UVALDE, Texas (AP) – The gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers inside a Texas elementary school was in the building for more than an hour before being killed by law enforcement, according to authorities.
It was 11:28 a.m. Tuesday when Salvador Ramos’ Ford pickup truck crashed into a ditch behind Texas elementary school and the driver jumped with an AR-15 rifle.
Twelve minutes later, authorities say, Ramos, 18, entered the hallways of Robb Elementary School and found his way to a fourth-grade classroom, where he killed 19 students and two teachers in a spasm of violence still inexplicable.
But it was not until 12.58pm that law enforcement radio talk said Ramos had been killed and the siege was over.
What happened in those 90 minutes, in a working-class neighborhood near the outskirts of the city of Uvalde, has fueled the growing anger of the public and the scrutiny of the response of law enforcement to the Tuesday’s commotion.
“They say they rushed in,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grader daughter Jacklyn Cazares died in the attack, and who ran to the school while the massacre unfolded. “We didn’t see it.”
On Friday, security officials scheduled another briefing to clarify the timing and address anger over the response. But that came only after he refused to explain why officers had not been able to stop the shooter before, and Victor Escalon, regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters Thursday that he had “taken into account all these questions “, but he was not willing to answer them.
Thursday’s briefing, convened by Texas security officials to clarify the chronology of the attack, provided fragments of previously unknown information. But when it was over, it had added to the worrying questions surrounding the attack, including how long it took police to get to the scene and confront the gunman, and the apparent failure to close. the door of the school where he entered.
After two days of providing often contradictory information, investigators said a school district police officer was not at school when Ramos arrived and, contrary to previous reports, the officer had not confronted Ramos. outside the building.
Instead, they outlined a timeline highlighted by unexplained delays by law enforcement.
After crashing his truck, Ramos shot at two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, Escalon said. He then entered the school “unobstructed” through a seemingly open door around 11:40 p.m.
But the first police officers did not arrive at the scene until 12 minutes after the accident and did not enter the school to chase the shooter until four minutes later. Inside, they were kicked out by Ramos and put under cover, Escalon said.
The gunman was still inside at 12:10 p.m. when the first U.S. Marshals Service deputies arrived. They had been running to school from nearly 70 miles (113 kilometers) away in the border town of Del Rio, the agency said in a tweet Friday.
The crisis ended after a group of Tactical Border Patrol officers entered the school at 12:45 p.m., Texas Department of Homeland Security spokesman Travis Considine said. They took part in a shootout with the gunman, who was locked up in the fourth grade classroom. Moments before 1 p.m., he was dead.
Escalon said during this time, agents called for support, negotiators and tactical equipment, while evacuating students and teachers.
Ken Trump, president of the National School Safety and Security Services consultancy, said the length of the calendar raised questions.
“Based on best practices, it’s very difficult to understand why there was some kind of delay, especially when you go into reports of 40 minutes or more coming in to neutralize that shooter,” he said.
Many other details of the case and the response remained murky. The motive for the massacre, the deadliest school shooting in the country from Newtown, Connecticut, nearly a decade ago, continued under investigation, and authorities said Ramos had no known criminal or mental health record.
During the siege, frustrated spectators urged police officers to charge at the school, according to witnesses.
“Come in! Get in! “The women called the officers shortly after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside a house across the street.
Carranza said officers should have entered the school earlier: “There were more. There was only one.”
The head of the Border Patrol, Raúl Ortiz, did not give a timetable, but said repeatedly that the tactical agents of his agency who arrived at the school did not hesitate. He said they moved quickly to enter the building, lining up in a “pile” behind an officer holding a shield.
“What we wanted to make sure of was to act quickly, to act quickly, and that’s exactly what these agents did,” Ortiz told Fox News.
But a law enforcement official said that once in the building, officers had trouble breaking down the classroom door and had to have a staff member open the room with a key. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Department of Homeland Security spokesman Lt. Christopher Olivarez told CNN that investigators were trying to establish whether the classroom was in fact closed or barricaded in any way.
Cazares said when he arrived he saw two officers outside the school and about five more listening to students outside the building. But it took 15 or 20 minutes before officers arrived with shields, equipped to face the gunman, he said.
As more parents went to school, he and others pressured police to act, Cazares said. He heard about four shots before he and the others were ordered back into a parking lot.
“Many of us were arguing with the police,‘ You all have to get in there. You all have to do your job. His response was, “We can’t do our job because you’re interfering,” Cazares said.
As for the school’s armed officer, he was driving nearby but was not on campus when Ramos crashed his truck, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case. spoke of the condition of anonymity.
Investigators have concluded that the school official was not located between the school and Ramos, which left him unable to face the shooter before entering the building, the officer said. .
Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, which works to make schools safer, warned that it is difficult to understand the facts clearly after a shooting.
“The information we have a couple of weeks after an event is usually quite different from what we receive on the first day or two. And even that is usually quite inaccurate,” Dorn said. For catastrophic events, “you usually have eight to twelve months left before you have a decent picture.”
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Bleiberg reported from Dallas.
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