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Forrest Anderson, an emergency-management employee for Uvalde County who oversaw installation of the local police radio system nearly 20 years ago, said the low-frequency radios that are best for the terrain in the area don’t work well in buildings with thick walls and metal roofs like Robb Elementary School, where the shooting took place. Furthermore, the more people try to use the radios at the same time, the less likely they are to work well, he said.

Mr. Anderson, who was serving as homeland security director for nine counties in South Texas at the time the system was installed, said state investigators have tested the radio system inside the building in the last few days, but he didn’t know the outcome of that test. An official from the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is leading the state investigation, didn’t respond to a request for comment about the results of the test.

Uvalde County Judge William Mitchell, the county’s highest-ranking elected official, declined to comment on the investigation, and didn’t respond to a request for comment on the communications system.

The ability of officers in the school to receive communications "was probably very, very sketchy with the amount of radio traffic in that whole area," said Mr. Anderson, who still oversees the radio system.

Dozens of law-enforcement officials from multiple federal, state and local agencies responded to the school. Investigators haven’t commented on what information officials tried to relay to law enforcement inside the school.

The local police radio system, which serves a nine-county area in this stretch of rural South Texas, was built in the early 2000s after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, when emergency response was priortized nationwide, according to Mr. Anderson.

Mr. Anderson said higher-frequency radios used in urban areas, which can better penetrate buildings, cannot cover the vast geography of an area like South Texas. He said he and other system designers assumed officers inside buildings could step outside when they needed to communicate. "The thought just wasn’t there that it would ever be an issue," he said.