“It was like putting salt on an open wound,” said Velma Duran, sister of murdered teacher Irma Garcia, about this week’s assessment of law enforcement response that revealed that a police officer Armed police had a chance to shoot the gunman before he got inside. Robb Elemental.
“It’s hard to cry when there’s no closure,” he said, six weeks after the massacre.
Jacinto Cazares’ 9-year-old daughter also died. “My stomach hurts, the policeman having this guy in his sights … could have shot me down,” he said.
“Something, right there, could have stopped everything. And it wasn’t like that.”
And that was just the beginning of what Duran calls “a tsunami of failures in every agency there was, every one.”
Two unlocked doors, the lack of effective command, the positions of officers inside, and the loss of momentum after authorities entered the building were other issues highlighted in Wednesday’s report by the Training Center. law enforcement rapid response (ALERRT), an active shooter and attack. response training provider at Texas State University.
The mayor of Uvalde denies the assessment of the response of law enforcement, saying that the new report “does not give a complete and accurate explanation of what happened.”
Mayor Don McLaughlin disagreed Thursday with the first part of the assessment, which said a supervisor of the officer with a rifle who had seen the gunman did not hear him or responded too late when he was asked for permission to shoot.
“No officer in the Uvalde police department saw the shooter on May 24 before he entered the school,” McLaughlin said in a statement. “No Uvalde police officer had any chance to shoot the gunman.”
There has already been massive criticism of the law enforcement response. The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Colonel Steven McCraw, said there were enough officers and equipment to stop the gunman three minutes after he entered the school. Instead, law enforcement took 74 minutes to confront him, at which point Professor Arnie Reyes, lying in his own blood in Classroom 111, thought he and his students had been forgotten.
Inaction is unfathomable to families.
“These pictures I’ve seen of all these agencies around … are under a tree, under the shade drinking water. And in my head, I’m thinking, are these kids asking for help? Are they calling. For 911? Is there still children who could have been saved? ” Duran said, catching her breath as she struggled to tears.
Two particularly critical relatives are Irma Garcia’s brother Marcus Lozano, a police officer, and his eldest son Cristian Garcia, who lost his father Joe to a heart attack two days after his mother’s death. .
“The moment I heard my mother was dead, I yelled, ‘I should have caught this bullet.’ I’m in the army. I know what to do. I signed up for that … I told myself that if I had been in that position, I would have rushed there and grabbed a bullet, ”Garcia said.
“He had no body armor. He had no shield. He had no support. They were there. And then they did nothing,” he continued of the gunman. “Why did my mother have to go to the door and look death in the ghostly eyes and try to lock that door?”
Lozano told CNN he was at the first briefing for families where they were allowed to ask questions and felt it was like “smoke and mirrors.”
“What I was asking them was what did the first agents who responded do, not involve the shooter? I live in San Antonio. It took me 50 minutes to go from San Antonio to … Uvalde. It took 77. I spent five minutes “villages and they tell me they didn’t have the power of fire,” he said.
Lozano blamed “bad police, bad tactics” for not stopping the massacre.
“I love my blue brothers, but it’s like any profession, you know? This profession isn’t made for everyone,” he continued. “It’s good and elegant: you graduate from academy, you get the badge, but when it’s time to get dressed … you know, look death in the face, they got weak on their knees.”
He agrees that some may still be dead. “It ‘s a fact that my sister [and] “Mrs. Mireles, adults will be the first … because they pose the greatest threat to him,” he said. “But all these babies should never have died.”
Garcia wants those responsible to leave law enforcement. “Those agents who were in those hallways, I want them to resign. All of them,” he said.
Her aunt, Velma Duran, added, “Or fire them. I want to know who they are and I want their credentials taken away.”
Garcia continued, “My mother protected these children, but no one protected her. So the whole police department here is a coward.”
Cazares breaks down when he compares his daughter, Jackie, to the envoys to save her.
“My daughter was a fighter, she carried a small bullet in her heart and she still fought,” he said. “She struggled a lot to stay alive. And those cowards couldn’t get in. Who knows how long she was like that? But she had a fight in her.
“Everyone has to go. Everyone has to go.”
Mayor McLaughlin told CNN he fears there is a cover-up between law enforcement to try to avoid widespread guilt, though both the Texas governor’s office and its law enforcement officials they insisted that investigations will continue to come to the truth.
And both Duran and Cazares said they felt that sometimes money and politics overshadowed lost lives.
Duran urged his fellow Texans to take action.
“We can have safer schools. We can have bulletproof windows. We can have security guards at every entrance or exit point. If there are assault weapons, that will continue. As we have noticed in recent days, it is assault. Weapons. So we have to vote for these people because right now it’s about money and their political power. “
CNN’s Rebekah Riess and Ray Sanchez contributed to this report.