'We Wanted to Storm the Building': Uvalde Parents Furious as Police Waited an Hour to Stop Shooter
18:11 GMT 27.05.2022 (Updated: 18:27 GMT 27.05.2022)
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As new details emerge about the sequence of events on Tuesday at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, people are demanding answers as to why police refused to enter the building and stop the shooter for more than an hour.
At a hectic press conference on Thursday, Texas police revised their narrative about the sequence of events even further, revealing that a security official posted at the school did not engage 18-year-old Salvador Ramos before he entered the school - the shooter did so unimpeded.
Victor Escalon, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters that Ramos fired his rifle outside the school for 12 minutes before entering the building, including at people at a nearby funeral home, who placed the first 911 call to police. After Ramos entered the school, he entered a fourth-grade classroom and began shooting, killing 19 students and two teachers. He then remained in the room for more than an hour, and police “breached” the door by unlocking it with keys given to them by the school janitor.
Escalon said the first officers arrived at the school just four minutes after Ramos entered the building, but noted that they didn’t “make entry initially because of the gunfire”.
He said nearly all of the shooting happened at the beginning of the incident, meaning that the wounded lie dying amid the stakeout.
That was very different from the original story given by police, which claimed Ramos had traded gunfire with officers and barricaded himself in the classroom.
This video make so much more sense now. The cops literally stopped parents from helping their kids. pic.twitter.com/zhQfUjlpjd https://t.co/DqgZUH3uCC
— Matt Novak (@paleofuture) May 26, 2022
However, the police narrative had already begun to unravel. A day prior, video emerged of police outside the school seemingly more concerned with controlling the crowd of furious parents demanding they enter the school and stop the shooter from killing their children than they did with preparing to do so themselves.
“There were five or six of [us] fathers, hearing the gunshots, and [police officers] were telling us to move back”, Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn was inside the school, told the Associated Press. “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building”.
Jacklyn was one of the 19 students shot and killed that day.
Angeli Rose Gomez, a farm supervisor and parent, said she was tackled to the ground and handcuffed by US Marshals amid the arguing with police. She described a father who was tackled to the ground and another who was pepper-sprayed. A spokesperson for the federal police force denied that anyone had been handcuffed, telling The Wall Street Journal that they had “maintained order and peace”.
"They could've been shot. They could've been killed," Texas police lieutenant explains why law enforcement did not go into Uvalde school right away. pic.twitter.com/lfzTtAQqFg
— Virginia Kruta (@VAKruta) May 27, 2022
Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Chris Olivarez was challenged about officers’ slow entry of the school in a television interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer on Thursday, who asked him “what exactly law enforcement was doing for 60 minutes or so while the shooter remained in that classroom killing those kids and teachers?”
“If they proceeded any further, not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed”, Olivarez said.
A similar situation happened at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, on 14 February 2018: Deputy Scot Peterson, the only armed guard on campus, retreated to safety instead of moving to engage the shooter. He was arrested after being charged on 11 counts of neglect of a child, and a judge found last August that the trial against him could proceed.
However, since the 1999 Columbine High School shooting in Colorado, when SWAT teams sat idly outside the school as two shooters murdered 12 students and a teacher, standard police policy and practice in the US has been for police to enter the building as soon as possible and stop the shooter, even ignoring victims while the gunman remains an active threat.
For example, the manual used by the Texas Police Chiefs Association says that “the first two to five responding officers should form a single team and enter the structure”.
On Friday, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw admitted that it was “the wrong decision” to wait for tactical teams at Uvalde.
"There were 19 officers in there, in fact, there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done with one exception - the incident commander inside believed he needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point... Where I'm sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision”, he said at a press conference.
