UVALDE - What Really Happened at Robb Elementary?

On May 24, 2024, an active shooter went into Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde Texas and fatally shot 19 students and two teachers while injuring 17 others. This event would quickly become a lightning rod specifically for the fact that responding officers, although entering the school rapidly, treated their response as a barricaded subject call rather than an active shooter, and remained in the hallway for 77 minutes before finally confronting and killing the suspect.

Although there's been a great deal of misinformation and confusion about the actual facts of the event, the United States Department of Justice Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, has recently released an extremely detailed report of their investigation into the facts of Uvalde. My guests today are Nazmia Comri, and Frank Fernandez from the DOJ cops office who helped to create that report.

My name is Jon Becker.

For the past four decades, I've dedicated my life to protecting tactical operators. During this time, I've worked with many of the world's top law enforcement and military units.

As a result, I've had the privilege of working with the amazing leaders who take teams into the world's most dangerous situations.

The goal of this podcast is to share their stories in hopes of making us all better leaders, better thinkers, and better people.

Welcome to The Debrief!

Jon Becker: Guys, thank you for being here with me today. Let's start with backgrounds.

Nazmia, why don't you go first. Tell us about you and what you do.

Nazmia Comri: I’m with the Department of Justice Cop's office. I'm a sociologist. I've been there to support law enforcement and the communities that they serve with training and technical assistance.

Jon Becker: Frank.

Nazmia Comri: Yeah, thank you for having us, Frank Fernandez. I'm a retired chief of police from South Florida and a subject matter expert for the Department of Justice.

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Jon Becker: So why don't we maybe start with talking to me about what the DOJ, COP's office does because I don't think a lot of people are aware.

Nazmia Comri: Yeah, I'd love to. So the Department of Justice Cop's Office, the Office of Community oriented Policing Services is a component of the Department of Justice that focuses on supporting law enforcement and the communities they serve through training, technical assistance, funding and resources.

We have been around this year, we're actually celebrating our 30th anniversary. And our entire focus initially was supporting law enforcement by hiring officers that is our flagship program but over the years we've really expanded, and today again we're providing resources. We have the largest community policing library. We provide no cost training and technical assistance to law enforcement agencies, all the way from a full agency assessment to training policy assistance. In addition we support officers through the hiring of officers. We provide funding for crisis intervention teams, deescalation, accreditation, and really just advancing community policing.

Jon Becker: So how does the DOJ cops office get involved in Uvalde?

Nazmia Comri: So everything we do is by request. So we are solely again and it's a voluntary process. Once the incident in Uvalde occurred the mayor, the former mayor at the time, reached out to the Department of Justice and there were a lot of just questions about what occurred with the incident. There was a lot of misinformation coming out, and so the mayor reached out to the department of justice and asked, "Can you please come in and provide answers about what is going on and what happened?” So that is how the cop's office was asked to come in.

We have a history of doing after action reviews. We've done one in the San Bernardino terrorist attack. We've done one after the Pulse nightclub shooting. We also do them even outside of mass casualty incidents." We were asked to come in. We were asked to lead a team of subject matter experts. And again, it was a voluntary request and that's how we got involved.

Jon Becker: Talk to me okay. So talk to the that they request you to come in, what does that look like, what does the DOJ bring to the table, what are you doing for investigation, who's doing it give me that process.

Nazmia Comri: Yeah, so it is definitely a process, let me say that. We put in a data and document request to the agencies and generally involve all agencies that were involved.

So if an incident is just one agency, we would really work with one agency. In this case we had 24 agencies at least that were involved in this incident, so we would work work with, in this case the city of Uvalde we'd work with the Uvaldi Police Department, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Departments and other law Page 3 of enforcement agencies involved. We'd put in requests for things like body worn camera policies, training records, anything that would be involved and relevant for us to look at.

As part of that we also pull together a team, and that's really important for us. In this case we pulled together 10 subject matter experts that covered areas like leadership incident, command, tactics, public communication, trauma, school safety and so we pulled that together and we really just dig in, and really understand everything that we have.

We were on site within weeks of announcing this review. And we spent at least in the first year one week per month really just understanding what was going on while on the ground. We walked through the school, we walked through various incidents. We spoke to as many people as possible and we did observations.

In the end all of our interviews are voluntary because it is not a formal investigation, this is a review. For a lot of people that really helps ensure that they really feel comfortable talking with us for this. In particular we also took a trauma-informed lens that I think is a really important piece for the work we did. So we all underwent training to make sure that as we interacted with the officers as we interacted with the families the the survivors that we were not retraumatizing them based on the way we conducted the interviews, the way that we conducted all of our work that carried forward in terms of the way we wrote the report, and the way we rolled it out.

One thing also as part of the kind of setting this up is we also made sure we always had trauma and crisis counselors available. So if we were doing interviews, if we were doing focus groups we made sure that we had those resources available because it also became very clear in the beginning that the responders as well as the community, were not receiving the resources they needed to provide the support after this type of tragedy.

Jon Becker: Yeah as a guy who spends a substantial portion of my time interviewing people that have been traumatized, I literally describe it as we're “tearing off the scabs and then hoping it doesn't hurt too bad” so you can see where that would be. As far as scope of the investigation goes, did you guys in the end quantify how many documents were reviewed, how many people you talked to? Give me the statistics page basically.

Nazmia Comri: So we reviewed over 14,000 pieces of document data. So that's everything from body worn camera, audio, crime scene, photos, training records, policies procedures, any sort of document video audio that had anything to do with either the preparation, the incident or post incident. So over 14,000 pieces of document and data. We had access to the interviews that were conducted as part of the investigation, but in addition to that we also conducted our own interviews, and so we interviewed responders, those in the hallway, EMS family members. We also interviewed any of the adult survivors that were willing to talk with us. As part of that trauma-informed approach we made the decision not to interview any of the child Page 4 of survivors. We felt it was really important to be able to get the information from the interviews that were conducted or their family members. But we've just really felt that we didn't want to revictimize any of those children, so we did make an intentional effort on that piece.

In addition, we also spent over 50 days on site in Uvalde again interviewing individuals doing observations, walking the crime scene, and just really understanding the community there in Uvalde and then finally we went around the country, and we observed national level active shooter training. So we went around to five different training sites to really understand what is being taught at the national level.

Now we recognize that doesn't mean that we've observed every single training that is in the active shooter realm, but for us it was really important because as part of this work, and this report what are some of the areas that we thought that should continue to happen and then what are some of the areas that maybe we should rethink. So it was important for us to understand what officers are being taught, so that we can incorporate that into some of our recommendations.

Jon Becker: Yeah I think it's obvious everybody has an opinion on this case, and there a lot of them are well rounded, but it's very difficult if you're looking at it objectively to say okay what they did was okay, or was not okay unless there is some objective standard. Do you remember off the top of your head, what the five sites that you went to visit for assessment work?

Nazmia Comri: So we went out to observe training through the National Tactical Officers Association NTOA. We also went out to Texas State University to observe their alert training, and we also looked at the LSU, so the Louisiana State University training.

