Uvalde shooting incident commander says he didn't know he was in charge, ditched his radios on purpose

"My mind was to get there as fast as possible, eliminate any threats, and protect students and staff," Arredondo told the Tribune. 

The chief pinned the blame for the 77-minute span between his arrival at the school and the elimination of Ramos primarily on officers' inability to find the correct key to the door of the classroom in which the shooter had locked himself. Over the course of the attack, he says he was given two different key rings to try.

"Each time I tried a key I was just praying," Arredondo said. However, few elements of Arredondo's version of events at Robb Elementary that day have been confirmed by other officers and personnel in the hallway with him. 

The Tribune's report includes claims from the police chief that he had no idea he was in charge of the police response inside the school. Arredondo denied previous reports from The New York Times that stated the group of officers that ultimately killed Ramos had been ordered to stand down before making their move against the shooter. The chief claims he did not tell these officers to stand down.

"I didn't issue any orders," Arredondo told the Tribune. "I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door." 

According to Arredondo, the classroom door had a steel jamb that could not be forced open, and he focused on evacuating students in other classrooms while waiting for keys to the room. He says he ordered officers to shatter windows from the outside and extract those inside. Arredondo's attorney, George E. Hyde, who is not an expert with regard to mass shootings, told the Tribune that attempting to use a similar window tactic to engage the shooter in the locked classroom would've been "reckless" and "guaranteed all the children in the rooms would be killed."

This conflicts with comments offered by FBI Agent Katherine Schweit, one of the bureau's chief researchers on mass shootings, who told the Tribune that going through a window is proper police protocol during an active shooter event.

"The training that police officers have received for more than a decade mandates that when shots are fired in an active-shooter situation, officers or an officer needs to continue through whatever obstacles they face to get to the shooter, period," Schweit told the Tribune. "If that means they go through walls, or go around the back through windows, or through an adjoining classroom, they do that."

A New York Times report filed Thursday stated that "more than a dozen" of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the conjoined classrooms occupied by the shooter remained alive during the hour and 17-minute span between the beginning of the shooting and officers' entry into the classroom. One teacher shot by Ramos died while being transported to the hospital, the Times notes, and three children who were extracted from the classroom later died at the hospital from their injuries. 

A Times analysis of surveillance footage in the building found that officers didn’t return to the classroom door for 40 minutes after first arriving and attempting to enter the classroom. By the time the room was breached by law enforcement, 60 officers had assembled at Robb Elementary, according to the Times.