UVALDE, Texas (AP) — It was 11:28 am when the Ford pickup crashed into a ditch behind the Texas Low School and the driver jumped out with an AR-15-style rifle.
Twelve minutes after that, authorities say, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos was in the hallways of Robb Elementary School. He soon entered a fourth grade classroom. And there he killed 19 schoolchildren and two teachers in a spasm of still unexplained violence.
At 12:58 pm, a radio conversation from law enforcement said that Ramos had been killed and the siege was over.
What happened in those 90 minutes, in a working-class neighborhood near the edge of the small town of Uvalde, has fueled growing anger and public scrutiny over law enforcement’s response to Tuesday’s rampage.
“They say they ran in,” said Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, and who ran to school as the massacre unfolded. “We didn’t see that.”
On Thursday, authorities largely ignored questions about why officers hadn’t been able to apprehend the shooter sooner. Víctor Escalón, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters that he had “taken all of those questions into account” and that he would provide updates. later.
The press conference, called by Texas security officials to clarify the timeline of the attack, provided previously unknown bits of information. But when it was over, it had added to troubling questions surrounding the attack, including the time it took for police to arrive on the scene and confront the gunman, and the apparent failure to lock the gate of the school he entered.
After two days of providing often conflicting information, investigators said a school district police officer was not inside the school when Ramos arrived and, contrary to their earlier reports, the officer had not confronted Ramos outside the building. .
Instead, they outlined a schedule notable for unexplained delays by law enforcement.
After crashing his truck, Ramos fired at two people who were leaving a nearby funeral home, Escalon said. He then entered the school “without obstruction” through an apparently open door at around 11:40 a.m.
But the first officers didn’t arrive at the scene until 12 minutes after the crash and didn’t enter the school to chase the shooter until four minutes later. Inside, Ramos’ shots drove them back and they took cover, Escalon said.
The crisis came to an end after a group of Border Patrol tactical officers entered the school about an hour later at 12:45 p.m., Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Travis Considine said. They got into a shootout with the gunman, who was hiding in the fourth-grade classroom. Just before 1 pm, he was dead.
Escalón said that during that time, officers called in reinforcements, negotiators and tactical teams, while evacuating students and teachers.
Ken Trump, president of the consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services, said the length of the timeline raises questions.
“Based on best practices, it’s very hard to understand why there was any kind of delay, particularly when you get to reports of 40 minutes or more going in to neutralize that shooter,” he said.
Many other details of the case and the response remained murky. The motive for the massacre, the country’s deadliest school shooting since Newtown, Connecticut, nearly a decade ago, remained under investigation, and authorities said Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history.
During the siege, frustrated onlookers urged the police to enter the school, according to witnesses.
“Get in there! Get in there! The women yelled at officers shortly after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside a house across the street.
Carranza said the officers should have entered the school earlier: “There were more. There was only one of him.”
Border Patrol Chief Raul Ortiz did not give a timeline but said repeatedly that his agency’s tactical officers who arrived at the school did not hesitate. He said they moved quickly to enter the building, lining up in a “pile” behind an officer holding a shield.
“We wanted to make sure we moved quickly, moved quickly, and that’s exactly what those officers did,” Ortiz told Fox News.
But a law enforcement official said that once in the building, officers had trouble forcing open the classroom door and had to ask a staff member to open the room with a key. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the investigation.
Department of Public Safety spokesman Lt. Christopher Olivarez told CNN that investigators were trying to establish whether the classroom was, in fact, locked or barricaded in some way.
Cazares said when he arrived, he saw two officers outside the school and five others escorting students out of the building. But it was 15 to 20 minutes before officers arrived with shields, equipped to confront the gunman, he said.
As more parents came to the school, he and others pressured police to act, Cazares said. He heard about four gunshots before he and the others were ordered back to a parking lot.
“A lot of us were arguing with the police, ‘Everyone should go in there. You all need to do your job. His response was, ‘We can’t do our job because you guys are interfering,’” Cazares said.
As for the armed school officer, he was driving nearby but not on campus when Ramos crashed his truck, according to a law enforcement official who was not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on condition of anonymity.
Investigators concluded that the school officer did not position himself between the school and Ramos, leaving him unable to confront the shooter before he entered the building, the law enforcement official said.
Michael Dorn, executive director of Safe Havens International, which works to make schools safer, warned that it’s hard to get a clear understanding of the facts soon after a shooting.
“The information we get a couple of weeks after an event is usually quite different from what we get on the first or second day. And even that is often quite inaccurate,” Dorn said. In the case of catastrophic events, “it’s usually eight to 12 months before you really have a decent picture.”
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Bleiberg reported from Dallas.
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More on the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas: https://apnews.com/hub/school-shootings
Jake Bleiberg, Jim Vertuno, and Elliot Spagat, Associated Press
Reference-www.sudbury.com