After being under scrutiny, Texas state police made a decision to retract key statements they had repeatedly made regarding the Uvalde school shooting. failing to stopThe gunman remained outside the school until approximately 90 minutes after his arrival.
Texas Governor Greg Abbott and spokespeople at the state’s Department of Public Safety said since the attack that school police officers “engaged” the shooter before he entered the school, praising law enforcement’s “quick response.” But DPS regional director Victor Escalon acknowledged during a hectic news conferencePolice did not respond to the shooting on Thursday. In fact, no school police officer was present before the gunman entered.
“He walked in unobstructed initially,” Escalon said. Officials said that Salvador Ramos (18 years old) shot his grandmother and then crashed her pickup truck on the way to school.
“He was not confronted by anybody,” Escalon said.
Ramos actually crashed his car around 11:28 AM, but he didn’t enter the school for 12 minutes. Escalon reported that the gunman got out his truck and shot at two pedestrians across the street. He then shot multiple times at school buildings. Escalon reports that Ramos entered school through an unlocked door on the side.
According to an official, the gunman entered a classroom where he fired more than 25 shots. Officers arrived at school at 11:44 AM and attempted to engage the gunman, but were shot at and then backed off.
The suspect was in the classroom about an hour. Police arrived outside to assist worried parents. begged officersTo enter the building and stop him. Escalon claimed that during this time, police were evacuating parts of the school and tried to negotiate the suspect. Escalon says that eventually, a Border Patrol tactical unit arrived and broke into the classroom. The suspect was killed in a shootout.
It’s unclear why it took so long for law enforcement to stop the gunman. Data shows that most “active shooter” attacks in the U.S. end within five minutesAccording to FBI data however, the Uvalde attack lasted 20x longer. CNN reportedIt was estimated that about 100 federal agents and police officers were on the scene.
“They [didn’t] make entry immediately because of the gunfire they were receiving,” Escalon said while dodging questions from reporters.
Parents who lost their children in the attack slammed the police response and the cops’ narrative following the shooting.
“They said they rushed in and all that, we didn’t see that,” Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jacklyn was killed while he begged police outside to let him go into the school, told the New York Times. “There were plenty of men out there armed to the teeth that could have gone in faster. This could have been over in a couple minutes.”
Law enforcement experts were critical of the response.
“If you’ve got somebody you think is actively engaged in harming people or attempting to harm people, your obligation as a police officer is to immediately stop that person and neutralize that threat,” Don Alwes, a former instructor for the National Tactical Officers Association, told NBC News. “We don’t expect police officers to commit suicide in doing it. But the expectation is that if someone is about to harm someone, especially children, you’ve got to take immediate action to make that stop.”
This stalled response could have cost lives.
“You can’t wait until patients go to a trauma center,” Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at University Hospital in San Antonio, who coordinated treatment for multiple victims, told NBC. “You have to act quickly.”
Instead of entering the school, officers from the AW Enforcement Department were seen controlling crowds as parents panicked gathered outside. According to a report, some officers entered the school to retrieve their children. DPS official. A videoVideo taken outside the school shows police officers with long guns stopping parents from entering the school.
“Shoot him or something!” a woman pleads in the video.
“They’re all just fucking parked outside, dude. They need to go in there,” a man is heard saying.
“The police were doing nothing,” Angeli Rose Gomez, whose children attend second and third grade at Robb Elementary, told The Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
Gomez was so frustrated by the delay in getting a response, he drove 40 miles to the school to complain to police about the shooting. Gomez and other parents asked law enforcement to enter the school before U.S. She claimed that Marshals placed her in handcuffs, and informed her that she was being detained for interfering in an active investigation. She claimed that another father was thrown to the ground and another parent was pepper-sprayed.
Gomez claimed that she convinced local police officers she knew enough to persuade marshals to release her. Gomez said that she was free and jumped the school fence to evacuate her children.
A Marshals Service spokesperson denied that anyone was handcuffed.
“Our deputy marshals maintained order and peace in the midst of the grief-stricken community that was gathering around the school,” he told the Journal.
Desirae Garza, Amerie Jo Garza’s niece, was killed in the shooting. The TimesAngel, her brother, was also detained by a local officer while trying to run into school.
“Nobody was telling him anything. He was determined to find out. He wanted to know where his daughter was,” Garza said.
Gomez claimed that she saw police use a Taser against a father who approached the bus carrying students to evacuate them.
“They didn’t do that to the shooter, but they did that to us. That’s how it felt,” she told the Journal.
Rep. Joaquin Castro D-Texas called out state officials for providing the public with “conflicting accounts of how the tragedy in Uvalde unfolded.”
Castro sent Christopher Wray a Thursday letter requesting that a federal investigation be initiated into the police response.
“I’m calling on the @FBI to use their maximum authority,” he tweeted, “to investigate and provide a full report on the timeline, the law enforcement response and how 21 Texans were killed.”