For all of the trainings we looked at their initial which would kind of be their level one training, and we also looked at if they had a rescue task force style training. So those were generally the trainings, and then in addition, we also observed some of the online trainings. So for example, TICSS the Texas extension program out in Texas A&M does training on a leadership level that is online training. So we also observe that as well but that did not require travel.

Jon Becker: Got it. So, I think it's safe to say that the DOJ report is going to be the most thorough look at what actually happened in Uvalde.

Nazmia Comri: Yes. When we released the report in January, it was the most authoritative accounting of the incident that occurred. Every single detail in that report was verified. It was very important for us that we made sure we triple-verified every single detail. We knew that there was a lot of information that came out on this incident as you mentioned. There was a lot of misinformation as well, and we wanted to make Page 5 of sure that what we put in that report was accurate. There were times that we would find a fact but we could not verify it, and so we had to make the decision sometimes we couldn't put that information in there. I'm sure some of that will be part of our conversation today. So it is the most authoritative accounting. It was also an independent review that was really important for us to ensure that there was an independent review that came out because not only was this report important for the community in Uvalde to be able to provide the facts of what occurred. It was also really important for law enforcement to help them understand what are promising practices, and what are areas that they should be working on to really move this forward, so we don't have another Uvalde. Then finally it was really important for us to honor those victims and those survivors, those in the community that were deeply impacted.

Jon Becker: Yeah this is as I said, I'm dealing with these kinds of incidents not obviously not as bad as Uvalde but a lot, and it is a very difficult line to walk between secondguessing what people did that that were righteously trying to do the right thing, and trying to manage how people feel and people that were traumatized. But in the end I think obviously an independent investigation has to happen. I think that it's great that the DOJ does this because this is an extremely expensive endeavor. I don't know what this report costs, but it was millions of dollars. I think that the problem with all of these kinds of reports is they're very long, they're very complicated. So part of the reason I wanted to sit down with you guys is to just kind of put on the record what is the known timeline, what do we know happened and why do we think some of those decisions were made? What was your role in the report?

Nazmia Comri: Yeah. So one thing I will say is that this report actually has no cost to agencies. Yes, so one thing that we always like to say with our assistants. So my role was a co-program manager for this. So I worked with our 10 subject matter experts on a daily, sometimes maybe even an hourly basis and myself and the other co-program manager George Faulkner, we worked very closely with the DOJ cop's office leadership team. And in addition to that, we were the primary authors on this report, and worked again with the expertise of our 10 subject matter experts, and our leadership team.

Jon Becker: Frank, how do you get involved in this?

Frank Fernandez: So I've been working with the Department of Justice now since investigations, never with the cop's office, and received a call from the attorney general's office asking if I would be involved, if I would volunteer most voluntowed to participate in this investigation with other subject matter experts. And when you’re on incident calls you can't say no, you have to go and respond and do what you got to do.

It's horrifying to see what happened, how it happened. It's difficult to meet the victim's families multiple times, speak with them, see them cry, feel them cry. Those types of things will forever be in my memory bank of the things that you don't want to see in life.

Page 6 of Today as we sit here I want to thank you for the opportunity because the more we get to speak about this and talk about what went right, what went wrong people get to learn about it. Hopefully through these conversations teams out there can operate effectively efficiently, and get it done the right way.

Jon Becker: I think it's important to realize with these reports, it's essential that we do this, we have to look and and lessons learned. I don't think that anybody that responded to Uvalde, walked away feeling good about what happened. I don't think that anybody that responded to Uvalde went in there with an intent to not do the right thing, but in the end, the result at Uvalde obviously was not what we would hope for. I think it is important that we kind of dig into it.

I think I'd probably like to start by giving me some kind of general information about Uvalde. Just kind of set the stage of what we're talking about from a town perspective and from a capabilities perspective.

Nazmia Comri: Uvalde is approximately 60 miles away from the border, about an hour and a half to San Antonio which is the next biggest city. Generally about 23 to 24,000 person population roughly around the time of the incidents. It's about four to five square miles, so it's relatively small but you do have two major highways that intersect there which I think is an important piece. One of those highways has a lot of or a large number of whatever is referred to as bailouts which is people coming across the border and that are fleeing, typically Customs and Border Protection or Texas Department of Public Safety. You have a lot of that kind of occurring in the community itself; it is a very large law enforcement community though. You have a customs border protection station there in Uvalde. You have a large presence at the time of the Texas Department of Public Safety as part of the state's work on the border. You also have various law enforcement agencies as well, the Uvalde Police Department, you have the sheriff's office, you have a police department as part of the school district. The school district itself had a little over 4,000 students at the time of the incident.

Another thing to kind of just understand, there's a large percentage of English as a second language, so a very large percentage of Spanish speakers in the community. The way that the school is split up is any child that is in public school between grades second and fourth grade, would be at Robb Elementary School which is where the incident occurred. When we talk about in the report there's really a community and a trauma, and a shared trauma because you have so many people that have connections to that school.

Jon Becker: Yeah, virtually anybody with a second to fourth grader is tied to Robb Elementary School.

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Nazmia Comri: Absolutely.

Jon Becker: Got it. Frank, let's talk about the police departments. So initially we have kind of two police departments involved here: the city of Uvalde, and then the school district police.

Frank Fernandez: Correct.

Jon Becker: Talk to me about those two, give me some kind of background or some kind of overview of the two agencies.

Frank Fernandez: Yeah some may classify as a rural community but I don't think so. I think most departments across the country are 50 officers or less. They're under that classification of a small agency across the country. However, the Uvalde school district police have only five officers. So that plays a big role in decision-making where the chief of police arrives on that scene and is making decisions when he only has a person of five, and that that includes him, and that's a significant issue I think we've alerted to in the report that incident command is really important leadership is important, and what you say matters. As we go through this, you'll see what the words that were spoken there were and how it stopped the momentum of the officers going into that classroom.

Jon Becker: From a just kind of normal policing perspective, the chief of police with four officers is a corporal in virtually any other city as far as the number of people he is commanding. Although he has chief of police responsibilities and maybe responsible for budgets, he's used to running a very small organization which is going to inform the decisions, and the choices you make.

Frank Fernandez: It also informs, if you are a chief of police of a very small agency that you have to coordinate with other agencies, have mutual aid agreements in place, making sure that whenever a critical incident takes place, who is going to be in command, and how are you going to delegate those critical authorities to make decisions at that critical moment in time. Those decisions were not ever discussed or made. In this particular situation, it played out in a very negative way for the outcome of these kids.

Jon Becker: So let's kind of walk through the timeline because there's been a lot of controversy about the timeline, and what happened and what people knew and all of that. I think it probably makes sense to just walk through the timeline, at least kind of hitting the high wave points of how this event evolves. What is the first indication that something is wrong here?

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Frank Fernandez: Nazmia, if you could talk about the first incident, I'll pick it up at the school.

