As if the sight of dozens of fully armed police officers stacked and snugged against the halls of the schoolhouse – peeking safely from around corners, doing nothing as children and teachers called repeatedly for help, cowering as the slaughter goes unanswered – wasn’t enough to engender utter disgust and heartrending sadness. Where damn near every last thing went so horribly, inexcusably, and unnecessarily wrong, and cost so very dearly.

The hits on this horror show just keep coming. A joint report out this morning from the WaPo, Texas Tribune, and ProPublica will cause the bile and tears to well up all over again.

Oh, my God, is it hard to read.

Not just a retelling of some of the more gut-wrenching moments of the siege and botched operation, but a detailed analysis of the emergency medical response to the school shooting. Nineteen kiddos and two teachers died, and the emergency services story is another complete and total disaster.

…Law enforcement’s well-documented failure to confront the shooter who terrorized the school for 77 minutes was the most serious problem in getting victims timely care, experts said. But previously unreleased records, obtained by The Washington Post, the Texas Tribune and ProPublica, for the first time show that communication lapses and muddled lines of authority among medical responders further hampered treatment.

…Three victims who emerged from the school with a pulse later died. In the case of two of those victims, critical resources were not available when medics expected they would be, delaying hospital treatment for Mireles, 44, and student Xavier Lopez, 10, records show.

…The disjointed medical response frustrated medics while delaying efforts to get ambulances, air transport and other emergency services to victims. Medical helicopters with critical supplies of blood tried to land at the school, but an unidentified fire department official told them to wait at an airport three miles away. Dozens of parked police vehicles blocked the paths of ambulances trying to reach victims.

Multiple cameras worn by officers and one on the dashboard of a police car showed two ambulances positioned outside the school when the shooter was killed. That was not nearly enough for the 10 or more gunshot victims then still alive, though additional ambulances began arriving 10 minutes later. Six students, including one who was seriously wounded, were taken to a hospital in a school bus with no trained medics on board, according to Texas EMS records.

…Although helicopters were available, none were used to carry victims directly from the school. At least four patients who survived were flown by helicopter to a more fully equipped trauma center in San Antonio after first being driven by ambulance to a nearby hospital or airport.

Meticulously documented with transcripts, audio, maps and video, the article lays out in detail how emergency responders stumbled from practically the beginning of the siege. The first two ambulances arrived on the scene, but the subsequent influx of law enforcement blocked the streets, as did the vehicles of panicked parents rushing to the school.

Again, as with the law enforcement arm, there was no one in charge. And no one took charge.

…Medics on helicopters and in ambulances who responded to the Uvalde shooting told investigators they were confused about who was in charge, where they should be stationed and how many victims to expect. Some of them pleaded to be allowed closer to the scene. In the absence of clear guidance, experts said, medics did the best they could while trying to save lives.

“They were told, essentially, to go to the airport and wait,” according to an interview the Texas Rangers conducted with Julie Lewis, the regional manager for AirLIFE, an air medical transport service that sent three helicopters from the greater San Antonio area.

“They couldn’t figure out who was in command.”

Reading again how police officer Rueben Ruiz desperately tried to save his wife is difficult. She believed her husband was coming – he told her “We’re coming. We’ll be there” when she called, telling him someone was shooting at the school. And then Ruiz was prevented from saving her by fellow officers. None who had the courage to go in with him and then there were even those who went as far as stripping him of his weapon – for his own safety, you understand.

That’s revolting enough to turn your stomach.

…About 20 minutes later, his wife called again.

At 11:56 a.m., he shouted, “She says she’s shot!”

TWENTY MINUTES have passed and police have done nothing.

But when you learn what that magnificent woman, shot while protecting her students, had the presence of mind to do, even as she lay wounded – and then you find out she might not have had to bleed out after all? Oh, Lord.

…Trapped inside her classroom, Mireles tied a plastic bag around her arm to help slow the blood loss, one of her students told investigators. Another child in Room 112 told investigators that Mireles tried to protect him. The boy was hit in the back of his shoulder but survived.

At least two students used Mireles’s phone to call 911, begging officers to send help.

The children trapped in that horrific situation knew their beloved teacher had little time left, as did so many of their classmates who lay in the carnage.

Finally, a Border Patrol tactical team arrived at the school and took charge of the chaos…

…With no one clearly in charge of the police or medical responses, an elite Border Patrol tactical team that began arriving at the school at 12:10 p.m. assumed both roles, according to a July report by a state House committee tasked with investigating the response.

…breaching the classroom, and neutralizing the murderer, who’d popped out of a closet, firing, as they stormed in.

77 precious minutes had elapsed.

