The missing 77 minutes between the start of the Robb Elementary School shooting and the police shooting of suspect Salvador Ramos could finally be a little clearer.
Texas House Rep. Dustin Burrows, chairman of the special Texas House panel investigating the shooting, said Monday that both Texas Department of Public Safety and Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin have agreed to release at least some of the surveillance footage from inside the school.
“I can tell people all day long what it is I saw. The committee can tell people all day long what we saw. But it’s very different to see for yourself and we feel that’s very important,” Burrows said.
The video would “contain no graphic images or depictions of violence,” he said, and would be specifically of the hallway after the shooter entered the classroom but before police finally made contact and killed him.
Burrows gave no timetable on the release, but said it could be made public along with the preliminary report on the massacre.
The recordings have been at the center of questions about the failed police response to the school shooting since late May.
Nineteen students and two teachers were fatally shot on May 24 while police waited outside and tried to stop parents from going into the school.
Researchers from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) at Texas State University said in a report last week that a Uvalde police officer armed with a rifle had eyes on Ramos before he even entered Robb Elementary, but the officer’s supervisor never gave him the go-ahead to shoot. Local Uvalde officials have disputed that report.
Col. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, admitted during a state senate hearing last month that the responding officers never even bothered to try opening the door to the classroom where the gunman was opening fire.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” McCraw said of Pete Arredondo, the school police chief for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District.
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