Nazmia Comri: Yeah, so the subject and I think one thing I really just want to say, I really appreciated you talking about how nobody walked into that school from the police side and wanted what happened, but I think it's so important to talk about that the reason why we lost and we had that incident that day was a subject walking into that school. I think it's an important piece to say there. The subject gets into an altercation with his grandmother earlier in the day approximately about 11 minutes before walking into the school, and he steals his grandparents truck after that altercation where he actually shoots his grandmother in the face. He steals the truck, and he attempts to drive to the school. In that process he cannot navigate a left hand turn while he's driving, he doesn't really know how to drive. So he crashes the pickup truck in a ravine right next to the school, and across from a funeral home. So the initial calls for service that are coming to the Uvalde Police Department are an accident that occurred.

Staff from the funeral home actually come outside to see what is going on with this, and they're actually on the phone with 911 reporting this when the subject crawls out of the driver’s side window and begins shooting at the funeral home employees. Now the funeral home employees are not physically injured from the shooting, but that is also caught on the call for service. That same a similar call for service is coming from a teacher that is from Robb Elementary School who also heard the accident. It's a very similar situation this teacher is now saying, an accident has occurred and now has shifted to this subject is now shooting at these people. The subject then makes his way towards the school where I think Frank will be able to pick it up.

Frank Fernandez: He runs towards the school, he jumps over the fence, gets into the school property, runs along the side of the school and drops a backpack full of rounds.

Comes across the first door which is in the northwest corner of the school. A jar was just unlocked. He walked right into the school. The teachers inside the school you'll see on video heard the gunfire on the outside. There was actually a teacher looking outside and actually tried to lock the door. Unfortunately some of these doors are locked from the outside. So that's why a flaw in the locking mechanism for both the classroom doors, and the exterior doors. So the subject enters the school at about 11:33 in the morning, runs right into that hallway and proceeds right to the classrooms 111, 112 which ironically were his classrooms when he was a young kid in that school.

Jon Becker: Yeah I heard that. He attended this school. We don't really talk about the perpetrators in this, but I think in this case it is relevant that he attended this school, and this was a classroom that he had been in.

Frank Fernandez: That is correct. You see him firing from the outside, walking inside the classroom, there's a lot of gunfire. Inside this hallway now through the video camera that we see from the school CCTV camera, you'll see smoke from the gunfire. There's Page 9 of obvious signs of penetration from gunfire in the doorway, but within 3 minutes of the gunfire officers run into this hallway-- a textbook operation by the way at this point.

This is officers responding without hesitation right into the school door and into the hallway. They ran right up to classroom 111, 112 and they stood on each side of it. So up to that point the officers responded exactly how you would see an active shooter training across the country. At that moment in time that the lieutenant who led this particular group was standing at the doorway, he's assessing what's happening in the classroom, he's trying to look inside. At that moment in time a round penetrates the door, and it apparently strikes the side of his head or a shrapnel metal hit the side of his head and he backs up, when he backs up he reassesses himself, and within a short period of time he re-engages again towards that classroom showed an enormous amount of courage. He re-engages again. He looks back and there are no officers backing him up. So he disengages, goes back, talks to the officers, re-engages again but when he looks back again, the officers are not engaging. They stayed back.

At that moment in time everything becomes stagnant. There's no movement towards that classroom. In this hallway as I mentioned earlier all the officers senses are activated.

They visually see the penetration of rounds through the door. They smell the gunpowder in the air and we know this from our interviews. They see the smoke in the hallway. So all the indications of an active shooter present a response to go and penetrate that door, but they stop short of that door.

It's at this moment in time that we find out through interviews that on the opposite side of this hallway the Independent School Police District Chief is there along with several other officers, and he slows down that momentum or stops the momentum and says, "Hold on." And he considers it a barricaded subject. It's at that moment in time that everything stopped, so this incident froze within 3 minutes of officers responding.

Initially when we looked at this, we were trying to look at the first 20 minutes of the response time. As we looked at video and body cam footage and all the information available, we got about 3 minutes into it, we knew that it had stopped right then and there. After 3 minutes nothing happened.

Jon Becker: So the school district chief is the one that has been kind of vilified in the media which is Eric Dondo, if I remember correctly. So as they're coming in you say that there's all signs of an active shooter. What isn't present as you were telling me that caught my attention, is there are no victims down. They're not coming across victims because he has entered the school and entered directly into classroom 111, which if I remember correctly adjoins 112 through an internal doorway. If you're the responding officers as you come in, you're not seeing victims down, you're just seeing gunfire, smelling gunfire, smoke all of that but there's not kids in the hallway that are down.

Frank Fernandez: Here's the difference: The difference is that when we're training active shooter training, we're trained to head towards the sound of gunfire. And if we Page 10 of see victims, what are we supposed to do? Bypass them keep moving towards that gunfire sound. We're not trained to look for the victim and then consider an active shooter. We're trained that if we have gunfire especially inside of a school given our history across the country that we're supposed to continue, and penetrate every door possible to get inside to identify the threat. You go towards the sound of gunfire that noise to identify where the threat is, where that individual is firing it. I can tell you any, and all evidence indicated that the school was actively in session.

The school police chief and school police officers are there. They knew, or should have known that the school was actively engaged with students in those classrooms.

Throughout this whole stagnant situation, there were three separate activations of an active shooter. So that individual fired from inside the classroom three separate times in three separate sequences that should have activated the officers to engage now.

I get what you're saying, I'm looking for victims. I don't see any but if I know that it's a school there are cars in the parking lot. They're all visible indications that there's students inside the school. There's no evidence to prove that that classroom's empty.

There's all evidence to prove that the classroom is probably occupied and that individuals in their firing on top of that look what separated the officers from these victims is a separation of a partition wall. It's troubling to think about this, what could have stopped much of these deaths as the attorney general mentioned during the press conference that had they entered that classroom immediately, lives would have been saved.

Jon Becker: Yes, because at that point it's certainly impossible. If I remember correctly, you didn't do a medical review where you went in, and looked at what this person would have. It's not hard to imagine that minutes after this suspect shot people, shot the kids especially having medical attention in there would have made a difference.

Frank Fernandez: There's other evidence, when we think about the totality of those circumstances, the door, the chief, the school chief decided to go look for keys but there was no indication that the door is locked and no one ever tried the door. If you're the school police chief you should know those doors only lock from the outside. The teacher typically has a lanyard around the neck with the key. They have to go on the outside of the door and manually lock it in order for it to lock. All indications from the video, and obviously they weren't privy to this but we saw it afterwards, is that this individual walked right into that classroom without hesitation. In order for that door to have been locked, that perpetrator, that offender needed to obtain that key from the teacher, walked outside and locked the door and then went back inside. That's how the mechanism worked in that door. So all indication is that- that door was not locked, but they stalled that forward momentum looking for a key looking for a ballistic shield for a rifle rated ballistic shield, looking for rifles. I can tell you that within 3 minutes, there were 11 officers in that hallway, two SWAT officers, two chiefs of police, one lieutenant, three sergeants. Two of those officers were SWAT officers, a couple detectives. An enormous amount of resources in that hallway to affect a different outcome, and for one word that came out barricaded, it stalled the entire process, the entire forward Page 11 of momentum of that team that initially responded with forward momentum to penetrate the classroom to go inside, and then would have stopped that threat.

