well.

All right, up next, we're expected to hear from officials and family from Uvalde, Texas, on that preliminary report into the Robb Elementary school shooting. We'll bring that to you, live, as soon as it happens. Thank you so much for joining me today. I'm Fredricka Whitfield.

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