Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, says police made the wrong decision by waiting nearly an hour for additional officers before entering the classroom where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers. He clarifies that all Texas officers have active training and certification of shooters, which requires them to participate until the subject is dead.
Students trapped inside a classroom with a gunman repeatedly called 911 during this week’s attack on a Texas elementary school, including one that begged, “Please send the police now.” nearly 20 officers waited in the hallway for more than 45 minutes, authorities said. Friday.
The commander of the scene in Uvalde, the head of the school district police, believed that the armed man Salvador Ramos, 18, was barricaded inside the adjoining classrooms of Robb Primary School and that the children were no longer at risk, Steven McCraw, head of Texas. The Department of Public Safety said in a controversial press conference.
“It was a wrong decision,” he said.
Friday’s briefing took place after authorities spent three days providing often contradictory and incomplete information about the 90 minutes that elapsed between the time Ramos entered the school and the time when Border Patrol officers The US unlocked the door to the classroom and killed him.
Ramos killed 19 children and two teachers, but his motive is unclear, authorities said.
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There was a bombing shortly after Ramos entered the classroom where officers killed him, but those shots were “sporadic” for much of the 48 minutes when officers waited in the hallway, McCraw said. He said investigators do not know if or how many children died during that time.
During the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 for help, including a girl who begged, “Please send the police now,” McCraw said.
Questions have been raised about how long it took officers to get into the school to confront the gunman.
It was 11:28 a.m. Tuesday when Ramos’ Ford truck crashed into a ditch behind Texas elementary school and the driver jumped with an AR-15 rifle.
Five minutes later, authorities say, Ramos entered the school and found his way to the fourth-grade classroom where he killed all 21 victims.
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.”
According to the new timeline provided by McCraw, after crashing his truck, Ramos shot at two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, officials said.
Contrary to previous statements by officials, a school district police officer was not inside the school when Ramos arrived. When the officer responded, unknowingly, he passed Ramos, who was crouched behind a car parked outside and fired at the building, McCraw said.
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At 11:33 p.m., Ramos entered the school through a back door that had opened and fired more than 100 meats at a couple of classrooms, McCraw said.
DPS spokesman Travis Considine said investigators had not determined why the door was opened.
Two minutes later, three local police officers arrived and entered the building through the same door, followed shortly after by four others, McCraw said. In 15 minutes, as many as 19 agents from different agencies had gathered in the hallway, catching sporadic fire from Ramos, which was locked in a classroom.
Ramos was still inside at 12:10 pm when the first deputies from the U.S. Marshals Service 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.
But the police commander inside the building decided the group would have to wait to confront the gunman, believing the scene was no longer an active attack, McCraw said.
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.
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.
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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.”
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 go. You all have to do your job. His response was, “We can’t do our job because you’re interfering,” Cazares 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.”
One mother describes her daughter’s experience of surviving the Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook nearly a decade earlier.
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