Jon Becker: Not to steal our own thunder here, but in the end this is going to be a case where a misdiagnosis happens early. The case is misclassified as a barricaded subject which stops everybody, and we just start building inertia that is then going to be really hard to break going forward.

Frank Fernandez: One of the takeaways, or the many that we took from the review in speaking to the officers, is that forward momentum. Once you have that forward momentum, they had the courage. They heard the gunfire. They saw the smoke in the air, all the indications and they didn't stop. They did not hesitate. They didn't slow down their pace. Their pace continued right to that door. It's when that initial stop takes place that that subconscious mind kicks off, and the conscious mind kicks in, and then all the training stops. They were moving based on training. They were moving based on what they were trained to do. When leadership kicks in and says stop, you have to know that there's a consequence to that.

Look, it's a really bad scenario, really bad for anyone, any cop, even a SWAT team that could be available that would respond to that situation. It's a scenario you don't want to go through. That door it's a very loss ending scenario there for any officer going through the door.

Jon Becker: I mean you're talking about a hostage rescue in a classroom with a fatal funnel that starts it.

Frank Fernandez: You're going to go through that fatal funnel, and you're probably going to get shot.

Jon Becker: Yeah.

Nazmia Comri: If I could just add, I think when we're talking about the contained subject or barricaded subject. I think it's also important to know that there were so many other indicators that there were children and teachers in those classrooms. So again, the officers came into the school at 11:36. By 11:40, there were already calls coming in from various teachers. We have one that is saying that they have heard that a teacher is injured. We have a teacher that was injured in class 112 that actually reached out to her husband who happened to be one of those first 11 officers. So we have a lot of these different indicators, and then those continue throughout the incident where we're having calls coming in, we're having information coming out that there are in fact Page 12 of children and teachers, and victims that are in these two classrooms and that these are not empty.

I also think the important thing to bring up at this point is just recognizing that because there's no sounds coming out of classrooms, and because the classrooms are dark and you're unable to see anybody in there, does not necessarily mean that no one is in there.

I think one thing we talk about in the report is the importance of law enforcement, understanding, what are the lockdown procedures that in this case schools go through.

It's so important to understand that for example in this school their lockdown procedure is to turn off the lights, close the blinds and go in a corner, so the children and the staff are doing everything that they need to do. So because there are no noises coming out of there and because the lights are off does not necessarily mean that nobody is in there. It is important for law enforcement to have that situational awareness.

Frank Fernandez: It's concerning that the chief of police and the school officers should have conveyed that. There's a reason why it's dark. There's a reason why you're not hearing any noise. They're the school officers. They need to know those procedures, so they can convey it to those first responders who are coming from the Uvalde Police Department.

Jon Becker: In the end, active shooter, you're going to clear everything.

Frank Fernandez: Yes.

Jon Becker: It's interesting so let's focus specifically on room 111 and 112 because we have two connecting rooms that are adjoined by a door. What do we know about the suspect's initial engagement? When he enters room 111 what happens?

Frank Fernandez: So those rooms, so you understand they're set back a little bit of doors from the hallway. There are independent doors for each classroom except that in the middle is a wall, and then there's double doors that join the two classrooms. The reason why these double doors are there is so if a teacher takes a break, she opens the door and he opens the door, say, "Watch my kids i'm going to take a break." And they do it for each other. So they watch each other's kids take a lunch break, whatever it may be, they have that capacity.

We know that the individual went in through the right side door and went into the first classroom. There's an immediate volley of fire inside the classroom. We suspect that the kids at that moment in time because of their procedures, had already convened in the corner underneath a desk. So all these kids are almost piled up in a corner. I would call it Page 13 of the southwest corner of the classroom underneath a desk, if you will. The subject walks in.

What we do here, we don't have video on the inside, but we do hear on the outside rapid succession of gunfire on the inside of the classroom. The kids that were shot were shot underneath that table in the corner. So we suspected they were hunkering down there based on procedures. He then went to the other classroom, and those kids were also on the northwest corner of the classroom underneath that desk, and those kids, many of them expired as well, were shot by the offender.

Jon Becker: So what about the teachers? Where are the teachers in these classrooms?

Frank Fernandez: Can you speak to that on the teachers?

Nazmia Comri: Yeah. So in the end, the teacher in room 111 is seriously injured. Part of the procedure that the teacher did when they went into their lockdown procedures while the children kind of went off into the corner, the teacher kind of dropped down based on where that teacher was located. So that teacher was again seriously injured as part of this incident.

For classroom 112 there were two teachers in that classroom, and both teachers are killed. In that incident as well they were found near the students, and one of those teachers happened to be the spouse of one of the officers for the school police department.

Jon Becker: You said of the first 11 responding officers, one of those officers' wives calls him from room 112, and tells him that she is injured in that classroom.

Nazmia Comri: Yes, so there are messages coming, there's a call there's also text messages that come from her, in terms of saying that she has been injured and that she is dying. That information is then later conveyed from that officer to the officers in that immediate area including to the Uvalde Police Department who then as a result of hearing this information about a teacher being injured get on the radio to confirm our classes in session, and they do receive confirmation that classes are in session.

Jon Becker: How far after just from a timeline standpoint is initial engagement what time?

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Nazmia Comri: The initial officers make entry into the CL into the school at 11:36 okay within seconds they are there, and probably within about 30ish seconds they then disengage from those classrooms, and then they kind of circle back. By 11:40 there is no further advancement down the hallway until the 12:21 shots occur which we’ll talk about a little bit later. At that point, there's no further engagement down the hallway.

The initial calls that are coming in to this officer whose wife is in the classroom, occur within seconds of those officers making entry into this school around 11:36.

Frank Fernandez: He's actually in the hallway on the northwest corner. He's the second officer in the hallway, and he's on video with it. He takes his phone out, looks at it, and he shows the phone to the staff that's at the end of the hallway.

Jon Becker: I think that's caught on video right?

Frank Fernandez: That is caught on video, yes.

Jon Becker: Yeah, I remember seeing that. I think one of the things that we need to discuss here as we're doing this is there are a lot of indicators that would spur people to action. You said, they get there initially it's an active shooter, the officers queue up. They start to do the right thing. Here you have an officer who is 25 ft away from his dying wife.

I think one of the most heartbreaking or most difficult things about this case, is that to think that your wife is dying 25 ft away from you, and you're not going to take action is a difficult thing to conceive of. I think kind of the cautionary tale here is but that's what happens. There are several things that are going to happen here that sitting objectively and looking at it you're like, I would never do that. I would never allow that to happen, but yet it does. It's easy to dismiss it, and make hominem attacks against the officers, “No man, they were cowards or they were this, or that or the chief was this”.

