CNN
(CNN)While a gunman was inside adjoining classrooms with children at a
Texas elementary school, a group of 19 law enforcement officers stood in a hallway outside and took no action as they waited for room keys and tactical equipment, a state official said Friday.
"The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject," Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Col. Steven McCraw said.
"From the benefit of hindsight where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. There's no excuse for that," he said.
LATEST UPDATES Uvalde school shooting
While officers waited outside adjoining classrooms at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, children inside the room repeatedly called 911 and pleaded for help, he said.
"The belief was there isn't anybody living anymore and that the subject is now trying to keep law enforcement at bay or entice them to come in" and shoot them, he said.
The damning revelation explains the lengthy wait between when officers first arrived to the school at 11:44 a.m. and when a tactical team finally entered the room and killed the gunman at 12:50 p.m. The tactical team was able to enter using keys from a janitor, McCraw said.
Nineteen students and two teachers
were killed Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde before the team killed the gunman, ending the deadliest US school shooting in almost a decade.
Officials initially praised the law enforcement response and noted that the carnage could have been worse. But revelations from McCraw and from DPS regional chief Victor Escalon a day earlier revealed major flaws in the response and contradictory information.
Emergency protocol established since the Columbine school shooting of 1999 is to end the threat as quickly as possible because fatalities occur in seconds to minutes.
"The levels of failure are just incredible, beyond belief," said Anthony Barksdale, the former acting Baltimore police commissioner.
The shooting in Uvalde is the deadliest school shooting since the
2012 Sandy Hook massacre and at least the 30th shooting at a K-12 school in 2022. The attack came less than two weeks after
a racist mass shooting in Buffalo, New York, and has left Americans grieving yet again and many renewing calls for gun law reform.
