(FORT GORDON, Ga.) — One U.S. Army Reserve soldier has died and nine others were injured after a lightning bolt strike while on a range at Fort Gordon, Georgia, a base spokesperson told ABC News.
“We know there were injuries, but we don’t know the extent of those injuries,” base spokesperson Anne Bowman told ABC News.
Bowman said the incident occurred at approximately 11:10 a.m. at Training Area 26 when there was bad weather in the area, and that the soldiers “sustained injuries associated with a lightning strike at one of their training areas.”
Fort Gordon’s Department of Emergency Services and EMS responded to the scene immediately, according to Augusta ABC affiliate WJBF.
The soldiers were taken to the Dwight David Eisenhower Medical Center at the base for treatment, according to Bowman.
(FORT GORDON, Ga.) — Ten soldiers from the U.S. Army Reserve were injured after a lightning bolt strike while on a range at Fort Gordon, Georgia, according to the Army base.
“We know there were injuries, but we don’t know the extent of those injuries,” base spokesperson Anne Bowman told ABC News.
Bowman said the incident occurred at approximately 11:10 a.m. at Training Area 26 when there was bad weather in the area, and that the soldiers “sustained injuries associated with a lightning strike at one of their training areas.”
Fort Gordon’s Department of Emergency Services and EMS responded to the scene immediately, according to Augusta ABC affiliate WJBF.
The soldiers were taken to the Dwight David Eisenhower Medical Center at the base for treatment, according to Bowman.
(NEW YORK) — As grocery prices continue to rise on everything from grains to greens, customers are struggling to find ways to keep costs down.
Consumer prices on food experienced the largest annual increase in over four decades since February 1981, with costs skyrocketing 10.4% in the 12-month period ending June, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Within the “food at home” category — grocery store food products purchased for cooking or eating at home — prices rose 12.2% over the last year, the largest increase since 1979.
Since June, food at home prices have risen another full percentage point, marking the sixth consecutive month of increases.
With prices ballooning constantly, it can be hard to plan out a weekly grocery list. Figuring out which items are consistently the most expensive and which prices have climbed steeply in recent months, however, might at least allow shoppers to craft a backup plan or estimate an approximate budget.
Below is the current breakdown in cost changes across various food categories from the Consumer Price Index (CPI), which measures the change in prices paid by consumers for goods and services.
Everyday items like meat and dairy see an uptick at grocery store checkouts
Fruits and Vegetables: This group saw an 8.1% increase in price between June 2021 and June 2022 and a 0.7% increase between May and June this year.
Meats, Poultry, Fish and Eggs: Between June 2021 and June 2022, prices rose 11.7%. Prices fell 0.4% between May and June, however, as the cost of pork and beef declined.
Nonalcoholic Beverages: This includes everything from seltzer water to soda. Prices in this category rose 11.9% between June 2021 and June 2022. They increased 0.8% between May and June.
Other food at home
The BLS report also showed sharp increases in the costs of butter (21.3% increase over the past year), sugar and sugar substitutes (11.4% over the past year) and “other sweets” (15.7% over the past year), with cereals and bakery product prices rising 13.8% over the past 12 months.
The cost of flour, meanwhile, rose 19.4% over the past year. Between May and June, prices rose 5.3%.
For those who have time and resources to shop around, similar products can cost different prices at different stores, since every retailer has different pricing variables.
Phil Lempert of supermarketguru.com explained that, due to supply chain issues, some grocery stores aren’t sure when certain items will arrive, so coupons aren’t as common as they used to be either.
In order to find special prices or deals, customers can download their favorite grocery store apps to get the latest savings directly at their fingertips.
(NEW YORK) — The funeral for the late Ivana Trump, first wife of former President Donald Trump, was held on Wednesday at New York City’s St. Vincent Ferrer Church.
Ivana Trump died Thursday after suffering injuries sustained from a fall in her Upper East Side home, New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. She was 73.
She was married to the ex-president from 1977 to 1992, and they had three children together: Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka.
“Our mother was an incredible woman — a force in business, a world-class athlete, a radiant beauty, and caring mother and friend,” the Trump family said in a statement at the time of her passing.
In a statement on his Truth Social platform, former President Trump called her a “wonderful, beautiful and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”
He attended the funeral service, alongside former first lady Melania Trump and their son Barron.