In the end, I think one of the cautionary tales here is this can happen. People's ability to override whatever it is that stops this process, is pretty strong.

Frank Fernandez: I would not say that we don't pass judgment on the officers. We only report the facts. We surface the facts, and we learn from those facts. We tell a story about it, and hopefully through that story we're able to create better lesson plans for officers to learn from it, and that's the better outcome that we look for because we don't know how people react.

The sound of a handgun as I'm sure you're aware it's a small thumping sound in comparison to a rifle round. And that's out in the open range you have a rifle, it's a thumping sound that goes off but when that rifle round goes off in a hallway inside of a classroom, it makes your body vibrate.

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Jon Becker: Especially a school with concrete floors and tile walls.

Frank Fernandez: That is going to vibrate in your body, your ears, it's going to overwhelm your senses, you're going to have sensory overload. We don't know how people react to that. If there's lack of training, and there's lack of scenario based training then that becomes even more impactful to that one individual. I don't know the officer that took out his phone, and read that terrible message, why he didn't engage. I think generally speaking people would wonder why. That's not our mission. Our mission is to find out what could have been done better. How do we train officers to overcome those sensory overloads to get into that classroom? Like I said before, it's a bad scenario with any training, we can provide officers. You're going into that funnel of death, and you're going to pray to God that you can make it through that you get lucky, and he does not because it's a bad scenario. You have to go through that door in order to save people and like I said when you take that oath of office we have to remind officers, you're taking an oath of office to put your life second to anybody else. So then that day may come when you get that call that you have to go through that door. It's a terrible-terrible scenario.

I spent 13 years in a SWAT team as an operator, a team leader, a commanding officer, bad situations that I had to tell officers, go through that door. I was a young SWAT officer when I was told, "Go through that door” with a fear that I was going to die going through that door. I was reassured by leadership that said, “Go through that door, it's your job you got to get it done”, and that's where leadership counts here. Officers with that forward momentum from what we indicate from our report, our takeaway is that officers with the forward momentum that they were continuously pushed through that door, told to go through that door, directed to go through that door, they would have gone through that door. It's the leadership that made a difference here, it wasn't the officers. The officers were properly equipped. They had the equipment. They had rifle rounds. They had handgun rounds. They had a shield. All of which we know that active shooter training we don't train with shields we go with the equipment you have. In this particular case all that was present including a significant number of resources in that hallway.

If we were to paint a best case scenario for an active school shooting in terms of personnel who would not want two police chiefs, a lieutenant, two sergeants, two SWAT officers. If you were to pick, this is your inventory of resources. Do you want to go into an active shooter? I think the average officer say, "Yeah I'll take that inventory. I would go with it." So it wasn't about resource deployment. It was more about that forward momentum being stopped at that moment in time, and then paralyzed.

If you fast forward through these horrible 77 minutes, there was a moment in time on the northern hallway where they set up a triage-- I mean a fullscale triage. You think about the leadership not thinking about this if you didn't think there were kids in that classroom… Page 16 of

Jon Becker: Why'd you set up a triage?

Frank Fernandez: Why'd you set up a triage? I interviewed those individuals and I can tell you that just shocked me to think that number one there were officers portraying as medics, not portraying, officers that were engaging their medic training when they had professional paramedics outside the school, and they didn't allow them to come in.

Jon Becker: Nazmia, let's pick back up. Let's continue. I want to kind of continue with the timeline and just kind of bounce back and forth between what's happening and the conversation. We have stalled. Initially we've got about 11 officers. As the timeline moves forward, what's our next kind of signpost in the time?

Nazmia Comri: So again the 11:40 is a really critical point because that really is where as Frank mentioned all forward momentum stops. So at that point, around noonish is where the next kind of big point is. This is really where the school district police chief attempts to start negotiating with the subject. He will begin to shout out to the subject, another officer will attempt to shout out in Spanish, and they're going to attempt to negotiate with the subject. They will never get any response throughout the entire scene and the incident from the subject, or anybody from the classrooms.

Then what will continue is at 12:09, probably one of the more difficult things will occur.

A call will come in from children in room 112. They will call 911, and they’ll be asking for help. They're going to report that there are people dying. That their teachers are dead. They're going to report that they need help. At one point on that call, they're going to offer to open the door for the police. This is probably one of the most difficult sets of calls to listen to because in the end, they'll be on the phone with law enforcement and the dispatcher altogether for over 30 minutes. This information is conveyed to the officers in the hallway. This is conveyed over the radio. They receive confirmation, including from the acting chief of Uvalde police department that they are hearing what is going on in that classroom, and that is I think one of the most difficult things that occurs on top of everything else that is kind of occurring with this incident.

Then 12:21, we have four shots come from inside the classrooms. The subject will shoot four times. And at that point, you'll start to see some of the officers create a stack and start going down the hallway, and you think at that point that they're going to make entry into the classrooms. What will end up happening is they're going to stop short of those classrooms, and it's not going to be till 12:48 that they're going to finally start and make entry into those classrooms. So that's just kind of a high level.

Jon Becker: So at 12:09 we get a 911 call from kids, and it is another. How many minutes before you hear the four shots?

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Nazmia Comri: At 12:21 that the four shots occur.

Jon Becker: So the kids are in room 112 correct that make the call.

Nazmia Comri: Yes.

Jon Becker: So we can probably infer that at the point that they make the call the suspect is probably in room 111.

Nazmia Comri: Exactly.

Jon Becker: He’s bouncing back and forth. I think at one point the teacher in room 111 who is playing dead has been shot, but is playing dead. The suspect begins to kind of figure out if he's alive, pours water on him, shoots him again. Plays with his blood, some other stuff that is kind of weird. The assumption would be that at the point the kids make the call, he's in the other room.

Nazmia Comri: That is the assumption we don't know for a fact but we do believe that the subject was not in that space. The children are not necessarily quiet on the call, you can also hear children crying in the background. They are not whispering, so we do suspect that the subject was in a separate room. But again we would not be able to know for a fact where the subject was at that exact moment.

Jon Becker: Is there any evidence that you uncovered, body worn camera, whatever that the officers outside of the classrooms can hear these calls being made? Apart from the fact that they are made and reported back, is there evidence that the officers in the hallway are hearing these calls from inside room 112?

Nazmia Comri: So it's hard to say there are various points on body worn and camera throughout the entire 77 minutes where officers believe that they can hear something, but it's unclear whether it's coming from rooms 111 and 112 or it's the other classrooms in the hallway. So we cannot ever say definitively that they could hear what was going on in rooms 111 and 112. We can say though that the children in classrooms 112, do hear what is going on in the class in the hallway by the law enforcement officers. They hear law enforcement in the hallways. They hear a lot of what the law enforcement are saying, but again we can't say with anything definitive that the officers can hear what's going on.

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Jon Becker: While this is going on the assumption would be active shooter protocols, we think the subject's here. Are any other classrooms being cleared? Is the rest of the school being cleared?

