Law enforcement from different agencies work the scene of a shooting at a shopping mall in El Paso, Texas, on Saturday, Aug. 3, 2019. Multiple people were killed and one person was in custody after a shooter went on a rampage at a shopping mall, police in the Texas border town of El Paso said. (AP Photo/Rudy Gutierrez)
Texas Mall Shooting
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety says three minutes after a gunman entered a school where he slaughtered 19 elementary students and two teachers there was sufficient armed law enforcement on scene to stop the gunman.
Yet police officers armed with rifles stood and waited in a school hallway for nearly an hour while the gunman carried out the massacre. Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, called the police response “an abject failure.”
Delays in the law enforcement response have been the focus of the federal, state and local investigation of the massacre and its aftermath.
—Copyright 2022 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
