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Robb Elementary Corridor staff wanted to enter Classrooms 111 and 112 immediately. An officer’s daughter was inside. Another officer was called by his wife, a teacher, who told him he was bleeding to death.
Two closed doors and a wall stood between them and an 18-year-old with an AR-15 opened fire on children and teachers in the connected classrooms. A hooligan bar – an ax-like tool for forced entry by firefighters to get through locked doors – was available. Ballistic shields arrived at the scene. He also had a lot of firepower, including at least two rifles. Some officers were itching to move.
One such officer, a special agent in the Texas Department of Public Safety, arrived about 20 minutes after the shooting began. He immediately asked: Are there more children in the classrooms?
“If there are, they just have to come in,” the agent said.
Another officer replied: “It is unknown at this time.
The agent replied, “Don’t you all know if there are children inside?” He added, “If there are children there, we should go in there.”
“He who answers will determine this,” came the answer.
Inaction seemed too much for the special agent. He noted that there are still children in other classrooms at the school who need to be evacuated.
“Well, there are children here,” he said. “So I’m taking the kids out.”
The exchange took place at the start of the torturous 77 minutes on May 24, which began when Salvador Ramos, who had just shot his grandmother in the face, walked through an unlocked Robb Elementary door without encountering any interference while owning a him AR-15 eight days earlier. At the end of those 77 minutes, 19 students, including the daughter of one of the police officers located in the corridor, and two teachers were dead or dying. Others have suffered serious physical injuries; emotional and psychological will last a lifetime. It was the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
But for most of those 77 minutes, despite urgent requests from staff and parents gathered outside, staff remained outside rooms 111 and 112, located at either end of a wide corridor with sky-blue and green walls and billboards featuring children’s artwork. Ramos fired at least four sets of ammunition – including the initial shooting, which probably killed many of his victims instantly.
It was nearly an hour after the special agent’s comment before a Border Patrol tactical team broke through the classroom doors and killed the shooter.
In the weeks following the Uwalde tragedy, questions have been circulating about police action and whether some lives could have been saved if police confronted the barricaded gunman earlier. Authorities shared conflicting information about who was in charge, who faced the shooter and when. The debate over whether locked classroom doors could be broken gave way to the discovery that they may not have been locked at all.
Disclosures have surfaced in the press: The New York Times described employees’ doubts about the decision to wait; breakdowns in communications and tactics; and the fact that the officers refrained from confrontation, even though they knew that people were wounded and probably dying inside. The San Antonio Express-News reported that there was no evidence that officers had tried on the doors of rooms 111 and 112 – contrary to a key statement by Uwalde School Police Chief Pete Aredondo, who told The Texas Tribune that they tried the doors and found them locked and had to wait for a master key to unlock them. On Monday night, Austin American-Statesman and KVUE-TV revealed that the officers actually had more than enough firepower, equipment and motivation to break through the classrooms.
Pete Aredondo, head of the Uwalde school police, on a dirt road on the outskirts of Uwalde on June 8. Credit: Evan L’Roy for The Texas Tribune
Meanwhile, at least three investigations – by the Texas Legislature, the U.S. Department of Justice and local District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busby – are reviewing records and questioning witnesses to assess law enforcement responses. Public understanding of the tragedy was overshadowed by state and local agencies ‘refusals to publish public recordings, local officials’ efforts to ban journalists from public meetings, and the nature of closed-door hearings by state lawmakers. Pointing his finger has already prompted The Texas Monthly to ask, “Will we ever know the truth about Uwalde?”
For this article, the Tribune reviewed the chronology of events compiled by law enforcement, plus surveillance footage and transcripts of radio traffic and phone calls from the day of the shooting. The details were confirmed by a senior official in the public safety department. The investigation is still at an early stage and the understanding of what happened may still change as the videos are synchronized and improved. But current records and footage show that a well-equipped group of local officers entered the school almost immediately that day and then withdrew after the shooter started firing from the classroom. Then they waited for more than an hour to commit again.
“They had the tools,” said Terry Nichols, a former Séguin police chief and active shooting expert. “Tactically, there are many different ways you can handle this. “But someone needs to be responsible, make and implement decisions, and that just didn’t happen.”
Here are some key findings from these records and materials:
- No security footage from inside the school shows police trying to open the doors of classrooms 111 and 112, which are connected to an adjacent door. Aredondo told the Tribune that he tried to open one door and another group of officers tried to open another, but that the door was reinforced and impenetrable. These attempts were not captured in the footage reviewed by the Tribune. Some law enforcement officials are skeptical that the doors were ever locked.
- In the first minutes after the reaction of the law enforcement agencies, an official said that Haligan (a fire truck, which is also sometimes described as a hooligan) was on the spot. He was brought to the school only an hour after the first employees entered the building. Authorities did not use it and waited for the keys instead.
- Officers had access to four ballistic shields inside the school during the clash with the gunman, according to a law enforcement transcript. The first arrived 58 minutes before police stormed the classrooms. The last one arrived 30 minutes ago.
- Numerous public safety officers – up to eight, at one point – entered the building at various times while the shooter was hiding. They left very quickly to perform other duties, including evacuating children, after seeing the number of officers already there. At least one of the officers expressed confusion and frustration as to why the officers did not break into the classroom, but he was told that no order had been issued.
- At least some officials at the scene seemed to believe that Aredondo was in charge of the school, and sometimes Aredondo seemed to issue orders such as directing officers to evacuate students from other classrooms. This contradicts Aredondo’s claim that he did not believe he was leading the law enforcement response. Aredondo’s lawyer, George E. Hyde, did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.
What the camera saw
Most of the video from inside the school was shot from a wide-angle camera located at the northwest entrance of the school building, the same one used by the shooter. The camera faces south of its north ceiling and offers a slight view of the entrances to classrooms 111 and 112 on the left.
The Tribune also reviewed transcripts of radio traffic and camera footage.
They show that the armed man arrived on campus at 11:28 a.m. He appears to have been planning to shoot for some time. In October, according to the law enforcement schedule, he retired from Uwalde High School. A month later, when he was still 17, he bought some weapon accessories online, including rifle slings and a military vest. He started buying his ammunition in April and bought his weapon on his 18th birthday in May. On May 14, he posted an ominous message on Instagram: “10 more days.” On February 28, this chat thread included a reference to him – it is not clear from whom – as a “school shooter”.
At 11:33 a.m. on May 24, he entered the northwest entrance of Robb Elementary and headed south to the two classrooms on the left, firing his rifle randomly into the hallway. He had crashed his car and was shooting outside, so the school was already locked at that moment and the corridors were almost empty. No one was hit, but a boy could be seen peering around the corner at the northeast end of the corridor, apparently trying to return to class from a nearby bathroom. The boy heard …
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