Uvalde Students Followed Active Shooter Training & Stayed Quiet. Some Responding Officers Didn’t Realize Kids Were in Classrooms.
The May 2022 gun massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, left 19 children and two teachers dead. It was one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
More than a year and a half later, findings from a state-led investigation into the chaotic response — in which officers took more than an hour to take down the gunman — have yet to be released. With the possibility of a criminal case looming, most of the officers involved in the response have declined to talk publicly about what happened that day.
Most officers also declined to speak with FRONTLINE, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica. But the three news organizations gained access to a trove of materials from the investigation and were able to review the accounts of almost 150 responding officers, as well as hours of bodycam footage and 911 calls.
The above excerpt, from the documentary Inside the Uvalde Response, illustrates one of the most striking findings to emerge from the three news organizations’ analysis of the investigative materials: Accounts from law enforcement show that several officers initially didn’t believe children were in the classrooms with the gunman, as the students and their teachers followed active shooter training — staying silent and out of sight.
“Officer after officer said that they didn’t think there were children inside that wing because it was so quiet,” Lomi Kriel of the ProPublica-Texas Tribune Investigative Unit, who has been analyzing the evidence with a team of reporters, says in the excerpt. “They said that because it was so silent, they didn’t hear any screams or any indication that a child was inside that wing, that they believed it was empty, even though it was the middle of a school day on one of the last days of the semester.”
In the documentary and related reporting, the news organizations draw on the investigative materials to reconstruct the day’s events, giving a detailed analysis of one of the most criticized mass shooting responses in recent history, and providing extraordinary insight into law enforcement officers’ thoughts and actions at the time. Featuring never-before-published interviews conducted by state and federal investigators in the days immediately after the shooting, the documentary, which is available to stream online and in the PBS App, identifies critical missteps as the response unfolded; explores the candid fears, regrets and anguish expressed by officers; and underlines the complexity, confusion and tragedy of the day.
In investigative interviews like the ones featured in the above excerpt, responding officers described what they were thinking as the crisis unfolded. A staff sergeant said, “I honestly didn’t think anybody was in there besides the gunman … I literally didn’t hear anything at all. You would think kids would be yelling and screaming.” A corporal said, “I don’t hear any screaming … I put myself in the position of being that age, I probably would be like, ‘Oh ****.’ No screaming, no yelling, and it’s almost like, OK, maybe, maybe this place is empty.” A detective said, “We couldn’t hear the kids. We couldn’t hear him shooting anybody or anything like that. So I guess that’s why, you know, they were waiting to make entry because we didn’t know what was going on in there. It was too quiet.”
Kriel notes in the excerpt that staying silent is children and teachers’ “best defense to stay alive” in an active shooter situation, according to experts.
“So what we found was kind of this incredible contrast,” Kriel says. “The children and the teachers followed their training, but by following their training and staying quiet, that actually meant that officers thought they weren’t there, and they took longer for them to help them.”
Nineteen students and two teachers were fatally shot in Uvalde, most of them likely during the initial two minutes of gunfire before police entered the school. Two students and a teacher were alive when officers breached the classroom, and died soon thereafter.
Explore an in-depth companion investigation from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE that probes the role officers’ training played in the response. Examining how the absence of an official command post and missteps in communication throughout all levels of law enforcement compounded the confusion, the joint investigation is a powerful piece of accountability reporting about what went wrong in the response to one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history — and what lessons can now be learned.
For the full story, watch Inside the Uvalde Response:
The documentary premiered on Dec. 5, 2023. It is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. It is a FRONTLINE production with The Documentary Group in association with ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The director is Juanita Ceballos. The producers are Juanita Cellabos and Michelle Mizner. The co-producer is Lauren Prestileo. The writer is Juanita Ceballos. The senior producers are Nina Chaudry and Gabrielle Tenenbaum. The reporters are Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill (ProPublica/The Texas Tribune) and Jinitzail Hernandez (The Texas Tribune), with editing by Zahira Torres of ProPublica and The Texas Tribune. The editor-in-chief of ProPublica is Stephen Engelberg. The editor-in-chief of The Texas Tribune is Sewell Chan. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.
This story has been updated.
