SEATTLE - After more than two years of legal battles, the City of Uvalde released records related to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, a former student at the school, fatally shot 19 students and 2 teachers and injured 17 others.
The records released include police body camera footage, 911 calls and other communications from Uvalde city officials and the police department related to the school shooting and its immediate aftermath.
The release of records comes after more than a dozen news organizations, including The Texas Tribune, ABC News and the Associated Press, filed a suit in 2022 after being repeatedly denied open records requests.
The footage includes a 911 call from a Uvalde student recounts the early moments of the shooting. Fourth-grader Khloie Torres pleaded law enforcement to hurry up in their response from inside the classrooms. "Please hurry, there's a lot of dead bodies," Torres said. "Please, I'm going to die."
Some of the other 911 calls were from instructors. One described "a lot, a whole lot of gunshots," while another one sobbed into the phone as a dispatcher urged her to stay quiet. "Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!" the first teacher cried before hanging up.
The delayed response from Uvalde's law enforcement has been widely condemned as a massive failure, with nearly 400 officers waiting 77 minutes before confronting the gunman in a classroom filled with dead and wounded children and teachers. The response included nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, as well as school and city police.
Uvalde police body cameras were released in July 2022 only two months after the shooting, showing confusion around the law enforcement command structure and a lack of coordination among officers to confront the shooter.
In June, former Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo and a second school officer Adrian Gonzales were charged with felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child during the response at Robb Elementary.
The indictment alleges that despite having time to respond to the shooting, Gonzales failed to act to impede the gunman and failed to follow active shooter training by not advancing toward the gunfire, while Arredondo's indictment alleges that he failed to identify the situation as an active shooter, failed to respond as trained, and instead, called SWAT, thereby delaying the response by law enforcement.
Both Gonzales and Arredondo have pleaded not guilty to multiple charges of child abandonment and endangerment, while a Texas state trooper in Uvalde who had been suspended was reinstated to his job earlier this month.
Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece Jacklyn Cazares was killed in the shooting, said the release of information Saturday reignited festering anger because it shows "the waiting and waiting and waiting" of law enforcement. "Perhaps if they were to have breached earlier, they would have saved some lives, including my niece's," he said.
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