Ivana Trump was found unconscious and unresponsive at the bottom of a set of stairs in her apartment, police sources said. Her death was ruled an accident, according to the medical examiner.
Known for her glamour, Ivana Trump created her own clothing line and helped design the interior for the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower. She was also a bestselling author and worked for her former husband’s business empire as a senior executive, where she served as the CEO of Trump’s Castle, a hotel-casino in Atlantic City.
Instead of flowers, her family is asking people to donate to the Florida nonprofit Big Dog Ranch Rescue, the organization said on its website.
(CHICAGO) — Just 16 days after a man wielding an AR-15-style rifle allegedly killed seven people and injured more than 40 at a Fourth of July parade in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, the town’s mayor pleaded with Congress to pass a federal assault weapons ban, saying, “today is the day to start saving lives.”
But Mayor Nancy Rotering quickly learned during her testimony Wednesday before the Senate Judiciary Committee that enacting such a law will be a major challenge. Republican committee members — including two from Texas, where on May 24 a gunman firing an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 students and two teachers — argued that such a ban will not stop massacres and only infringe on the Second Amendment rights of law abiding citizens.
Rotering testified about being in the middle of the Independence Day shooting rampage. She graphically detailed the chaos, panic and bloodied bodies lying on the street of “an All-American Midwestern town,” telling the committee, “I will be haunted forever.”
“Less than a minute is all it took for a person with an assault weapon to shoot 83 rounds into a crowd, forever changing so many lives,” Rotering told the panel. “And the most disturbing part, this is the norm in our country.”
She began her statement by describing a “perfect summer day” with 3,000 people lining the parade route, waving American flags and cheering the marching bands and colorful floats of her city’s first post-pandemic Fourth of July Parade in two years.
“Music and cheering were all we could hear as we headed down the street,” Rotering testified. “I looked left and waved to my husband in the crowd. What I didn’t know at that moment was that just to my right on a one-story rooftop, a 21-year-old was preparing to traumatize my hometown forever with an assault weapon.”
She said that as she and her city council colleagues headed down the parade route, she noticed that a marching band had gone silent and she heard a “tat, tat, tat” sound she initially mistook for a drum cadence.
“I then saw a sea of marching band members sprinting down the sidewalk, some with tubas entwined around their bodies,” Rotering told the committee. “I realized later that the sound I heard wasn’t drum cadence. It was the sound of an assault weapon.”
She said she and her colleagues immediately started an emergency evacuation, screaming at paradegoers to run, repeatedly shouting, “shooter.”
“Adults stared back, not comprehending,” she said. “But the kids knew immediately this wasn’t a drill and they yelled to everybody, ‘run, hide.’ They knew what was happening.”
She said among those killed were Kevin and Irina McCarthy, who were at the parade with their 2-year-old son, Aiden. She said good Samaritans found the boy under his father’s body.
Rotering also told the horrific story of 22-year-old Cassie Goldstein, who she says was forced to leave her mortally wounded mother, Katherine, behind as bullets rained down on the crowd.
“When the shooting stopped, Cassie returned to find her mother lifeless,” said Rotering, as a group of Highland Park residents attending the hearing sat behind her.
She told the committee of hot shrapnel melting into the arms and legs of the victims.
“Highland Park had the uniquely American experience of a Fourth of July parade turned into what had now become a uniquely American experience of a mass shooting,” Rotering said. “How do we call this freedom?”
She noted that in 2013 following the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Middle School in Newtown, Connecticut, Highland Park passed a ban on assault weapons and large capacity magazines, but lamented that local laws have little effect as long as such weapons are still being legally sold in neighboring Illinois towns.
“Local government cannot do this alone,” Rotering said. “Congress must take action. You must federally ban assault weapons and large capacity magazines. Today is the day to save lives.”
But Rotering’s plea was met with stiff resistance from Republican members of the committee, who uniformly agreed that renewing the federal assault weapons ban that was enacted in 1994 and expired in 2004, is not the answer to curbing mass shootings.
“These bans would be ineffective and not consistent with the right to self-defense,” said Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa. “We also know restrictive gun control will hurt vulnerable communities that need to defend themselves against the horrible spike in violence.”
Republican Sens. Ted Cruz and John Cornyn, both of Texas, agreed with Grassley, saying they support tougher laws that go after the perpetrators of the violence instead of the guns, which Cornyn described as “inanimate objects.”
