82 minutes of disturbing footage of the massacre at Robb Elementary School shows police officers, some armed with rifles and ballistic shields, gathered in a hallway for more than an hour before entering a classroom and killing the gunman.
At one point, officers approached the classroom door, within minutes of the gunman entering the school unimpeded. They then quickly retreated after the gunman opened fire with his semi-automatic rifle.
The video does not shed light on why officers waited so long to confront the shooter, nor does it reveal who was responsible for the delay. In fact, days after it was published by the Austin American-Statesman, the video raises more questions than it answers.
The gunman appears to have done most of the shooting between the time he entered the classrooms and when officers approached the classroom minutes later, only to retreat under a hail of gunfire.
Here’s what the video revealed about the much-criticized and confusing police response — and the key questions that still remain unanswered as the Texas House of Representatives investigative committee releases its preliminary report on Sunday.
Delayed entry and retreat under fire
In the first edited video, which is just over four minutes long, audio captures distraught teachers screaming as the gunman crosses 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 carrying a semi-automatic rifle — his face was briefly shown — and entered a classroom, where he opened fire again, unleashing dozens of rounds.
When the shots rang out, a student peeking around the corner of the hallway at the shooter quickly turned and ran. Multiple volleys echoed through the corridors for nearly three minutes. The American statesman edited the footage to blur the identity of at least one child and remove the sound of children’s screams. Victims not shown.
About three minutes after the shooter entered, at least nine officers made what appeared to be a coordinated entry into the building. It was about 10 seconds after the last volley of gunshots that could be heard from the classrooms — followed by a long pause.
At least two policemen entered from one end of the corridor and seven in a column from the other. The video showed for the first time how quickly officers were on the scene and close to the shooting.
“It’s an incredible response time,” said Bill Francis, a former FBI agent who was the leader of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team for 17 years. “What happens after that is where things get messy.”
At least three police officers, two with rifles, immediately headed for the classroom door, crouching for cover.
Instead of forcing their way through the door — which would have been the widely accepted next step in an active shooter situation, and where officers would almost certainly have opened fire — they lingered outside the door until more gunfire rang out.
From the video alone, the direction of the gunfire from the classroom is unclear, though officials previously said officers fired when they first approached the door.
“They’re right there,” Francis said of the three officers seen near the classroom. “They get shot. At this point, you just have to win the battle. You have to go into that room and you have to eliminate the threat, and that’s established doctrine.”
Instead, the officers retreated down the hall to a spot just below the surveillance camera. A policeman grabbed him by the back of the head.
“The safety priorities that we teach … is to overcome that kind of primal instinct of self-preservation and overcome it to address the threat, to engage the threat,” said Thor Eales, executive director of the National Tactical Officers Association, as referred to until the initial missed opportunity to confront the shooter.
“It does require that we have to go into danger to do that, and that was the opportunity between two, three, four (officers) to start shooting at that suspect.”
Active shooter training generally holds that delay in confronting a shooter could cost civilian lives, and officers should move toward the shooting, alone if necessary, to stop the killing, experts say. A quick confrontation can save lives.
“They’re losing the chance for kids who are injured, bleeding out in there, maybe being saved and more kids getting shot at that point.” To me, that’s the biggest failure right there,” Francis said of the officers’ decision to withdraw from the shooting.
The retreat came at a crucial time in the siege and raises questions about the officers’ training, according to experts who have seen the video.
“The officers are really turning their backs on the door and running down the hall, and the shooter, if he wanted to, could have easily opened that door and killed all those officers,” Francis said. “They just turn and run away from the shooting. It’s just unfortunate because at that point they lose all momentum.”
The husband of the murdered teacher was among the first responders
Officers in bulletproof vests, some with ballistic shields, were seen walking through the hallways of the school as the gunman took over neighboring classrooms.
Police body camera video included in the recording shows two officers fist bumping at one point. Another clip shows an officer using a wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser.
Early in the siege, an officer was seen checking his phone, which drew criticism in some quarters, until a local politician provided important context.
State Rep. Joe Moody, one of three members of the House investigative committee looking into the law enforcement response, tweeted that the officer was Ruben Ruiz of the Uvalde School District police — the husband of teacher Eva Mireles, who was shot and killed.
The teacher called her husband on the phone while he stood with a gun in his hand in the hallway to say she was dying, according to Moody.
Mireles was a fourth grade teacher. She had been an educator for 17 years, her family said. Seconds after he was seen on the phone, the video shows Ruiz walking out of the camera’s view. He comes back a little later and talks to other officers.
Ruiz was eventually escorted out of the building after he tried to intervene, according to Moody.
“He tried to engage himself, but he was escorted out of the building and disarmed,” Moody said. His attempt to intercept the shooter and his removal from the building are not seen.
The Uvalde County Coroner’s Office has not released information on the deaths that day, and state officials have not commented on how many children may have died while officers waited outside and inside the building. During the siege, the children made repeated phone calls to the police while officers waited in the hallway. An 11-year-old girl who survived said she smeared herself in the blood of a dead classmate and pretended to be dead.
Steve Ijams, who headed Missouri’s SWAT team and is now a law enforcement tactics consultant, said the video does not reveal whether any officers tried to engage the shooter themselves.
“I have to believe that some people turn to others and say, ‘What are we here for?’ What are we doing?'” Ijams said.
“The main question when you watch the video is, ‘Why aren’t you doing your job?’ There are a lot of cops with guns drawn down the hall, as if they’re expecting this guy to run away. The idea that we just stand there with bunkers and shields and rifles and helmets and do nothing is just incomprehensible.”
Ijames is surprised that one of the officers in the video “didn’t just say, the hell with it, we’re going in.”
The video sheds no light on the agency’s role in the scene
It’s not clear from the video alone which agencies the officers belonged to or who was in command, although an investigative report to be released this weekend may provide answers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety said the officer responsible was school district Police Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who has been criticized by parents of the slain children, local leaders and law enforcement officials.
DPS said Arredondo misclassified the siege as a barricade situation, which — unlike an active shooter report — required a more measured response.
Arredondo said he neither considered himself the commander of the incident, nor did he instruct employees to refrain from trespassing in classrooms. He resigned from the Uvalde city council seat he took just 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 officials from other agencies.
“We don’t know who these other leaders are that arrived after the original chief arrived, what their interaction was with that chief, but there are a lot of people who could step up and take charge who were actually in the hallway,” Francis said.
Many of at least eight agencies whose officials responded to the school that day did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment. Others declined to comment on their role in the response.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busby said in a statement last month that the shooting was being investigated by the FBI and the Texas Rangers. She said “any release of records about this incident at this time would interfere with the ongoing investigation and would prevent a thorough and complete investigation.”
Busbee also objected to the release of the video, according to Texas DPS. The district attorney did not respond to CNN’s requests for comment.
DPS Director Col. Stephen McCraw last month criticized the delayed police response as a “gross failure,” citing in part evidence from hallway surveillance video.
“It was a mess for sure,” Francis said, referring to the law enforcement response. “There’s a lot of blame to go around.”
The video does not reveal what happens with the police response outside the school.
“What’s going on outside that…
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