Meanwhile, teams of Border Patrol agents rushed to the school, including 10 to 15 members of a SWAT-like tactical and counterterrorism unit, said Jason Owens, a senior regional Border Patrol official.
A Border Patrol officer who was working nearby when the shooting began rushed to the school without waiting for a backup and shot and killed the gunman, who was behind a barricade, according to an official of the order that he spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to do so. Talk about it.
The officer was injured but was able to leave the school, police sources said.
Owens confirmed that one officer suffered minor injuries, but did not give details of that confrontation.
The children killed in the massacre were probably between seven and 10 years old, according to the age groups taught by Robb Elementary School. It has about 600 students in courses 2, 3 and 4, authorities said.
Families are waiting for the news from the children
Hours after the attack, families were still waiting for news from their children.
Outside the city’s civic center, where families were told to gather, silence was repeatedly broken with shouts and moans. “No! Please, no!” shouted one man as he hugged another.
“My heart is broken today,” said Hal Harrell, the school district’s superintendent. “We are a small community and we need your prayers to overcome this.”
Adolfo Cruz, a 69-year-old air conditioning repairman, was still out of school when the sun set, looking for news of his 10-year-old granddaughter, Elijah Cruz Torres.
He drove to the scene after receiving a terrifying call from his daughter shortly after the first reports of the shooting. He said other relatives were at the hospital and civic center.
The wait, he said, was the hardest moment of his life.
“I hope she’s alive,” Cruz said.
“It’s a shock to me. I also feel for all the other families. This is a small community. Uvalde has always been very kind. People are very kind,” Cruz said.
Images of smiling children were posted on social media, with their families asking for information. Classes were ending during the school year and each school day had a theme. Tuesday was Footloose and Fancy. Students had to wear a nice dress with fun or stylish shoes.
At night, the names of those killed during the attack began to emerge. Fourth grade teacher Eva Mireles was remembered as a loving mother and wife.
“She was adventurous. I would definitely say these wonderful things about her. I will definitely miss her a lot,” said Amber Ybarra, a 44-year-old relative from San Antonio.
Ybarra was preparing to donate blood to the wounded and wondered how no one could detect possible problems in the shooter in time to stop him.
“I am furious that these shootings continue. These children are innocent. The rifles should not be readily available to everyone,” Mireles’ aunt Lydia Martinez Delgado said in a statement to ABC13 News in Houston.
“This is my hometown, a small community of less than 20,000 people. I never imagined that this would happen to loved ones … All we can do is pray a lot for our country, the state, the schools and especially everyone’s families. “
The president reacts
Biden, recently returned from his trip to Asia, made a statement to the White House in which he could scarcely contain his anger over an epidemic of massacres in America.
“As a nation, we must ask ourselves: when, in the name of God, will we face the gun lobby? When, in the name of God, will we do what we know is right for our instincts?
“We must act,” he said, suggesting reinstating the ban on assault weapons and other “common sense weapons laws.”
“I hoped that when I became president I would not have to do this again,” said Biden, who denounced the deaths of “beautiful and innocent” young children in “another massacre.”
“[Their parents] he will never see his son again, he will never make them jump in bed and hug them, “he said.
Prior to his trip to Asia, Biden had visited the scene of a massacre in Buffalo, New York, which claimed the lives of 10 blacks.
An image of an Instagram account linked to Ramos.
He also reflected on the finding that, unlike the US, other countries did not have such routine massacres.
Biden ordered U.S. flags to be hoisted at half-mast in the White House and other public buildings “as a mark of respect for the victims.”
It was not immediately known how many people were injured, but Uvalde police chief Pete Arredondo said there were “several injuries”. Earlier, Uvalde Memorial Hospital said 13 children were taken there.
San Antonio University Hospital said on Twitter that it had received two patients from the shooting: a 66-year-old woman and a 10-year-old girl, both in critical condition.
Ramos had hinted on social media that an attack could come, according to state Sen. Roland Gutierrez, who said he had been informed by state police. He noted that the gunman “suggested that the children should be watched.”
CNN reported that an Instagram account linked to Ramos showed an image of two AR15 assault rifles.
Uvalde, home to about 16,000 people, is about 135 miles west of San Antonio and 110 miles from the Mexican border. Robb Elementary is located in a mostly residential neighborhood of modest homes.
There was a large police presence around the school on Tuesday afternoon, with heavy-duty vests diverting traffic and FBI agents coming and going from the building. What appeared to be a refrigerated mobile morgue was parked near the scene, local media reported.
Earlier, the district had said all its schools were closed due to gunfire in the area.
The South Texas Blood & Tissue Center announced that it was conducting an emergency blood drive in Uvalde.
Hillcrest Memorial Funeral Home, located in front of Robb Elementary School, said in a Facebook post that it would help the families of the victims of the shooting at no cost to the funeral.
Mass shootings
The shooting in Texas took place less than two weeks after a gunman opened fire on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, killing 10 shoppers and black workers in what authorities have described as a hate crime.
The shooting in Texas was one of the deadliest in an American school since a gunman killed 26 people, including 20 children aged five to 10, in an attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in December 2012 .
In 2018, a former student at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 students and educators.
Uvalde’s shooting was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. It was four years after a gunman killed 10 people at Santa Fe High School in the Houston area.
The United States experienced 61 incidents of “active shooters” last year, a large increase in the number of attacks, casualties and geographical distribution since 2020 and the highest number in more than 20 years, it reported on Monday. FBI.
The 2021 total, spread across 30 states, was 52 percent higher than 2020 and about twice as many as each of the previous three years, the FBI said.
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The agency defines an active shooter as someone who is engaged in killing or attempting to kill people in a public space in a seemingly random manner.
Commercial companies accounted for just over half of all these incidents last year, which also stood out for an emerging trend of “roaming active shooters” opening fire in various places, as was the case with a gunman. which attacked several day resorts in the Atlanta area. said the FBI.
Last year’s active shooter carnage left 103 dead and 140 injured, according to the report.
In contrast, the FBI counted 40 active-duty sniper attacks in 19 states that killed 38 people and injured 126 in 2020, a year that coincided with the peak of restrictions on social and economic life due to the coronavirus pandemic.
Weapons rights
The shooting came days before the annual National Rifle Association convention in Houston began. Texas Gov. Abbott and the two U.S. state senators were among the elected Republican officials scheduled to speak at a NRA-sponsored leadership arm of the NRA on Friday.
Abbott has campaigned for gun rights.
In 2015, he wrote on Twitter that he was “embarrassed” that Texas had lagged behind California in arms sales. “Let’s pick up the jeans,” he said.
Senator Chris Murphy, of the state of Connecticut where the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting took place, made a passionate speech in the Senate immediately after the Texas shooting.
“There are more mass shootings than days a year,” he said. “Our children live in fear every time they step on a classroom because they think they will be the next ones … What are we doing?
“Why spend all this time running for the Senate, if your response as this massacre increases and our children run to save their lives, [is] do we do nothing
“What are you doing? Why are we here?”
AP, Reuters with staff
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