Cruz cited a shooting that occurred Sunday at a shopping mall in Greenwood, Indiana, in which three people were killed before an armed good Samaritan shot and killed the suspect who was firing an AR-15-style weapon.
“If the objective is to stop mass murderers, gun control doesn’t work,” Cruz said. “The state of Illinois has the strictest gun control laws of any state in the country, Highland Park has even stricter gun control laws than the state of Illinois. Consistently, if you look across the country with the jurisdictions with the strictest gun control laws, almost without exception, they have the highest crime rates and the highest murder rates.”
In June, Congress a passed a bipartisan gun safety law, the first major piece of federal gun reform in almost 30 years, that was signed into law by President Joe Biden. The legislation — which followed back-to-back mass shootings in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, New York — expands federal background checks for buyers under the age of 21, provides financial incentives for states to pass “red flag” laws and other intervention programs and closes the so-called “boyfriend loophole” denying people convicted of domestic violence access to firearms.
But Sen. Tammy Duckworth, D-Illinois, a retired military veteran, testified before the committee that banning AR-15-style rifles needs to be made a priority for Congress. She called the rifles “weapons of war” designed to kill and critically maim people far more efficiently than conventional semi-automatic firearms.
“The leading cause of death of Americans under the age of 16 in this country isn’t cancer, isn’t car accidents, it’s gun violence. Only in America,” Duckworth said. “I’m urging this committee to demonstrate courage in supporting a ban on assault weapons and large capacity magazines.”
Duckworth said that since the assault weapons ban expired, mass shootings in the United States have tripled. Mayor Rotering noted that Highland Park was the 309th mass shooting in the United States this year.
Sen. Dick Durbin, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, ended the hearing by acknowledging the divisiveness of the debate over gun control.
“You saw a good illustration today of the political aspects of this issue involving guns, why we do so little,” Durbin, a Democrat from Illinois, said. “Once every 30 years, we’re going to do a gun safety bill? God forbid if that is what happens.”
(UVALDE, Texas) — The Uvalde, Texas, school board will meet in a special session Saturday to consider the recommendation to fire Police Chief Pete Arredondo for cause following widespread criticism of how he handled the response to the May school shooting.
The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District has recommended Arredondo be fired.
Arredondo is currently on leave while an investigation into the conduct of law enforcement at the shooting on May 24 takes place. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
The discussion will occur in a closed session, but, legally, a determination to fire him would have to be publicly announced.
Despite the Uvalde school district’s active shooter plan calling for its police chief to assume command in the event of a shooting, Arredondo allegedly failed to take on the role of incident commander or transfer the responsibility to another officer on scene during the May 24 attack, according to a report issued this week by a joint committee of the Texas Legislature.
“The Uvalde CISD’s written active shooter plan directed its police chief to assume command and control the response to an active shooter,” according to the report.
Last month, Arredondo told The Texas Tribune he did not consider himself the commanding officer on the scene.
He also said that no one told him about the 911 calls that came in from students who were still alive in the classrooms during the 77 minutes before law enforcement breached a classroom door and killed the 18-year-old gunman.
“We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced,” Arredondo said. “Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”
At an open forum hosted by the Uvalde school board Monday, parents and community members called on officials to fire Arredondo immediately, with some also calling for the firing of other members of Uvalde’s school district police force who were present during the shooting.
(NEW YORK) — A dangerous heat wave is stretching across much of the U.S. with temperatures in the triple digits from the West to the South to the East as sweltering, unrelenting heat continues to slam Europe.
Here’s what to expect Wednesday:
Excessive heat warnings stretch from San Antonio to Tulsa to Memphis, where it’ll feel like 105 to 115 degrees.
Heat advisories extend from Cincinnati, Ohio, to the Mexican border, with the heat feeling like over 100 degrees for this wide swath of the central U.S.
The heat index — what temperature it feels like with humidity — is forecast to skyrocket to a dangerous 108 degrees in Houston, 113 in Dallas and 112 in Little Rock and Memphis.
Houston, Dallas, Austin and San Antonio may reach record highs. The intense heat is also continuing to create a breeding ground for fires in Texas.
In the Northeast, heat advisories stretch from Maryland to northern Vermont.
The heat index is forecast to jump Wednesday to 101 degrees in Philadelphia and 98 degrees in New York City and Washington, D.C.
The heat wave in the Northeast is expected to last through the weekend and may linger into next week.
