Five Texas Department of Public Safety officers will face an investigation into their actions during the response to the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde in May.
Two of the officers have been suspended with pay until the investigation concludes, while the other three remain on duty, the Texas Tribune reported.
The officers were referred to the state Inspector General’s Office for a formal investigation after the department conducted an internal review into the conduct of its officers during the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead.
Texas DPS spokesperson Travis Considine said the department has completed the internal review and will not publicly release the names of the five officers, ABC News reported.
The investigation comes after a Texas House of Representatives committee issued a report in July detailing “systemic failures” by authorities — including local, state and federal law enforcement officers — during the shooting
Officials around the nation have questioned why it took 77 minutes for police to breach a pair of adjoining rooms where a gunman was mercilessly slaughtering fourth-grade students and their teachers.
The Uvalde school board voted unanimously last month to fire district police chief Pete Arredondo, who was the on-scene commander, over the botched police response.
Texas DPS director Steven McCraw has called the police response to the shooting an “abject failure.”
McCraw testified before a state Senate committee that Arredondo was “the only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers” from entering the adjoining fourth grade classrooms where the shooter was mercilessly slaughtering students and their teachers.
He said Arredondo “decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” arguing that law enforcement had a large enough presence at the scene of the shootings to have stopped the 18-year-old gunman within three minutes if the on-scene commander had not kept officers from entering the rooms.
Police officers with rifles gathered in the hallway outside the classroom for nearly an hour while the gunman, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, carried out his attack.
Arredondo previously told the Texas Tribune that he and another group of officers tried to open the doors to classrooms 111 and 112 but that the doors were reinforced and impenetrable.
While reports have indicated police were waiting for a master set of keys to enter the classrooms, an officer said a Halligan bar, an ax-like forcible-entry tool, arrived eight minutes after the shooter entered the building, according to McGraw. Authorities did not use the tool, which was not brought into the school until an hour after the first officers entered the building, and instead waited for keys, according to a Texas Tribune report.
McGraw said the classroom door could not be locked from the inside and testified that the officers never tried to see if the door was unlocked.
McCraw sent an email to Texas DPS staff in July detailing a new policing policy in the wake of the massacre, according to a new CNN report.
“DPS Officers responding to an active shooter at a school will be authorized to overcome any delay to neutralizing an attacker,” McCraw wrote.
“When a subject fires a weapon at a school he remains an active shooter until he is neutralized and is not to be treated as a ‘barricaded subject,'” he added.
McCraw continued: “Every agency that responded that day shares in this failure, including DPS.”