Frank Fernandez: Absolutely. The school police chief decides to start evacuating classrooms. At one point they go on the outside, they break the window, and they start getting kids out of the window on the west side of the school. It's a low hanging fruit right we can't get inside, so let's go, let's make ourselves active and let's start evacuating classrooms. So they went outside and started getting the kids out. Unfortunately, they didn't get the teacher that was shot in the adjacent room. They didn't get her out until the later part of it. So they went to the low hanging fruit of the furthest point of the classroom, the opposite side of the hallway to take those kids out through the west side windows.

Jon Becker: So at 12:09 when the phone call is made from the kids in the classroom, how many police officers are on scene?

Frank Fernandez: Well we know that we accounted for 377. There may have been more but that's what we accounted for.

Jon Becker: At 12:09?

Frank Fernandez: Well the timeline of the total throughout those 77 minutes. Not all were in the hallway but the hallway was flooded with officers so much so--

Jon Becker: We’re above the original 11 now though by 12:09.

Frank Fernandez: Yeah. At this point they're shoulder-to-shoulder, again no command and control. Anyone with any sort of tactical training would say that this is not in our most advantageous position. The word tactic really comes by way of the defined tactic is a advantageous position. Having so many officers in a hallway does not provide an advantageous position. You talk about crossfire, all this existed in that hallway they put rifles in front of a shield, the shield behind. There was a guy with a rifle holding a shield.

These are all the errors that you see tactically that did not place them in an advantageous position. Again leadership should look down that hallway and say, "This looks too cluttered. Let's remove people that are unnecessary."

Page 19 of We have video and photographs of an officer in shorts and in Crocs, slip-on shoes with a vest on. That's another indication of lack of leadership. When you have 377 or so resources available, why would you allow someone who's not fully equipped to be in that hallway. Those people should be removed.

The self-deployment played a negative factor in this response, so many resources responded. If they respond and there's command and control on the outside to control those resources, and deploy them to the appropriate spots that would have been appropriate. In this particular case, it was a free flow of resources going into wherever they wanted to.

Jon Becker: Yeah, and you would presume police officers tend to be young, and have young families. You would presume that a lot of the officers on scene here have kids in this school. I would imagine or I'm going to assume that the self-deployment here is going to be pretty high.

Frank Fernandez: Not only is that high but the environment and the atmosphere on the outside if you will it's very tense. There's parents that are arriving. They're questioning the officers. They want to go inside the classroom. We have a school where a lot of misinformation is being delivered. Nazmia can speak to a lot of the communication problems that took place throughout the evolution of this whole situation.

I always go back to that initial response. You said it earlier: Those officers all of them responded with the best of intentions. Their forward momentum was textbook. It's when that momentum stopped that everything went the wrong way.

Jon Becker: The Uvalde school chief of police, has he declared himself the instant commander? Do we have an incident commander or has he defaulted into incident commander because he has more stars on his collar?

Frank Fernandez: He is the closest chief to that door and he assumed command immediately, by declaring a barricaded subject by trying to negotiate and giving directions to the officers. Now the de facto incident commander should have been the Uvalde police chief or acting police chief. He's down the hallway. He has the right position to assume command to have a good field of view of what's happening to now allocate resources, to set up an ICS system. All these things could have been playing, but none of them happened. Everybody was self-deployed. When we talk about selfdeployment, that happened in the hallway. You see a hodgepodge of resources that didn't make any sense at all in any type of setting. Officers in a prone position have a rifle. Another one standing right behind him in another rifle position with another guy with a handgun behind that one.

Page 20 of So there's no organization of effort. There's no coordination of effort, and there's no alignment of resources at all. You have a chief on one side and a chief on the other side.

There's a lieutenant. There's other command personnel present there. As we get closer to the end of this before they make entry, there are additional high-ranking people arriving at the school and entering the hallway to get a field of view. You see them at the end of the hallway with pads in hand, the pad looking down the hallway. These are people that have command authority, positional authority to make decisions.

Nazmia Comri: I think to answer your question, there was never an implementation of incident command. You never had somebody come on and say, "I'm taking charge."

There were actions as Frank mentioned, the actions in terms of what the school chief was doing, but no one ever took command. That also played out into how the perimeter was, and really the fact that there was really no perimeter. It was officers that were selfdeploying that just started to create a perimeter but you didn't have a staging area, you didn't have a command post. It's not until after the incident ends around 1:10 that they start to create a command post at the funeral home. So that is also what leads to a lot of the issues that we see that Frank is talking about is that no one really took that incident command, and let alone there was never an unified command.

So you have all these law enforcement to Frank's point, all these leaders who also have the school, no one is sitting down and bringing everyone together and trying to coordinate.

Jon Becker: Yeah. It's just a cluster. All right, let's keep moving forward with the timeline. So we are now 12:09. We get the calls from the kids inside the classroom. A few minutes later, we hear four gunshots. Obviously we can't draw any positive conclusions, but you would assume that he may have heard the kids make the call, and went into room 112, and then executed those kids. What's the next thing that happens? When the cops or the guys in the hall hear the four shots, what happens?

Nazmia Comri: They attempt to make a stack, and they go down the hallway. You have sheriff's deputies from neighboring counties. You have Bortach which is the Customs and Border Protection Tactical Unit. You have the Texas Department of Public Safety, and other law enforcement that start, and in the end it's about 20 officers that just make their way down the hallway. Then they're going to stop. They're going to stop approximately where the fire doors are, and there's going to be this now focused on trying to find the keys. They're really focused on how they can get into the classrooms.

We'll then fast forward to about 12:36. They will officially find a key that works in the janitor's closet. Janitor's closet is right next to rooms 111 and 112. They'll also test the key on rooms 131 and 132. Once they know that that key works, they will then start to move forward with their plan. The Bortach commander will then connect. Soon after some of the Bortach members will also show up from his team, they will kind of connect.

One of them happens to be a sniper. They're going to try to create a plan to determine if Page 21 of he could see into the classroom from outside of the classroom, and then in the end around 12:48, the Bortach commander will insert the key into the door, we'll turn the door, hence the piece about what Frank mentioned we don't know 100% that the door is unlocked, but we do suspect it was. They will allow the door or the doorway to breathe for about a minute before they will make entry into the classroom. I don't know if you want to continue from there Frank.

Frank Fernandez: Yeah, once they get inside they're looking.

Jon Becker: Which classroom, 111, 112?

Nazmia Comri: 111.

Jon Becker: Okay.

Frank Fernandez: They penetrate the door. They go inside. Just inside the door they see the subject coming out of a closet, it's right in front of them. There's a small triangle location in the corner. The door opens up and that's where they engage him.

Jon Becker: Does he get a shot off at Bortac or do they…?

Frank Fernandez: There were a total of 45 rounds fired by the offender. We don't know if any of those rounds were fired at Bortac.

Nazmia Comri: When those officers make entry into the classroom there will be gunfire, there will be a firefight excuse me.

Jon Becker: Yeah there's going to be a gunfight, got it.

