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- A report released Sunday by a Texas House of Representatives committee found "systemic failures" throughout the entire botched response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
The investigation also found "egregious poor decision-making" by nearly everyone in a position of power as an 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers on May 24.
The 77-page report showed that the shooter had no firearms training before the shooting and that he targeted a school with an "adequate" active-shooter policy that kept leaving doors propped open.
It also showed that the shooter's family missed warning signs and that the police response disregarded its own active-shooter training.
376 officers from various law enforcement agencies came to the school but lacked clear leadership, basic communications, and a sense of urgency. Any one of them could have assumed control, but none did.
As the Texas Tribune points out, that's a larger force than the garrison that defended the Alamo.
Eventually, a small group of Border Patrol agents and a neighboring county deputy sheriff decided to go in to confront the shooter, but the report concluded that an order could have been issued far earlier to do so.
Sunday's report is the first to criticize state and federal law enforcement for its inaction. Previous reports only blamed the chief of the school district police, Pete Arredondo.
The report also found that a faster response would not have saved many of the lives lost that day, but some of the victims died en route to the hospital. A footnote says it's plausible some could have survived without such a long wait for rescue.
"It's a joke. They're a joke. They've got no business wearing a badge. None of them do," said Vincent Salazar, whose 11-year-old granddaughter Layla Salazar was among the victims.
