The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
A dad’s anguish as shooting unfolded
He, others angry that police didn’t do more to stop gunman.
UVALDE, TEXAS — Javier Cazares raced to his daughter’s school when he heard there was a shooting, leaving his truck running with the door open as he ran into the schoolyard. In his rush, he didn’t bring his gun.
He spent the next 35 to 45 agonizing minutes scanning the children fleeing Robb Elementary School for his 9-year-old “firecracker,” Jacklyn. All the while, he yearned to run in himself — and grew increasingly agitated, along with other parents, that the police weren’t doing more to stop the gunman who holed up in a classroom, killing kids.
“A lot of us were arguing with the police, ‘You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs,’” said Cazares, an Army veteran. “We were ready to go to work and rush in.”
Nineteen children and two teachers were ultimately shot dead in the roughly 80 minutes the gunman spent inside the school in Uvalde, Texas, a small, predominantly Latino community that sits among vegetable fields halfway between San Antonio and the U.s.-mexico border. The Justice Department has said it will review the law enforcement response.
This account of the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook is based on law enforcement’s timeline, records and numerous interviews with Uvalde residents in the hours and days after the massacre.
Salvador Ramos was up early on May 24, sending ominous messages. The man authorities have identified as the gunman turned 18 the week before and promptly bought two Ar-15-style rifles along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
In the pre-dawn hours in his grandparents’ shaded neighborhood just a halfmile from the site he would turn into a killing ground, Ramos wrote “I’m about to” to a woman over Instagram and sent someone a private Facebook message saying he was going to shoot his grandmother.
Within hours, he’d done it. Sometime after 11 a.m., a neighbor who was in his yard heard a shot and looked up to see Ramos run out the front door of his grandparents’ home to a pickup parked along the narrow street. The 18-year-old seemed panicked and struggled to get the Ford out of park, Gilbert Gallegos, 82, said.
Ramos finally drove off, kicking a spray of gravel in the air. Moments later, his grandmother emerged from the single-story home covered in blood.
“This is what he did,” Gallegos recalled her yelling. “He shot me.”
Gallegos’ wife called 911 while he took the wounded woman into their backyard. As they hid and waited for the police, more gunshots rang out.
By 11:28 a.m., Ramos had sped to Robb Elementary and crashed the pickup in a drainage ditch, authorities said. At that moment, video shows a teacher entering the school through a door that she had emerged from and propped open a minute earlier, according to Steven Mccraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The teacher grabbed her phone to call 911 and report the crash, but as she came back out while on her phone, she realized Ramos had a gun, department spokesman Travis Considine later said. The teacher removed the rock that had propped open the door, which closed behind her.
But the door — which is usually closed and locked — didn’t lock.
Witnesses said Ramos jumped from the passenger side of the truck with a rifle and a backpack full of
ammunition. After shooting at two men who emerged from a nearby funeral home, Ramos hopped a chain-link fence and headed toward the school — still shooting — as panicked people nearby called the police.
Authorities initially said Ramos exchanged fire with a school police officer before entering the building, but they later said the officer was not actually on campus and “sped” back upon hearing of the shooter.
But the officer initially headed for the wrong man, confronting someone who turned out to be a teacher — after passing within feet of Ramos, who was crouched behind a vehicle parked outside the school.
From his hiding place, Ramos went for the proppedopen door, slipped through it and into adjoining fourthgrade classrooms at 11:33 a.m., authorities said. He rapidly fired off more than 100 rounds.
In one of those rooms, Miah Cerrillo, 11, covered herself with a friend’s blood to look dead, she told CNN. After the shooter moved into the adjacent room, she could hear screams, more gunfire and music being blared by the gunman.
Two minutes after Ramos entered the school, three police officers followed him through the same door and were quickly joined by four more. Authorities said Ramos exchanged fire from the classroom with the officers in the hallway, and two of them suffered “grazing wounds.”
The first police on the scene were outgunned by Ramos’ powerful, highend rifle, according to a man who watched from a nearby home.
“After he started firing at the cops, the cops stopped shooting,” said Juan Carranza, 24. “You could tell the firepower that he had was more powerful than the cops’ weapons.”
After shots started ringing out, a cafeteria worker who had just finished serving chicken tacos to 75 third-graders said a woman shouted into the lunchroom: “Code black. This is not a drill!”
The employees didn’t know what “code black” meant but closed blinds, locked the doors and escorted students behind a stage, said the worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid publicity. Some staff then took refuge in the kitchen.
In the nearly half-hour after the first officers followed Ramos inside, as many as 19 piled into the hallway, authorities said.
In the meantime, students and teachers elsewhere in the building were trying to get out, some climbing out of windows with the help
of police.
Cazares isn’t sure exactly when he arrived on the scene, but when he did, he saw about five officers helping people escape. He kept a close watch to see if Jacklyn, who he later said loved gymnastics, singing and dancing, was among them.
About 15 to 20 minutes after he got to the school, he said he spotted officers arriving with heavy shields for the first time.
In the chaos, he felt that time was both “going so fast and it was going so slow.”
But he added: “From what I saw, things could have been a lot different.”
Other parents felt the same. One onlooker recalled
a woman yelling at officers, “Go in there! Go in there!”
Police didn’t breach the classroom faster because the commander inside the building — the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo — believed the situation had morphed from an active shooting to a hostage situation, said Mccraw, of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Officers from other agencies urged the school police chief to let them move in because children were in danger, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. Mccraw said
gunfire was “sporadic” for much of the time that officers waited in the hallway and that investigators do not know if children died during that time.
“It was the wrong decision,” Mccraw said.
