UVALDE, Texas – A gunman killed at least 19 children and two adults at a rural elementary school in Texas on Tuesday, a state police official said in the deadliest shooting of an American school since the massacre. Sandy Hook Elementary a decade ago.
The killings took place shortly before noon at Robb Elementary School, where sophomores from Uvalde, a small town west of San Antonio, were preparing to begin their summer vacation this summer. week. At least one teacher was among the adults killed and several more children were injured.
The gunman, who was identified by authorities as an 18-year-old boy who had gone to a nearby high school, was armed with several weapons, authorities said. He also died at the scene, they said.
“He shot and killed in a horrible, incomprehensible way,” Gov. Greg Abbott told a news conference.
As Uvalde’s terrified parents waited for the news of their children’s safety, and law enforcement officials rushed to reconstruct how the attack had transpired, the mass shooting was deepening a national political debate over gun laws and prevalence. of weapons. Ten days earlier, a gunman shot 10 people inside a Buffalo grocery store.
“This is just a bad thing,” Rey Chapa, a resident of Uvalde, said of Tuesday’s killings while using insults. Mr. Chapa said his nephew was at school when the shooting took place, but he was safe. I was waiting to hear from family and friends about other children’s conditions, via Facebook for updates. “I’m afraid I’ll meet a lot of these kids who were murdered.”
Across the street from the school, state agents were strewn across the school lawn and an ambulance ran with the lights flashing. Adolfo Hernández, a longtime resident of Uvalde, said his nephew had been in a classroom near where the shooting took place.
“In fact, he witnessed his little friend being shot in the face,” Hernandez said. The friend, he said, “got shot in the nose and just fell, and my nephew was devastated.”
In a brief White House speech Tuesday night, President Biden was moved as he reflected on the attack and called for action, but did not defend a particular policy or vote.
“He’s sick,” he said of the type of weapons that can be easily found in the United States and are used in mass shootings. “In the name of God, where is our backbone, the courage to do more and then face the lobbies? It’s time to dump her and move on. “
Mr Biden later added: “May the Lord be close to those who have a broken heart and save those who are crushed in spirit, for they will need much.”
The shooting took place on election day in Texas, when voters across the state were heading to the polls for elementary schools that would set the stage for the November election at a time when the state and the nation has been broken by political disagreements over race, immigration. and abortion.
As the death toll became known, Robb Elementary School events immediately brought heartbreaking memories of the devastating 2012 shooting of Sandy Hook in Newtown, Connecticut, which left six staff members and 20 children dead, some of only 6 years. Six years later, a gunman killed 17 people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida.
Emergency workers gathered near the scene of the shooting. Credit … Dario Lopez-Mills / Associated Press
Lydia Martínez Delgado said her niece Eva Mireles, a fourth-grader at the school, was among those killed in the commotion. Mrs. Mireles had been a teacher for 17 years, her aunt said, and she was “much loved,” an avid hiker and proud to teach mostly students of Latin descent. “She was having fun at the party,” Ms. Slim.
For many, the weight of the tragedy seemed to increase with its arrival so soon after a deadly mass murder of black shoppers at a grocery store in Buffalo, in what was one of the deadliest racist massacres in the recent history of the United States. It had been the deadliest shooting in the United States this year until Tuesday’s killings in Uvalde.
Mr. Abbott said the shooter was a resident of the same county where the shooting took place, that he went to high school and had acted alone. He entered elementary school with a gun and possibly a rifle, the governor said.
It was not immediately clear whether the shooting took place in one or more classrooms and officials did not disclose the names or ages of the murdered students or the teacher. At least three children – a 9-year-old and two 10-year-olds, one in critical condition – were taken to University Health, a San Antonio hospital, for treatment.
Officials were investigating whether the gunman, who was identified as Salvador Ramos, had been targeting the school or whether he had ended up there by chance, according to a law enforcement official, who requested anonymity to describe the research that, he warned, was still unfolding. It appears the gunman had crashed a van through a barrier at the school before entering, the official said. At least two law enforcement officers who had tried to confront the gunman were injured in the shooting, neither of them seriously, the official said.
Marsha Espinosa, deputy secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said at least one U.S. Border Patrol officer was injured after responding to the shooting at Robb Elementary School. “Upon entering the building, law enforcement officers and other law enforcement officers confronted gunmen from the subject, who was barricaded inside,” he wrote on Twitter.
Shortly before the massacre, a 66-year-old woman was shot at her apartment in Uvalde, the official said, and was later airlifted to a San Antonio hospital with gunshot wounds. The officer said the woman appeared to have been the gunman’s grandmother and had been shot before the shooting at the school; both shootings, and the connection between them, remained under investigation.
The shooting took place shortly after 11:30 p.m. For much of the afternoon, as word spread, the district asked distressed parents to stay away from school. “Please don’t pick up students at this time,” the school district told parents, directing them to a local civic center. “Students must be counted before being released from your charge.”
Parents and relatives struggled for any information, as the news of a murderer at school became the realization that so many children had been murdered.
Ryan Ramirez told KSAT in San Antonio that he did not find his daughter, a fourth-grader at Robb Elementary, when she showed up at school or at a reunion point at a civic center. “Nobody tells me anything,” she said, adding, “I’m trying to figure out where my baby is.”
Even before much was known about the gunman, his motives or details about the weapons he used, the killings brought the debate over gun control and the rights of the Second Amendment back to the forefront. of national attention.
A city court employee lowered the Texas flag at half-mast. Credit … Christopher Lee for The New York Times
Sen. Chris Murphy, a Connecticut Democrat and advocate for gun control, said, “I think everyone will be shaken to the core for that.” He added: “I have no idea how a community handles this. There is no way to do it right. Your community is never the same after that.”
The National Rifle Association will hold its annual meeting in Houston beginning Friday. Mr. Abbott is on the list of prominent Republicans to appear, along with former President Donald J. Trump and Sen. Ted Cruz.
“Today is a dark day,” Mr. Cross in a statement. In messages posted on Twitter, he said the nation had “visited too much of these shootings,” but did not immediately call for any specific policy proposals to help prevent mass killings.
West Virginia Sen. Joe Manchin, a Democrat in 2013, blocked efforts to legislate on gun background checks, saying “It doesn’t make sense that we can’t do things common sense and try to prevent some of these things from happening. “
Robb Elementary, a brick school building near the city center boundary, serves more than 500 students, most of them between the ages of 7 and 10. About 90 percent of students are Hispanic, according to district records, and almost everything else. they are white. A poster hanging from the school says “Welcome!” and “Welcome!” next to the school logo, a choir.
In the neighborhood around the school, more than 40 percent of residents have lived in the same home for at least 30 years, according to census data. And more than a quarter of Uvalde’s 15,000 inhabitants are children, well above the national average. More than a third live on or just above the federal poverty line.
Joaquin Castro, a U.S. representative in Texas, described Uvalde on Twitter as a “wonderful, united community.”
The reports were provided by Mike Baker, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Emily Cochrane, Jacey Fortin, Robert Gebeloff, Jesus Jimenez, Alyssa Lukpat, Eduardo Medina, Sarah Mervosh and Michael D. Shear.