Such doors, he said, occasionally are spotted during assessments of buildings, particularly older ones. “That school," he said of Robb Elementary, “I can promise you, is not the only one in this country that you can’t lock the doors from the inside." He lamented that it was still an issue a decade later. Mo Canady, the executive director of the National Association of School Resource Officers, spoke publicly about the importance of being able to secure doors after Sandy Hook. Sandy Hook Elementary was built around the same time as Robb Elementary, in 1956. Some victims’ families have said lives could have been saved if teachers had been able to lock classroom doors from the inside, and they questioned whether two teachers who were killed in the shooting, Victoria Soto and Lauren Rousseau, even had access to keys.Īnother teacher who could not get a classroom door locked told investigators that she looked into the hallway, saw a janitor who yelled at the gunman to leave and motioned to the janitor to lock her door. Today, it also is general practice that all exterior doors are locked during school hours, except during drop-off and pick-up, he said.Īt Sandy Hook Elementary School, the doors of the two classrooms where all 20 children were killed in the 2012 massacre, along with their teachers, could only be locked from the hallway with a key. The Columbine tragedy led to an evolution in school construction, he said, with most new classrooms designed to provide locking from inside via a key or thumb turn. “Locking from inside the classroom may not have been a popular option out of concern that students could lock the teacher out,” he said. Ferking is a design leader for DLR Group, an architecture firm that specializes in school design. Many schools designed in the 20th century featured classroom doors that locked from the outside, allowing the teacher or administrator to lock up as they left for the day, Todd Ferking explained in an email. “To me," Stephens said, “there’s just a whole cascade of apparent failures that took place in this particular situation." He said police instead waited for more than an hour for a key. McCraw also disclosed Tuesday that despite the door being unlocked, there was no indication officers tried to open it during the standoff. Stephens and Trump also raised alarms about the fact that the door was broken, describing it as a maintenance issue. “This is ridiculous and it’s inexcusable,” McCraw said of the fact that the classroom door could not be locked from inside. Once inside the school, the shooter then entered a classroom though a door that was designed to be locked from the outside, according to McCraw, who also said a teacher reported before the shooting that the lock was broken. WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE GUNMAN REACHED THE CLASSROOM DOOR? Robb Elementary is an older building, constructed in 1955. “Shouldn’t the security of the school be as safe as the security of your home?" he asked.Įxperts did not explain during the hearing why the school’s exterior door locked from outside. He likened it to a house that could only be locked from the outside. Ronald Stephens, executive director of the National School Safety Center, said he was “astonished" that the exterior door could only be locked from the outside. The gunman “walked straight through,” McCraw said Tuesday in blistering testimony at a state Senate hearing in Austin. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, further amended what his agency's investigation shows: The teacher did close the door, but unbeknownst to her, it could be locked only from the outside.
State police initially said the gunman entered the school through an exterior door that had been propped open by a teacher.ĭays later, state police retracted that statement to make it clear that the teacher closed the door. WHAT HAPPENED WHEN THE GUNMAN REACHED THE OUTSIDE DOOR?
Questions about how the shooter entered Robb Elementary and what happened at multiple doors have been a big part of the changing information about the attack.
0 kommentar(er)
