This feels shocking even though it’s been obvious from the start that it must have been the case. They knew the gunman was locked in a classroom with young kids; they knew he’d fired many rounds already. Some of those shots must have hit their targets. As a matter of simple probability, not all were apt to be fatal.

They waited in the hallway for 45 minutes anyway, accepting the risk that children were bleeding out on the other side of the door.

Did they assume that all of them were dead? Why did they assume that?

We knew all of this from the jump. And yet — shocking.

The chief, Pete Arredondo, and others at the scene became aware that not everyone inside the classrooms was already dead, the documents showed, including a report from a school district police officer whose wife, a teacher, had spoken to him by phone from one of the classrooms to say she had been shot.

More than a dozen of the 33 children and three teachers originally in the two classrooms remained alive during the 1 hour and 17 minutes from the time the shooting began inside the classrooms to when four officers made entry, law enforcement investigators have concluded. By that time, 60 officers had assembled on scene…

According to the documents, Chief Arredondo, who had earlier focused on evacuating other classrooms, began to discuss breaching the classrooms where the gunman was holed up about an hour after the gunfire started inside the school at 11:33 a.m. He did so after several shots could be heard inside the classrooms, after a long lull, around 12:21 p.m., video footage showed.

The cops didn’t break their way into the classroom and shoot the gunman until 12:50, which means it still took half an hour after the shots at 12:21 for them to get inside. According to the Times, a teacher called her husband — a cop — early on from inside the school to say that she’d been wounded. He told the other officers present at the scene about the call when he arrived there, at 11:48. It was more than one hour *from that point* before the police went in.

The officer’s wife ended up dying in the ambulance. Three kids were wounded but alive when the cops finally got to them but died at the hospital later. “He could have been saved,” said one man of his 10-year-old grandson. “The police did not go in for more than an hour. He bled out.”

Apparently, they were held back because there were no protective shields for officers at the scene. They had to be retrieved and that took time, which is hard to explain given that the school district PD had trained repeatedly for mass shootings. One would think that shields and body armor would be at the ready for responding officers in case the call ever came.

That wasn’t the only thing that went wrong:

A cascade of failures took place at the school: the local police radio system, later tests showed, did not function properly inside the building; classroom doors could not be quickly locked in an emergency; and after an initial burst of shooting from the gunman, no police officer went near the door again for more than 40 minutes, instead hanging back at a distance in the hallway.

The radios were apparently designed for longer-distance communication, not the close confines of a building. Arredondo didn’t even have a radio when he got there. And the exterior door through which the shooter entered didn’t lock automatically either.

What was the school district doing during its prior mass-shooting drills to ensure safety, exactly? No one ever … checked the doors and radios?

It also turns out that some of the first cops on the scene had rifles, which meant they wouldn’t have been outgunned if they had confronted the shooter despite the fact that he was wearing body armor.

Uvalde announced today that they plan to hire more officers to patrol school campuses. “I can understand wanting more cops on staff, after nine or ten hours camping out during a shooting you’ll want a second shift to come in and relieve you until the morning,” a Twitter pal replied.

NPR asked the former FBI agent who developed the Bureau’s active-shooter protocols what she thought of the response in Uvalde. She’s as shocked as we are. “That the law enforcement was there for an hour on the other side of a wall is just unheard of. I couldn’t have written this if I’d written a script,” she said. The FBI rule is simple: When you’re responding to a mass shooting, you move towards the shooter until he stops you or you stop him.

[W]hen there is active shooting underway, even if it’s a single officer, you must pursue to the sound of the shooting or where you believe the shooter is. You must pursue all the way to the shooter and neutralize the shooter. That is the lone objective, and that — you should never waver from that.

A law enforcement officer, if they’re trained, should continue moving forward, even if it means busting through a door, shooting through a door. I recognize the risks that are going through their heads, ‘oh, my gosh, there’s children in that classroom. I don’t want to hurt a child. I don’t want to’ — but we need to pursue, pursue, pursue, because the shooters have already proven that they’re willing to kill people, and they’ll continue doing it. That’s why the priority is, you keep moving forward, even if it means you go through walls and if you go through windows and if you go through doors.

Tthe collateral damage continues to mount. One Uvalde mom told People magazine that her daughter was best friends with a girl who was murdered by the gunman. When they visited a memorial to the victim last week, her daughter’s heart rate spiked so high that doctors feared she was on the verge of a heart attack. She’s 11 years old. She’s still in the hospital a week later — not the first person uninjured in the shooting to suffer heart trouble while trying to cope in the aftermath.

The Uvalde school superintendent was asked today if Pete Arredondo is still the school district police chief. No comment.