The disturbing 82-minute footage of the Robb Elementary School massacre shows police officers, some armed with rifles and ballistic shields, concentrated in a hallway for more than an hour before entering a classroom and killing the man armed.
At one point, officers approached the classroom door a few minutes after the shooter entered the school unobstructed. They then made a hasty retreat after the gunman opened fire with his semi-automatic rifle.
The video does not clarify why officers waited so long to confront the gunman, nor does it reveal who was responsible for the delay. In fact, days after its publication by the Austin American-Statesman, the video raises more questions than answers.
The gunman appeared to make most of the shots between the time he entered the classrooms and when officers approached the classroom minutes later only to retreat under a bombardment of gunfire.
This is what the video revealed about the heavily criticized and perplexed police response, and key questions still unanswered, as a Texas House of Representatives inquiry committee will release its preliminary report on Sunday.
A delayed entry and a retreat under fire
In the first edited video, which lasts just over four minutes, the audio captures frantic teachers screaming as the gunman walked through the parking lot after crashing a truck near the school campus.
He entered the school at 11:33 a.m. on May 24, turned down a hallway with a semi-automatic rifle – the face shown briefly – and entered a classroom, where he reopened fire, triggering dozens of rounds.
When the shots rang out, a student who had been looking around the corner from the hallway at the gunman quickly turned around and fled. Multiple bursts of gunfire resounded through the hallways for nearly three minutes. The American statesman edited the footage to blur at least one child’s identity and to eliminate the sound of children’s screams. The victims are not shown.
About three minutes after the shooter entered, at least nine officers made what appeared to be a coordinated entrance to the building. That was about 10 seconds after the last volley of shots could be heard from the classrooms, which was followed by a long pause.
At least two officers entered at one end of the hallway, and seven in individual rows at the other. The video showed, for the first time, how quickly the officers were at the scene and close to the shots.
“This is an incredible response time,” said Bill Francis, a former FBI agent who was the leader of the office’s elite hostage rescue team for 17 years. “What happens next is where things go wrong.”
At least three officers, two carrying rifles, immediately rushed to the classroom door, crouched down to protect themselves.
Instead of forcing themselves through the door, which would have been the next widely accepted step in an active shooter situation and where it is certain that officers would have fired, they stayed outside the door until additional shots were heard. .
Only for the video is the direction of the shooting from the classroom unclear, although officials have previously said officers fired when they first approached the door.
“They’re right there,” Francis said of the three agents seen near the classroom. “They’re getting shot. Right now you just have to win the fight. You have to get into this room and you have to eliminate the threat and that’s an established doctrine.”
Instead, officers retreated down the hallway to a point just below the surveillance camera. An officer grabbed the back of his head.
“The security priorities we teach … are to overcome this kind of overriding instinct for self-preservation and drive it to deal with the threat, to deal with the threat,” said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers, in reference. to the initial missed opportunity to face the shooter.
“It requires that we should be in danger to do so and that was the opportunity between two, three, four (officers) there to start attacking this suspect with gunfire.”
Active shooter training holds, in general, that delays in dealing with a gunman can cost civilians their lives, and officers should advance toward gunfire, only if necessary, to stop the shooting. ‘murder, according to experts. A quick confrontation can save lives.
“They miss the chance that the kids who are injured, bleeding in there, maybe get saved and more kids get shot at that point. For me, that’s the biggest failure there is,” Francis said of the decision. of the agents to retire. the shot.
The withdrawal came at a crucial time in the siege and raises questions about officer training, according to experts who watched the video.
“Officers turn their backs on the door and run down the hallway and the shooter, if he had wanted to, could easily have opened that door and killed all those officers,” Francis said. “They just turn around and run away from the shots. It’s a shame because at this point they lose all momentum.”
The husband of the murdered teacher was among the first respondents
Agents with body armor are seen, some with ballistic shields, who are seen walking down the school hallway while the gunman occupied the adjoining classrooms.
The video from the police corps camera, included in the footage, showed two officers being punched at one point. An agent is seen in another clip using a hand sanitizer dispenser mounted on a wall.
At the beginning of the siege, an officer is seen checking his phone, which provoked criticism in some sectors until a local politician provided an important context.
State Rep. Joe Moody, one of three members of the House Investigation Committee studying law enforcement response, tweeted that the officer is Ruben Ruiz of the Uvalde School District Police, the husband of Professor Eva Mireles, who was shot dead.
The teacher contacted her husband by phone while he was standing with the gun in his hand down the hallway to tell him he was dying, according to Moody.
Mireles was a fourth grade teacher. She had been an educator for 17 years, her family said. A few seconds after being seen on the phone, the video shows Ruiz coming out of sight of the camera. He returns a few moments later and talks to other agents.
Ruiz was eventually removed from the building after attempting to intervene, according to Moody’s.
“He tried to participate, but they took him out of the building and disarmed him,” Moody said. His attempt to confront the shooter and his exit from the building are not visible.
The Uvalde County Forensic Office has not released information on the deaths that day and public officials have not commented on how many children may have died while officers were waiting outside and inside the building. During the siege, the children made several phone calls to police while officers waited in the hallway. An 11-year-old girl who survived said she was smeared with the blood of a dead classmate and committed suicide.
Steve Ijames, who ran a SWAT unit in Missouri and is now a law enforcement tactics consultant, said the video does not reveal whether some officers attempted to attack the shooter on his own.
“I have to believe that some people are turning to others and saying, ‘Why do we exist? What do we do?’ “Ijames said.
“The key question when watching the video is,‘ Why don’t you do your job? “There are a lot of cops pointing guns down the aisle like they’re waiting for this guy to run out. The idea of us staying there with bunkers and shields and rifles and helmets and doing nothing is incomprehensible.”
Ijames is surprised that one of the agents in the video “not only said, f —- that, we’ll get in.”
The video sheds no light on the role of agencies in the scene
It is not clear just from the video which agencies the agents belonged to or who was in command, although the investigation report to be released this weekend could provide answers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety has said the officer in charge was the school district police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who has been attacked by the parents of the murdered children, local leaders and law enforcement officials.
The DPS has said Arredondo erroneously classified the siege as a barricade situation, which, unlike an active shooter report, calls for a more measured response.
Arredondo has said he was not considered the commander of the incident nor did he order officers to refrain from entering classrooms. He resigned from the seat of the City Council of Uvalde that he assumed only a week after the attack.
At least three federal, two state and three local agencies responded to the carnage at Robb Elementary. The video sheds no light on the role of classification officers from other agencies.
“We don’t know who these other leaders who came after the arrival of the initial boss, what was their interaction with that boss, but there are a lot of people who could have taken a step and taken charge that they really were in the corridor “, Francis. dit.
Many of at least eight agencies whose officers responded to the school that day have not responded to CNN’s requests for comment. Others have declined to comment on their role in the response.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee said in a statement last month that the shooting was being investigated by the FBI and Texas Rangers. He said “any publication of records of this incident at this time would interfere with the ongoing investigation and prevent a thorough and complete investigation.”
Busbee has also opposed the release of the video, according to the Texas DPS. The district attorney has not responded to CNN’s requests for comment.
DPS director Colonel Steven McCraw last month criticized the delayed police response as an “abject failure,” citing in part evidence from the hallway surveillance video.
“This was definitely a mess,” Francis said, referring to the law enforcement response. “There’s a lot of guilt everywhere.”
The video does not reveal what was going on with the police response outside of school.
“What’s going on outside of that …