UWALDE, TX – Covered in a whisper, a fourth-grader called police. Around her, in room 112 at Rob Elementary School, were the motionless bodies of her classmates and dozens of spent shell casings fired by a gunman who had been at the school for half an hour.
She whispered to a 911 operator shortly after noon that she was in the shooter’s classroom. She called again. And again. “Please send the police now,” she begged.
But they were already there, waiting in the school hallway just outside. And they were there for over an hour.
Police officers lingered while listening to sporadic gunfire behind the door, ordered by the scene commander not to rush into the pair of connected classrooms, where the shooter had locked himself inside and started firing shortly after 11:30 p.m.
“That was the wrong decision, period,” State Police Chief Stephen K. McCrow said Friday after reading from transcripts of child calls to 911 and the timeline of police inaction during nearly 90 minutes of horror at a primary school in Uwalde, Texas.
After days of changing explanations and conflicting accounts, the revelations answered many of the key questions about how the massacre took place. But they raised the even more painful possibility that the police had done more and faster, not all the dead – 19 children and two teachers – would have lost their lives.
Mr McCrow’s outspoken and sudden revelation that a police commander had decided not to enter the classroom, even when the shooter continued firing, sparked an eruption of shouts and emotional interrogations. Sometimes Mr. McCrow struggled to be heard. To others he looked overwhelmed, his voice broken.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, who earlier this week said police “showed incredible courage by fleeing to shoot”, told a news conference in Uwalde on Friday that he had been “misled” about the events and police response, adding that he was “absolutely furious.”
Mr Abbott, who hours earlier gave up his plans to appear at the National Arms Association convention in Houston, told reporters that US lawmakers would review the tragedy and find out what had gone wrong. “Do we expect laws to come out of this devastating crime?” The answer is yes, “he said.
For Robb Elementary School children, Tuesday began as a day of festivities and special treats – movies in the classroom, family photos in front of a shining curtain and award ceremonies for students ending their year in two days as relatives proudly held hands as they walked. corridors.
Gemma Lopez had a fitness class this morning and an award ceremony. She watched The Jungle Cruise with her fourth-graders in Room 108. Some of the students did the work, others played, “doing what we do,” as she put it.
Then she heard a loud bang in the distance, like firecrackers. She realized something was wrong because she saw the police in front of the classroom window. And the popping got louder.
“Everyone was scared and everything and I told them to keep quiet,” said 10-year-old Gemma. One of her classmates thought it might be a joke and laughed. Gemma said she drowned her out. They had trained for that. She turned off the lights in the classroom, as she had been taught to do.
“I heard a lot more shots, and then I cried a little,” she said, “and my best friend Sophie was crying right next to me.”
The 18-year-old gunman, who hit his grandmother’s pickup truck at 11:28 a.m. in a ditch near the school, started shooting outside – more than 20 times, first at passers-by and then at classroom windows. A police officer from the Uwalde school district arrived at the scene but did not see the attacker and passed him.
Minutes later, the shooter was inside and opened a side door that was supposed to be locked, but was supported by a teacher who had gone outside to pick up his cell phone.
Jasmine Carrillo, 29, was working in the café with about 40 sophomores and two teachers when the attack began. The lights dimmed, part of a blockage that had taken effect throughout the school.
After entering the fourth-class building, Ms. Carillo said, the shooter slammed and kicked the door of her 10-year-old son Mario’s classroom, demanding he be released. But he could not open the locked door.
Instead, he moved in with others.
In the connected classrooms, room 111 and room 112, a pair of teachers, Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia, also screened Lilo and Stitch as students finished their lessons. One of the teachers moved to close the door and close the classroom down the hall. But the shooter was already there.
11-year-old Mia Serilo watches her teacher walk back to the classroom, and the gunman follows. He shot first one teacher and then the other. She said he shot many students in her classroom and then went to the next room and opened fire, her 71-year-old grandfather Jose Veloz said, passing the story on to the girl.