Meanwhile, in the West, temperatures are expected to climb to 112 in Palm Springs and 113 in Las Vegas.
And in Europe, the United Kingdom on Tuesday reached its highest temperature ever, breaking 40 degrees Celsius for the first time as U.K. officials declared a national emergency and issued unprecedented health warnings.
Tuesday was the busiest day for London’s fire department since World War II, Mayor Sadiq Khan said.
Spain and Portugal have reported more than 1,100 heat-related deaths amid Western Europe’s record-breaking heat wave.
People in Paris and London will feel some relief Wednesday with temperatures falling to 75 degrees Fahrenheit and 80 degrees Fahrenheit respectively.
But the heat Wednesday turns to Spain, Italy and Germany.
Madrid is forecast to reach 99 degrees Fahrenheit, Milan 98 degrees and Berlin a scorching 100 degrees.
(UVALDE, Texas) — The Texas House of Representatives committee report on the Robb Elementary School shooting revealed the accused school shooter exhibited many warning signs in the years, months and days leading up to the school shooting, but he was still able to legally purchase the assault rifle used in the shooting.
The report illustrated many failures by the school and by law enforcement officers leading up to and on the day of the shooting and caused outcry among families of the 21 people killed in May.
Private individuals were the only people who knew of the many warning signs he displayed, as he had no criminal history prior to the shooting. The alleged shooter’s apparent motive was a “desire for notoriety and fame,” according to the report.
Those interviewed by the committee, including family, friends and acquaintances, reported many warning signs that experts say should have raised red flags.
“He exhibited almost every warning sign,” John Cohen, an ABC News contributor and the former acting undersecretary for intelligence and counterterrorism coordinator at the Department of Homeland Security, said in an interview. “This guy should have been on everybody’s radar.”
School officials had identified the accused shooter as “at-risk” academically by the third grade due to consistently poor test results. However, he did not receive any education services, according to the report.
The shooting itself took place in the accused shooter’s former classroom. The suspect had discussed bad memories of fourth grade with an acquaintance just weeks before, according to the report.
The suspect’s fourth grade teacher told the committee she was aware he needed special help and that he claimed to be a victim of bullying. She met with his mother over these concerns and said she believed he ultimately had a good year and that the classroom was a safe space where he made friends, according to the report.
The suspect’s family, however, disputed this account saying that classmates bullied him over his stutter, clothing and short haircut. Some family members also said that some of the teachers picked on the suspect and his cousin, according to the report. Notes found on the alleged shooter’s phone indicated that he was bullied beginning in middle school.
Concerning patterns
Beginning in 2018, the alleged shooter had bad school attendance, with more than 100 absences annually. He also had failing grades and increasingly dismal performance on standardized and end-of-course exams, according to the report.
The committee found that the local court does not regularly enforce truancy rules and it is unclear if any school resource officers ever visited the alleged shooter’s home.
Aside from a single 3-day suspension due to a “mutual combat” with a student, the suspect had almost no disciplinary history at school.
By 2021, when he was 17 years old, the alleged shooter had only completed ninth grade. He was involuntarily withdrawn from Uvalde High School in October 2021, citing poor academic performance and lack of attendance, according to the report.
Last year, the suspect increasingly withdrew and isolated himself. At the beginning of the year, a group of the alleged shooter’s former friends “jumped him,” according to the report.
His former girlfriend described the alleged shooter as lonely and depressed and said he was constantly teased by friends who called him a “school shooter,” according to the report. He was also called a “school shooter” online due to his comments.
She said he told her repeatedly that he wouldn’t live past 18, either because he would commit suicide or simply because he “wouldn’t live long.” The alleged shooter also responded to their breakup last year by harassing the girl and her friends, according to the report.
The alleged shooter’s activity online was also concerning as he began to watch violent and gruesome videos and images of things like suicides, beheadings and accidents.
Those with whom he played video games reported that he became enraged when he lost. He allegedly made over-the-top threats, especially towards female players, whom he would terrorize with graphic descriptions of violence and rape.
Later internet usage suggests he may have wondered if he was a sociopath and sought out information on the condition. His internet research resulted in him receiving an email, which was not disclosed from where in the report, about obtaining psychological treatment for sociopathy.
One month into working at Whataburger in 2021, he was fired for threatening a female coworker. He reportedly had a similar experience at Wendy’s.