Nazmia Comri: One of the Bortach members does end up sustaining injuries. He does have two injuries, a graze and then in the side of his head and then also his foot. The other officers will not sustain any physical injuries. In the end they will end up shooting and killing the subject as part of that firefight.

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Jon Becker: Got it. That is 12:48.

Nazmia Comri: Yes. By 12:50. So it's 12:48 when they open the door. By 12:50 the subject is dead, and at that point, they have now turned on the lights and law enforcement will flood the two classrooms.

Jon Becker: So in total, we have the two teachers in room killed and the teacher in room 112 are killed. The teacher in room 111 survives. How many kids are there in each room, and what is the ratio of injured to killed?

Nazmia Comri: So every child in room 111 that was present that day will be killed. So the only person that comes out of room 111 that day will be the teacher, and again severely injured.

Room 112 we'll have approximately 10 students who will be carried out of the classroom that will survive, carried or dragged out of that classroom that will survive.

They have varying injuries, physical injuries as well. In total between those two classrooms, 19 children are killed. Two teachers are killed. We do also in room 109 have a teacher that was also injured through a shooting from the walls of the subject early on, and then a child with that teacher is hit by shrapnel during that incident, so there are also two in that separate classroom.

I think one thing that's also important to know is that due to the disorganization of, and the fact that there was no incident command, we also saw that there were several children and teachers that were physically injured. For example, as Frank mentioned about the evacuations through glass, there are kids that are injured with glass on their hands on their bodies that are never actually seen by any medical personnel. What ends up happening is as children and staff are being evacuated, they are not being seen as part of a process. We saw that even with the kids that are pulled out of room 112. In that scene or that incident where the children are being pulled out, they're actually put on a school bus with the intent to take them to the reunification center. They're put on that school bus. They're covered in blood. They've been in this room for 77 minutes. While they're on the school bus they are joined by two Texas Department of Public Safety troopers. It is during that that they determine that two of those children have been physically shot, and that's when they divert the bus to the hospital to have all of the children looked at in room 112.

Jon Becker: I remember seeing a video of that bus which is absolutely gut-wrenching.

It's just a terrible video. One of the more I don't know compelling but horrific stories from room 112 is two little girls.

Nazmia Comri: Really all of the children. I don't think any of us could ever imagine the horror that they go through on that day. So really the children calling the police, calling Page 23 of 911, sharing this information about what they are dealing with in room 112, at various points the children are trying to tell the fellow children that have been either physically injured or emotionally, and mentally traumatized to stay quiet. Help is on the way.

Really trying what they can to keep the other children as calm as possible. That just kind of carries forward into this day that the children, and all of the survivors just the strength of everything that they've been through, whether the physical injuries, and again, the traumatic and the the mental injury that they will have to sustain for the rest of their lives, and really just the impact across the families and the community is just heart-wrenching.

Jon Becker: Yeah. I remember hearing the story of the two little girls that are in the room, and are trying to survive and literally coat themselves in their classmates blood, so that they can hide and not not be detected. Ultimately it works and they both end up surviving. There are these moments, these little microcosms of this thing that I think we were very inclined with these situations, and it's true with all these situations to kind of sanitize them, to look at them. We do this with all of these situations where we say, “Oh, 12 officers were killed, or three family members were killed”. We don't really want to dig into it because it hurts, and it's ugly, and we don't want to think about it. The problem with that approach is it also makes it easier for us to forget. It makes it easier for us to look at these situations and say, "Well oh it probably wasn't that bad." But the thing that stuck out to me is I have kids, so I can't imagine the horror of this. I think it's these moments that are kind of microcosms that force us to reexamine, and we need to look at this. As you said, none of these officers went there intending to have this result but the result that occurs is not an acceptable result.

I think that one of the things that I like about the report that you did, it's not about fixing blame, it doesn't matter whose fault it is. The question is systemically what are we doing wrong. What is going wrong with the way we are responding to these incidents, and where are we losing the momentum? As you said Frank, the initial narrative was none of these officers were trained in active shooter. I struggled with that initially because the alert center is in Texas. It's one of the national centers for this kind of response. It was difficult for me to believe that in the 400 officers that responded, none of them had been through alert training.

When you looked at the training of these officers, what was the training level of the responders?

Frank Fernandez: We do have a very detailed report about the training inside the report. It does indicate a level of training, and maybe not consistent but there is some exposure to training. The SWAT officers had attended several SWAT courses throughout their career. We actually highlight the 11 officers that were in the hallway, the number of hours of training that was actually embedded into that first response. It's quite significant that the amount of hours that were invested in those officers in training. Even today I still say that there's no reason not to have training. It may not even be physical training. It could be on the line training. We all have cell phones. We have whether it's an iPhone, or some other type of phone, their smartphones you get online. We have all Page 24 of kinds of resources throughout the country that provide training for free. Texas has a very Robust system for this. So the fact that they didn't know how to do it, didn't want to do it, that's a leadership problem. It's not an officer problem. That is the chief's responsibility as a former chief that I would take full responsibility for it, and say it was my job. I needed to make sure my officers were ready, and trained and properly equipped to respond to any type of situation.

In this particular case because active school shootings are so rampant, and so constant, unfortunately there's no reason for us for a police chief have to think about where my equipment is, how's my training, are the officers ready to engage when it comes up.

Leadership matters. It mattered at that moment in time in the hallway. But it also matters significantly in the pre-planning and preparation before the incident to coordinate with the school police chief. “Hey listen, if something happens I'm the Uvalde police chief. How are we going to handle this? Are you in command or are we in command?” Think systematically about the systems that are in play. When anyone dials 911, it doesn't go to the school police, it goes to the Uvale Police Department. That alone should tell you that Uvalde PD should be--

Jon Becker: They're in charge.

Frank Fernandez: They're in charge. The sheer number of officers that are responding that overwhelm the ones that you have in the Uvalde Police Department. Leadership matters, what you say, the words that you say, how you prepare your officers every day towards that daily engagement that when you swear them in as officers that it means something. There's a meaning behind that oath of office, and that when that deadly day comes up that you have to engage you're going to give them the best opportunity to survive that deadly encounter; that's a chief's job.

Jon Becker: Yeah it's interesting it was Alexander the Great that said, "I'd rather have an army of sheep led by a lion than an army of lions led by a sheep." It is easy to look at this and go, "Well they weren't trained they weren't whatever." But part of me looks at this and says, "Are we doing enough stress inoculation training?" When we are training our law enforcement, Uvalde is not unique. Uvalde is Columbine. This is the same recurring problem.

I interviewed a performance psychologist named Britney Looney who's embedded with the Seventh Special Forces Group, and we talked a lot about stress inoculation training.

It strikes me that one of the things that you said is we have momentum. We're in. We're at the door. We know where the suspect is. We're three minutes into the event, and all of a sudden we slam on the brakes, come to a stop. That is a leadership question but it's also I think a stress inoculation question.

Page 25 of I think that it becomes easy to stop. As you said nobody wants to go through that door.

That's a horrible situation.

