WWALDE, Texas, May 27 (Reuters) – Frenzied children called 911 at least half a dozen times from classrooms in Texas where the massacre was taking place, begging police to intervene as about 20 police officers waited in the hallway nearly an hour ago. to enter and kill the shooter, authorities said Friday.
At least two children made several emergency calls from a pair of adjoining fourth-grade classrooms after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle on Tuesday, according to Colonel Stephen McCrow, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Ramos, who drove Rob from home from elementary school after shooting and wounding his grandmother there, continued to kill 19 children and two teachers in the deadliest shooting at a school in the United States in nearly a decade.
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“He’s in Room 112,” a girl whispered on the phone at 12:03 a.m., more than 45 minutes before a tactical team led by the U.S. Border Patrol finally stormed in and ended the siege.
The field commander, the head of the Uwalde, Texas school district police department, believed at the time that Ramos was barricaded inside and that the children were no longer at immediate risk, giving police time to prepare, McCrow said.
“Of course, backwards, where I’m sitting now, of course, was not the right decision,” McCrow said. That was the wrong decision, period.
The revelation of delays by local law enforcement in the pursuit of a teenager armed with a semi-automatic rifle came when a leading national gun rights group, the National Weapons Association, opened its 275-mile annual convention in Houston.
Governor Greg Abbott, a Republican and staunch advocate for gun rights, who addressed the meeting in a pre-recorded video, caught obvious omissions by Uwalde police, saying at a news conference later that he had been misled and “hanged by what happened.” .
Abbott denied that Texas’ newly passed gun laws, including a controversial measure to remove licensing requirements for carrying concealed weapons, had “some significance” to Tuesday’s bloodshed. He suggested that state lawmakers focus new attention on tackling mental illness.
‘SEND THE POLICE NOW’
Even as the shooting resumed an irresistible, protracted national debate over easy access to military weapons in the United States, the latest chronology of the Uwalde school attack has sparked public concern, including among the officials who reported it.
McGraw, whose voice was sometimes choked with emotion, said: “We are here to report the facts, not to defend what has been done or what has been done.”
Some of the mostly 9- and 10-year-old students trapped by the shooter survived the massacre, including at least two who called 911, McCrow said. He did not offer a specific assessment.
There were at least eight calls from classrooms to 911 between 12:03 p.m., half an hour after Ramos first entered the building, and 12:50 p.m., when border patrol and police agents stormed in and shot Ramos.
It is unclear whether scene officials were aware of the calls while waiting, McCrow said.
Children flee to safety during mass shooting at Rob Elementary School, where a gunman killed nineteen children and two adults in Uvalde, Texas, USA, May 24, 2022. Photo taken May 24, 2022. Uvalde Leader -News / Distribution via REUTERS
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A girl, whom McCrow did not identify, called at 12:16 p.m. and told police there were still “eight to nine” students alive, the colonel said. Three shots were heard during a call at 12:21 p.m.
The girl who made the first call asked the operator to “please send the police now” at 12:43, and again four minutes later.
Police left three minutes after the last call, according to McCrow, when the tactical team used a doorman’s key to open the locked classroom door.
Several officers had an initial exchange of shootings with Ramos shortly after he entered the school at 11:33 a.m. when two officers were shot and fled. By 12:03 p.m., there were as many as 19 employees in the hallway when the first 911 call from the classroom was received, McCrow said.
Videos released on Thursday showed tortured parents outside the school calling on police to storm the building during the attack, some of whom must be detained by police.
Standard law enforcement protocols require police to confront an active school shooter without delay, instead of waiting for reinforcements or more firepower, a point McCrow acknowledged on Friday.
Medical experts also stress the importance of evacuating severely wounded patients with firearms to a trauma center within 60 minutes – what emergency doctors call the “golden hour” – to save lives.
McCrow described other times when Ramos may have been thwarted. A school official, answering calls about a gunman who crashed his car into the funeral home across the street, walked right past Ramos as he crouched down to a vehicle on the school property. Police say Ramos shot two people standing outside before climbing the school fence.
The door that gave Ramos access to the building was left open by a teacher, McCrow said, in violation of school district security policies.
NRA CONVENTION
The attack, which took place 10 days after the shooting in Buffalo, New York, which killed 10 people, intensified the long-standing national debate on gun laws.
At a meeting of the NRA, prominent Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, doubled arguments that tougher gun laws would do little or nothing to mitigate the growing frequency of mass shootings in the United States. Read more
About 500 protesters holding crosses, plaques and photos of victims of the Uwalde shooting gathered in front of the congress, shouting “NRA leave.”
President Joe Biden, a Democrat who called on Congress to approve new gun restrictions, will visit a community of 16,000 people Sunday about 80 miles (130 km) west of San Antonio. Read more
Investigators are still searching for the motives for the attack. Ramos, who dropped out of high school, had no criminal record or history of mental illness.
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Report by Gabriela Bortter and Brad Brooks in Uwalde, Texas; additional reports by Maria Caspani in New York, Brendan O’Brien in Chicago and Doina Chiaku in Washington; writing by Joseph Ax; edited by Jonathan Oatis and Cynthia Osterman
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