His family and friends were aware of his efforts to buy guns before he was old enough to do so legally. He asked at least two people to buy him guns when he was 17, but they both refused, according to the report.
None of the suspect’s online behavior was ever reported to law enforcement, and if it was reported by other users to any social media platform, it does not appear that actions were taken to restrict his access or to report him to authorities as a threat, according to the report.
Red Flag Laws
Red flag laws, or extreme protection orders, allow law enforcement or family members to ask a civil court to temporarily remove guns from a person who poses a risk to themselves or others. Recent federal legislation included funding for states to implement these laws.
While Texas is not one of the 19 states that have red flag laws in place, experts say these laws could have prevented the shooting if they had been used in this case.
“I think this is an illustration of why red flag laws might be needed. And that might be helpful, particularly if they were used extensively here,” Jeffrey Swanson, a professor of psychology and behavioral studies who is affiliated with the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University, told ABC News in an interview.
The alleged shooter in Uvalde showed sufficient indication of risks that his guns could have been removed under these laws, Swanson said.
Jarrod Burguan, the former San Bernardino police chief and ABC News contributor, said the mental health system being a revolving door has not made it effective in forcing treatment and potentially protecting society from these kinds of attacks.
While law enforcement can detain people they suspect pose a potential risk for up to 72 hours (this varies based on state), Burguan said millions of people slip through the cracks.
“We need something that puts more teeth in the ability of the mental health system to hold somebody and force them into treatment, and stop allowing people to walk away, and then affect everybody else in society,” Burguan said.
Cohen said he has heard this concern from law enforcement all over the country, but says the recent federal legislation can be helpful by increasing access to mental health care.
Cohen sees a need to also implement threat management strategies where community members, leaders and family could put in place a plan that would help people who may pose a risk.
Even if there is not enough evidence to arrest someone who may pose a risk, there is still middle ground for acting preventatively with “law enforcement working with mental health professionals to assess the risk based on an evaluation of the person’s behavior,” Cohen said.
(NEW YORK) — The funeral for the late Ivana Trump, first wife of former President Donald Trump, will be held Wednesday at New York City’s St. Vincent Ferrer Church.
Her three children — Eric, Ivanka and Donald Jr. — are expected to speak during the services.
Ivana Trump died Thursday after suffering injuries sustained from a fall in her Upper East Side home, New York City’s Office of the Chief Medical Examiner said. She was 73.
She was married to the ex-president from 1977 to 1992 and had three kids together, Donald Jr., Eric and Ivanka.
“Our mother was an incredible woman — a force in business, a world-class athlete, a radiant beauty, and caring mother and friend,” the Trump family said in a statement at the time of her passing.
In a statement on his Truth Social platform, former President Trump called her a “wonderful, beautiful, and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”
Ivana Trump was found unconscious and unresponsive at the bottom of a set of stairs in her apartment, police sources said. Her death was ruled an accident, according to the medical examiner.
Known for her glamour, Ivana Trump created her own clothing line and helped design the interior for the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower. She was also a bestselling author and worked for her former husband’s business empire as a senior executive, where she served as the CEO of Trump’s Castle, a hotel casino in Atlantic City.
Instead of flowers, her family is asking people to donate to the Florida nonprofit Big Dog Ranch Rescue, the organization said on its website.
(UVALDE, Texas) — Poor Wi-Fi service and a staff desensitized to alerts by frequent notifications diminished the effectiveness of Robb Elementary School’s digital emergency system during the May 24 massacre there, hampering teachers’ ability to swiftly secure their classrooms and students, according to an investigative report published Sunday.
The emergency alert system, called Raptor, was implemented by Uvalde’s school district in February 2022 to disseminate information about on-campus or nearby police activity. But on May 24, the alert system failed to sufficiently warn staff as a gunman approached the school and killed 21 people, the report found, even after the school’s principal triggered it.
“If the alert had reached more teachers sooner, it is likely that more could have been done to protect them and their students,” concluded the report, which was prepared by a special committee of the Texas state legislature.
Raptor Technologies, the Houston-based company that developed the emergency alert service used at Robb, pushed back against some of the committee’s findings, including details about when the first alert notification was transmitted.
David Rogers, the firm’s chief marketing officer, told ABC News that the report “paints an ambiguous and potentially misleading picture of the degree to which the data communication infrastructure was performant during the incident,” and said the committee did not request their data or input before publishing its report.