Frank Fernandez: That's why I say that you're right, it does become easy to stop. It's a natural instinct for a human body to say a human person to say "I don't want to kill myself. I'm going to stop." That's our natural instinctive survival that we have in play, but it takes leadership to push those officers through that door to accomplish their mission, and their obligation as a police officer. It's difficult to say they're going to do it on their own, some do, some have done it. Some of the active shooter situations we've seen across the country, officers on their own have acted independently. I'll tell you that even today in terms of training, in terms of training them properly I still see school police officers being trained, and they go on the media and they showcase before the school season starts. You may have even seen it this past school season, and they're training in teams and you see operating in with three officers going down the hallway.

When in fact we know that typically, it's one officer at a school. So they should be training one officer responding by themselves. You're lucky if you get a second and a third. But to train officers in ballistic helmets in the shield and to have the vest on it, that's not going to happen. You need to train with the low lowest common denominator, then build it up from there. The lowest common denominator is an officer with a handgun walking the school, and shots go off, you got to go.

Jon Becker: The opening episode of this season is Parkland, where you have a school resource officer that doesn't take action. As I said it's easy to look at these things and go, "Well it's that guy. It's that thing." But it's not. We are systemically failing here. We are missing something in the way we are training law enforcement leadership, and the way we're training responding officers that this is the byproduct of.

I know that the report has an extensive list of kind of lessons learned and recommendations for improvement, but just to kind of conclude with you guys what is Frank's top three to five ‘we really need this’?

Frank Fernandez: The top three is number one, I would say that it's supervision and leadership. Make sure they're properly trained. Train the leadership first, then train the officers. In many cases we see officers going to training and there's supervisors in the training, the supervisor get an executive version of it. They should train together so the supervisors know exactly what the officers are going to be doing. I think the second part of this is that pre-planning, and preparation is key, if it starts wrong it ends wrong. You have to have that pre-planning in place, have those MUS. Make sure you're coordinating with other agencies that you're going to work with in a tragic situation like this. So preplan it ahead of time.

I think the final part of this is to make sure that you have the equipment but that you've trained with that equipment. We saw many situations here where they didn't know how Page 26 of to use the equipment, equipment wasn’t used properly. They asked for shields, and when they moved forward left shields behind.

Jon Becker: One of the things that struck me here is they're looking for a key, is there no breaching equipment anywhere?

Frank Fernandez: Nazmia, do you recall? at the initial response I don't recall.

Jon Becker: Even when Bortach gets there, we're looking for a key. Why are we looking for a key and not just breaching the door with breaching tools?

Nazmia Comri: The Bortach commander does have a halligan tool, and there are various equipment at one point they have a sledgehammer on the scene. In the end the Bortach breacher is actually setting up water explosives, actually by the funeral home when they end up making entry. But there is just this big focus on finding the key to get into the doorways.

Jon Becker: The other thing that has struck me with a lot of these events, and you see it is my friend Kevin Seir who's the RCMP commander in the west coast of Canada, he talks about “keeping your brain busy becomes an excuse to not make a decision”. Sometimes we become very focused on I need this one piece of information, if I can get this one piece of information then I can make a decision. And really what you're doing is avoiding making a decision. There seems to be a great deal of that here where this process of things, we're looking for this, or we're trying to find this or it it strikes me that you kind of end up in these do loops that delay what should be action. The national standard that everyone teaches is immediate action here, but once it stalls, it never picks momentum up.

Were there fights? Were there arguments? Are there people? I feel at some point here probably somebody is screaming at this chief of police. Does that happen from what you guys can tell?

Frank Fernandez: Nazmia, I don't recall any arguments, do you in terms of evidence?

Nazmia Comri: So there are times where officers will say, "Why aren't we going in?" At one point officers will offer, "Why don't we try to distract? We'll hit the windows and a team can go in." So it's not a fight per se, but at times there will be those kinds of conversations, but each time those will be kind of nobody will respond to those or the school chief will say, "No we're going to focus on getting these other classrooms Page 27 of evacuated." But I wouldn't say that there was anyone ever yelling at each other or any physical fights, but there are those times that the officers are really trying to understand why nobody is going in.

Jon Becker: The decision inertia just builds. Nazmia, are there any of your lessons learned that stick out to you?

Nazmia Comri: So not to repeat what Frank has said but a couple recommendations that, I think are really important, we do recommend in the report that every law enforcement officer go through training on an annual basis. We say 8 hours scenario based stress inoculation training. We really do think that that's an important piece. We also found that as part when we went around, and looked at training even when you were asking about the training that the officers have been through, it's different looking at the number of hours they've done versus what kind of training they have and what kind of quality training. We do talk about that in the report. I think that's a really important piece. I definitely recognize when we recognize as a team training hours are really difficult. We're having staffing difficulties, and so training is really difficult. I think agencies can be creative on how they do that. Incorporate that maybe into your firearm calls. Maybe incorporate that into your roll call. How can you get to those eight hours each year, so I think that's an important piece.

I think another important piece is when you put somebody in an acting position they assume all responsibility of whatever that position is. So saying that “I am just an acting chief”, will not cut it. When you are put in an acting chief position you will assume all those responsibilities as a chief, and you should be trained and have the experience and expertise to be able to do that. To Frank's point if you cannot do that, then somebody else needs to be able to step in on that.

I think this is really the final thing and I think an important piece when we talk about how the number of law enforcement agencies across the country that are smaller, the importance of multi-jurisdictional multi- agency training is key. You have to be able to coordinate and to be able to practice in advance of a situation. You should not be trying to figure out who each of your officers are in the midst of a crisis. I think that's a really important piece. To your point about why we're still failing I think so many communities still don't believe that this can happen in their community and we really have to be saying, let's prepare because we don't ever know when this could happen but we need to be prepared.

Frank Fernandez: I also think that we still see a lot of SWAT teams being used to train active shooters, and there's no role for a SWAT team in an active shooter. It's highly unlikely that a SWAT team is going to be at that moment in time.

Jon Becker: Yeah it's patrol.

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Frank Fernandez: This is a single officer patrol SRO that's going to be there, but around the country we still see video footage from newscasters showcasing a SWAT team doing an active shooter training at a school. It's a SWAT team being deployed, a rapid response team being deployed and those are unrealistic situations that gets into the the mindset of a police officer, “If this happens, these SWAT offers are going to respond and take care of it, or the rapid response team is going to come so I'm just going to hold the fort until they get here”. That's setting these officers up for a bad bad outcome. We've got to train them for these really-really bad situations where that day comes where you may have to go through that door and eliminate that threat.

Jon Becker: I think that's a fantastic place for us to stop. Guys, thank you so much for sitting down with me and doing this. I'm hoping that people will pull your report and read it. We'll link to the site in the show notes and link to the report. I appreciate the fact that you guys did this work. I know this was a lot of work, but these stories need to be told, and this math needs to be done. So thank you for doing it.

Frank Fernandez: You're welcome.

Nazmia Comri: Thank you for the opportunity to share this information with your listeners.

Jon Becker: Absolutely.