…Officers who had packed the hallway now filled the classrooms. Ruiz ran back into the school, looking for his wife. Children lay on the floor, many near or on top of each other, most of them dead.

Officers and EMS personnel trying to clear dead and wounded children from the school became its own frantic exercise in danse macabre.

…Officers quickly began taking victims to a triage area inside the school, carrying some by their limbs. With so many law enforcement officers and first responders at the scene, there was little space to move. Some children were placed in a line on each side of the hallway.

One local medic later complained to investigators that the response was so chaotic that emergency crews were stepping on victims.

EMS personnel on the scene were practically crying with frustration. They could feel heartbeats but could find no helicopters, or ambulances for transport.

…“I can still feel the heart,” Aviles yelled, as he later recounted to investigators in an interview punctuated with sobs. “I need a f—ing plane. I need a helicopter down. I need to get a kid inside there!”

Or worse – rushed that same critically wounded child to a helo…that wasn’t there.

…Aviles had heard that the wounded were being airlifted from a field on the west side of the school, so he and other medics put the boy on a stretcher and began rushing him out to the dusty patch of grass at 12:56 p.m.

There was no helicopter.

So they made a snap decision to drive their little patient, first to San Antonio, then to Hondo, a city 40 miles away, with a Texas state trooper desperately performing CPR in the rear for the entire ride.

…State records show that Neese did not have an EMT or paramedic license in Texas, but he performed CPR on Xavier for more than 30 minutes while a medic tried to treat the boy’s wounds. The ambulance diverted to Medina Regional Hospital in Hondo, about 40 miles from Uvalde, where doctors declared the child dead shortly after 2 p.m., according to his family.

A helicopter arrived near Robb Elementary at 1:15 p.m., eight minutes after the ambulance departed.

There were five medical helos on the scene, but the report shows not one of them transported any child from either affected classroom off the school grounds. Supposedly due to restrictions on landing in a zone with an active shooter, but police were calling for medical evac helos within ten minutes of killing the shooter. And still not one landed in the schoolyard.

Communication and command authority chaos.

There is so much pain contained in this for the parents of those precious little victims – I do not know how one maintains a grip on one’s sanity, frankly, in the face of it.

There are nauseating rounds of basically “not my job” evasions from the Uvalde EMS manager, the executive director of the trauma care regional coordinating agency, etc. – just a litany of deadly incompetence. For example, with all their services provided by contractors, the Uvalde EMS director claimed his only function was “managing assets.” Yet he left it to his deputy to direct (or attempt to) the medics arriving on-scene and the second the fire chief of the neighboring county showed up, he turned command of the whole thing over to him! WHUT.

Not a single soul had a clue, nor made any attempt to take charge. Unforgivable.

…Multiple medics expressed confusion over who was in charge of the medical response and where to go.

“There was no EMS command and control,” said Julio Perez, a medic for AirLIFE, who told investigators he was pleading to help. “Nobody could tell me anything.”

How does anyone who had a paying gig in this town sleep at night? You can bet your last bippy not a one of them are answering any questions ever.

Brave teacher Eva Mireles, who had tied a bag around her arm in an effort to staunch the bleeding…

…But footage shows that Mireles was conscious and responsive when she was pulled from the classroom…

…now lay on the sidewalk alongside the school.

From the WaPo’s graphics:

A Border Patrol medic said in an interview with investigators: “I asked the guys, ‘Hey let’s not work on her here.’ But we look to the right and there’s no ambulances. So we had to work on her there.”

But there were two ambulances parked about 100 feet away.

She lay on the ground for more than 10 minutes, during which six ambulances arrived and two left. It’s unclear why Mireles was not immediately put into one of these ambulances.

Eva Mireles finally made it to an ambulance, where they did chest compressions, transfusions, and administered fluids for the next 40 minutes…until there wasn’t any more they could do.

…The ambulance that Mireles was inside never left the school curb.

I don’t know how these people sleep at night.

How do any of them still have their jobs?!

tough reading

Make yourself read it, and remember there's been almost no accountability https://t.co/URULw8sJkO

— Andrew Donaldson (@four4thefire) December 20, 2022

Demand better of the people you pay to protect and serve. That shouldn’t be a hollow empty phrase when the rubber meets the road, or refuse hits the fan and the consequences for betraying that trust should be swift and severe.

“Not my job” when it was? And then you’re still IN THAT JOB? Inconceivable.

All those precious little lives and those two women who had dedicated their lives to them lost in such senseless horror. To have so many “but WHAT IFs” with the firepower and medical help available on scene and (besides the Border Patrol agent with a borrowed shotgun who got his wife, daughter and others evacuated)…not ONE hero that day?

Not. One?

UnAmerican.

Honest to God. I do not know how these people sleep at night.