Police in Texas waited more than one hour to confront the gunman who killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, what law enforcement officials have conceded was “the wrong decision” in the wake of the massacre on 24 May.
Jessie Rodriguez, whose 10-year-old daughter Annabell was killed in the attack, told The Independent that “more likely many children probably still were there just bleeding out, but yet they didn’t try to rescue nobody.”
“It’s wrong to just think, ‘They’re all dead anyways.’ You don’t think negative like that; you enter and put down that man, find out if there’s still survivors – not just wait til they bleed out,” he said. “It took one hour before they could put a stop to this man ... but it’s a little bit too late.”
His remarks follow conflicting statements from Texas authorities, including a false statement that a school-assigned officer fired at the gunman before he entered the school, and a failure to fully account for the hour that followed.
Officers with the Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District arrived roughly four minutes after 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos entered the school, according to the timeline from law enforcement officials. But in the days that followed, officials have struggled to publicly explain what happened in the hour that followed before an officer fatally shot Ramos.
That critical hourlong gap in the timeline points to lingering questions about when exactly the shooting began, why police failed to stop the gunman, and whether Ramos had “barricaded” himself inside the classroom before or after killing the children inside.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre at Robb Elementary School, roughly 80 miles from San Antonio, the Texas Department of Public Safety initially nclaimed the gunman “encountered” an officer outside the school and “exchange[d] gunfire”. Not only did no officer confront Ramos, there was no officer on campus.
Those initial statements are “not accurate” according to Victor Escalon, a regional director with the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“He walked in unobstructed initially,” he said during a press conference from Uvalde on 26 May, two days after the massacre. “He was not confronted by anybody.”
Within the hour that Ramos entered the school and his death, parents and bystanders began to surround the school, urging police on the scene to enter and save their children.
Officers on the scene believed the active shooting stage of the incident was over, believing instead that the gunman “barricaded” from police, despite at least nine desperate 911 calls from children and people inside the school demanding help within that time.
At one point, at least 19 officers were in a hallway, though none of them engaged the gunman, according to police.
“Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period. There’s no excuse for that,” Steven C McCraw, Director and Colonel of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters on 27 May.
“We don’t care what agency you’re from,” Mr McCraw said. “You don’t have to have a leader on the scene. Every officer lines up, stacks up, goes and finds where those rounds are being fired at and keeps shooting.”
Additional reporting from Alex Woodward
