Timeline details how long officers waited to act
Texas officials have repeatedly changed the narrative of the timeline and left many details unexplained, including why local law enforcement officers apparently spent an hour inside the school “negotiating” with an active shooter.
Salvador Ramos’ shooting rampage began just after 11 a.m. Tuesday, when he shot his grandmother in the face at her Uvalde home. According to officials, Ramos then posted a social media message declaring that “I’m going to shoot an elementary school” and drove off at a high speed in his grandmother’s pickup truck.
At 11:28 a.m., Ramos crashed the truck in a ditch and jumped out of the passenger side, carrying a rifle. He fired at two people at a nearby funeral home as he walked toward Robb Elementary, climbed a fence and crossed the school parking lot.
At 11:33 a.m., the gunman entered the school and began shooting more than 100 rounds into Room 111 or Room 112, two adjoining rooms.
Two minutes later, three Uvalde Police Department officers entered the school through the same door used by Ramos and went directly to the classroom door. Two officers received grazing wounds from the suspect.
They were soon followed by three more Uvalde police officers and one county deputy sheriff, said Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, making a total of seven officers. By 12:03 p.m., as many as 19 officers amassed in the corridor.
But it was not until 12:50 p.m. — more than an hour after law enforcement entered the building — that officers “breached the door” using keys they were able to get from a janitor. A U.S. Border Patrol
tactical officer shot and killed Ramos.
“They failed,” said Carlos Ovalle, 32, a county worker who rushed to the school Tuesday in a bid to save his 8-year-old daughter, Makaylah, who survived.
The new timeline raises questions not just about slow active shooter response, but glaring security lapses in a school district that has invested in threat-assessment teams, a threat-reporting system,
social media monitoring software, fences around schools and motion detectors to detect campus breaches.
According to online district records, “teachers are instructed to keep their classroom doors closed and locked at all times.”
Even though Uvalde is a small city of 16,000, its school district has its own police department, formed a few months after the 2018 school mass shooting in Parkland, Fla. It
had six officers and one security guard. One of its newest hires, Officer Adrian Gonzalez, had been an assistant commander and SWAT training commander at the Uvalde Police Department for 10 years and had taken training courses in advanced SWAT tactics and how to respond to active shooters and rescue hostages.
Uvalde law enforcement officers have repeatedly participated in active-shooter training courses, according to official statements and online documents.
In April 2018, the Uvalde Police Department and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office took part in a five-day active shooter response course conducted at the Middle Rio Grande Law Enforcement Academy. The training included mock scenarios at various public places, including an elementary school, police said.
In October of that same year, a mock active-shooter drill was held at Sabinal High School about 20 miles east of Uvalde. The drill included members of the Uvalde County Office of Emergency Management, U.S. Border Patrol and Texas Department of Public Safety, according to the department.
Police also had experience with credible threats. In April 2018, about two weeks after the training at Middle Rio Grande, Uvalde officers arrested two juveniles who they said were “planning to conduct a school shooting on their senior year (2022) at the Uvalde High School.”
On Friday, Mr. McCraw said Ramos was not one of those juveniles.
On May 16, 2018, a school resource officer responded to a possible threat of a school shooting at Uvalde High School after a student stated she “overheard a comment in the hallways that a school shooting was going to occur sometime today,” according to a news release. Police were not able to identify the person who may have made the comment.
Eight days later, May 24, 2018, Uvalde High School was placed in temporary lockdown while officers investigated a school shooting threat. An investigation “revealed that the concerning information was from a previous threat investigation and was cleared without incident,” police said.