Reporters from The Associated Press tried to speak to Arredondo at his home several times; on one visit, someone answered the door and said the police chief wouldn’t talk. He also did not reply to a phone message left at the district’s police headquarters.
Cazares left school before officers killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. He rushed to the hospital because his niece said she’d seen Jacklyn in an ambulance.
The entire family soon gathered there, pressing hospital staff for information for nearly three hours. Finally, a pastor, police officer and a doctor met with them.
“My wife asked the question, ‘Is she alive or is she passed?’” Cazares said. “They were like, ‘No, she’s gone.’”
When he was finally able to see his daughter’s body, Cazares vowed that her death would not be in vain.
Later, he fought back tears as he pondered his daughter’s last moments.
“She could be feisty,” he said. “It kind of comforts our hearts that she would be one of the ones that was brave and tried to help as
much as she could.”
Key senators from each party said many of the right things this week as they struggled to find common ground on one of the more divisive issues in American politics — how to deal with gun violence.
Pressing for action after mass shootings at a New York grocery store and a Texas elementary school, senators are trying to forge a gun-violence package by possibly combining some gun law changes with mental health support, plus aid to bolster security at local schools.
Like most members of Congress, Georgia lawmakers are on the sidelines for these talks, waiting to see what kind of deal — if any — might be produced in the coming days.
“It’s time to act,” said U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-ATlanta.
But the truth is the approval of substantive gun legislation very rarely happens on Capitol Hill — you can pretty much count the bills on one hand in the past 50-plus years — and that action happens only after extensive political negotiation.
For example, it took the assassinations of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and U.S. Sen. Robert Kennedy to finally spur action on the Gun Control Act of 1968.
Twenty-five years later, senators brokered a deal on what
we know as the Brady Law. It started as a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases and ultimately created the current federal background check system for gun purchasers.
At about the same time, Congress was trying to rein in assault weapons. That effort grew out of a 1989 attack on an elementary school in Stockton, Calif., where a gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle killed five children and wounded 32 others.
It led to the most surprising vote in my time covering Congress — on May 23, 1990 — when the Senate voted 52-48 to restrict the import and manufacture of assault weapons in a larger anti-crime bill. It was a very rare defeat for the NRA.
Three years later, Congress voted to approve a 10-year ban on certain assault weapons. That expired in 2004.
After Democrats lost control of Congress in 1994, many
blamed the voter backlash in part on that assault weapons vote — one reason no major gun control legislation has been approved in the last 28 years.
Since the Sandy Hook school shooting in 2012, lawmakers have tried repeatedly to expand background checks on gun sales, in order to close loopholes in the Brady Law instant check system.
But those initiatives have routinely hit a wall in the U.S. Senate, mainly opposed by Republicans.
Can senators strike a deal this time on gun violence? History might not be on their side.
It’s been 60 years since Atlanta and the local arts community suffered a devastating loss. In the crash of Air France Flight 007 near Paris, 103 of the city’s most prominent arts patrons were killed. Here, we look back at how the tragedy unfolded and how the AJC, and photojournalists of the time, covered the story. This article originally ran online on June 3, 2018, and has been updated.
The 113 Georgians who died at Paris’ Orly Airport on June 3, 1962, all meant something to someone — their families, their friends, the Atlanta arts community — but one man couldn’t really grieve his losses privately. His position required him to serve as the public face of a city in mourning.
Atlanta Mayor Ivan Allen Jr. knew many of the dead. He’d seen them off on their trip in early May; a month later he faced the grim task of helping identify victims and accompanying their remains as they returned home from France.
“This was my generation ... these were my friends,” the mayor, his voice breaking, told the Atlanta Constitution shortly after hearing of the crash.
103 members of the Atlanta Art Association never made it back from their monthlong tour of famed European art galleries. They were among the 130 people killed when Air France Flight 007 crashed off the end of an Orly Airport runway after an aborted takeoff attempt. Investigators later learned that mechanical failure caused the crash. It was the worst single airplane crash at that time.
Among the prominent Atlantans killed were Ruth Mcmillan, Atlanta’s Woman of the Year in 1955; Frances Longino, a co-founder of the Davison’s department store chain; C. Baxter Jones Jr., a lawyer who ran for Congress in 1952; and Del Paige, president of the Atlanta Art Association. One victim, Doug Davis, was the son of an Atlanta aviator who had himself died in a plane crash decades earlier.
THE CRASH: What happened?
Air France Flight 007 attempted takeoff from Orly Airport near Paris, France, on June 3, 1962, but the plane’s landing gear remained on the ground even as the nose of the craft lifted off the runway. The pilots were beyond the maximum speed at which it was safe to abort the takeoff on the runway and had no choice except to attempt to stop the plane. During the attempt to brake, the undercarriage caught fire as the aircraft ran off the end of the runway.
THE AFTERMATH: How did Atlanta react?
Allen immediately flew to thecrash site at Orly Airport in order to help identify bodies. With many of its major arts patrons deceased, the city quickly started planning for a memorial to the victims. Former Atlanta Mayor William B. Hartsfield called the Orly crash “the greatest tragedy to hit Atlanta since the Civil War.”
THE LEGACY: What was the effect on the arts community?
As Sam Hopkins wrote in a 1972 Constitution article commemorating the crash, “most of the Atlantans who died were longtime art patrons who had been the backbone of the cultural growth and activities of the city.” The arts community suffered from the loss, but in typical Atlanta “rising from the ashes” style, the city rebounded from the tragedy and worked hard to ensure that its arts community thrived, a civic commitment continuing to this day. The Woodruff Arts Center, opened in 1968, stands as a memorial honoring the dead of Orly.