In the wake of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history, and as students across the country prepare to return to classrooms in the coming weeks, school districts across the country are grappling with their own alert systems and safety concerns.
The alert system was just one of many procedures that together failed to prevent the shooter from entering the school. In their investigative report, lawmakers noted that many of the shortcomings identified at Robb — including how it handled its emergency alert system — exist elsewhere in the state.
“We must not delude ourselves into a false sense of security by believing that ‘this would not happen where we live,’” according to the report. “The people of Uvalde undoubtedly felt the same way.”
Beyond the myriad of missteps on the part of law enforcement and the school district to adequately prepare for an active shooter event, the lawmakers’ report offered new details about how administrators sought to use the Raptor system during the siege with varying degrees of success. Patchy wireless connection at Robb Elementary delayed sending and receiving alerts, the report said, and an influx of notifications in recent months “diluted” the seriousness of the lockdown warning.
Difficulties with the digital alert app began almost immediately, the committee found. After hearing from a teacher who witnessed the gunman approach the school, Robb Elementary School Principal Mandy Gutierrez “attempted to initiate a lockdown on the Raptor application, but she had difficulty making the alert because of a bad wi-fi signal,” according to the report.
“Poor wi-fi connectivity in Robb Elementary likely delayed the lockdown alert through the Raptor application,” the report added.
Rogers, the Raptor executive, again disputed this claim from the committee, telling ABC News that the report “appears to imply that the lockdown was ‘attempted’ but not successfully initiated.”
“If that was the intended implication of the House Report,” he continued, “that would be inaccurate.”
Rogers said the firm’s internal system log data, which was shared with ABC News, confirmed that a “lockdown” alert was successfully transmitted at 11:32 a.m. — one minute before the shooter entered the school building. The committee’s report also noted that at least one teacher inside the school successfully received a lockdown alert at 11:32 a.m.
“Within seconds” of the alert being generated, Rogers said, 91 “critical notifications,” which are similar to an Amber Alert, 68 text messages and 136 emails were sent to “all configured user devices” associated with the Robb community. Rogers added that several teachers communicated amongst themselves using the app’s “group chat” function as the shooting unfolded.
With regard to Wi-Fi challenges cited by the committee, Rogers said Raptor’s alert system relies on devices that use cellular networks and wired connections, too — but said school districts are the ones responsible for ensuring strong Wi-Fi signals.
Once Gutierrez’s lockdown alert was successfully transmitted, the committee reached another troubling conclusion: many teachers likely ignored it. According to the report, the high volume of Raptor alert notifications about off-campus police activity in the weeks and months leading to the May 24 shooting “diluted the significance of alerts and dampened everyone’s readiness to act on alerts.”
Between February and May 2022, according to the report, staff members received more than 50 alerts — a frequency that “contributed to a diminished sense of vigilance about responding to security alerts,” the committee said.
Most of those alerts were in response to what the committee described as nearby “bailouts,” referring to incidents when undocumented immigrants flee their vehicles and attempt to outrun police. Because of Robb’s proximity to the U.S.-Mexico border, these so-called bailout events happen often.
“The series of bailout-related alerts led teachers and administrators to respond to all alerts with less urgency—when they heard the sound of an alert, many assumed that it was another bailout,” the committee reported.
Rogers said that Raptor is “actively working” with the Uvalde school district to make modifications to its platform so that “bailout” incident alerts would have a different notification setting, “so as to be clearly differentiated from other categories of emergencies.”
Even so, the committee added that many teachers “did not always reliably receive” the alerts for a number of other reasons, including “poor wi-fi coverage, phones that were turned off or not always carried, and employees who had to log-in on a computer to receive a message.”
In at least one instance during the shooting, the Raptor system worked as planned. Jennieka Rodriguez, a fourth-grade teacher in classroom 105, told the committee that she received a lockdown alert on her phone at 11:32 a.m. — just one minute before the gunman entered the school.
“[Rodriguez’s] students knew what to do and where to hide,” according to the report. “She stepped outside and checked her classroom door to ensure it was locked. As she did so, she looked across the hall and locked eyes with another fourth-grade teacher, Ms. [Irma] Garcia, who was locking the door to her classroom, Room 112.”
Moments later, the gunman entered the school and stormed classroom 112, killing Garcia and her students.