Then he started shooting wildly.
A terrifying echo of at least 100 shots rang out through the school as children in the classrooms and the two teachers were shot and fell to the ground. It was 11:33 in the morning
Not all the children inside were killed at this horrific moment. Several survived and huddled in fear to their relaxed friends. One of the children fell on Mia’s chest while she was lying on the ground, her grandfather said. Terrified that he would return to her classroom, Maya said, she took the blood of her classmate who fell dead and rubbed it with her. Then she was playing dead.
Two minutes after the shooter first entered the pair of classrooms, several police officers from Uwalde Police Department rushed to the school. Two police officers approached the locked door of the classroom as gunfire could be heard inside. The two were hit – abrasions, as their injuries will be described later – as bullets pierced the door and hit them in the corridor.
Minutes passed. Maya heard the shooter enter the next room and play “really sad music,” as she describes it to her family.
The attacker fired 16 more shots in the room. More policemen arrived from outside. By noon, there were 19 employees from various agencies in the corridors and many more outside the school.
By 12:10 p.m., one of the students, who called 911, said eight or nine students were still alive, Mr McCrow said.
Parents gathered near and around Uwalde, a close-knit community of 15,000 people west of San Antonio, desperately searching for any word from their children inside, increasingly deranged by the silence of the texts sent and unanswered.
“I prayed with four ladies that everything would be fine,” said Lupe Leia, 50, whose 8-year-old son Samuel was inside. In the midst of the commotion, his wife Claudia sent a text to their child’s teacher: “Are the children okay?”
In less than a minute, she received the answer she wanted: “Yes, we are.”
Other parents were increasingly angry, urging officers who seemed to be about to stop the shooting, which they clearly saw and heard was still going on.
But the commander of the scene, Chief Pete Aredondo of the Uwalde Police School District, decided the nature of the situation did not require officers to rush, as they have been prescribing for active shooting practice for decades since the 1999 Columbine High School massacre.
Mr McCrow said the commander had found that the shooter was no longer an active shooter but a barricaded suspect – “we had time, there were no children at risk”, he said. The commander ordered shields and other specialized tactical equipment to be brought into the room.
They waited for him for the long, torturous minutes.
“They were there without proper equipment,” said Javier Casares, who arrived at the primary school with difficulty, panicking about his daughter, Jackie Casares, who was caught inside. He watched the shields move in slowly, not simultaneously. “One man came in with one and another minute came in,” he said.
Chief Aredondo did not respond to requests for comment on Friday.
By 12:15 pm, specialized Border Patrol officers arrived at the school after about 40 minutes of driving from where they were located near the border with Mexico.
Federal agents arrived on a scene of chaos – people dragging children out of windows while local police, carrying only pistols and a few rifles, tried to secure a perimeter. The specially trained agents did not understand why they were left to wait, a police officer said.
At 12:19 p.m., another girl called from room 111, but quickly hung up when another student told her. Two minutes later another call was heard and three shots were fired.
More time passed. Another call to 911 from one of the two girls came at 12:47 p.m. By then, the children had been trapped by the shooter for more than an hour.
The girl in Room 112 begs, “Please send the police now,” according to a transcript read by Mr. McCrow.
A few minutes later, at about 12:50 p.m., specially trained Border Patrol officers opened the locked door with keys from a school janitor and stormed the room, firing 27 times into the classroom and killing the shooter.
Eight more rounds of ammunition fired by law enforcement were found in the corridor. The attacker fired 142 times during the massacre, Mr McCrow said, using an AR-15-style rifle, one of two he had bought a few days earlier with a debit card just after his 18th birthday.
Jackie, who has always wanted to be the center of attention, the “little diva” of her family, died in the shooting, along with her classmate and cousin Annabelle Rodriguez, a quiet, honorary student.
Maya, an 11-year-old whose classmate died before …
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