Why DID they wait?
CCTV shows heavily armed cops on hold for an hour as Texas school gunman went on rampage, so...
ARMED with rifles, shields and helmets, police stand in the hallway of a Texas school – while a teenage gunman goes on a killing spree in a classroom.
It is the first image from inside robb Elementary School in Uvalde during last month’s massacre of 19 children and two teachers.
CCTV shows at least seven officers were within feet of shooter Salvador ramos some 19 minutes after he entered. But they did not storm the unlocked room for another 58 minutes.
The image, showing officers were more heavily armed than had been admitted, raises further questions about the police response to the shooting – which has outraged the community and led to a US Justice Department investigation.
There were sufficient armed officers to ‘neutralise’ ramos within three minutes, Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said yesterday.
The police response was ‘ an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned’, Colonel McCraw told a Texas Senate committee.
Police training since the 1999 Columbine school shooting, to ‘pursue the attacker, stop the attacker’, was ignored.
According to police records released last night, ramos, 18, entered the school at 11.33am on May 24, walked into classroom 111 and began shooting.
The time stamp on the CCTV shows that by 11.52am the officers were in place outside the classroom. By 12.04pm they had been joined by others.
The officers are seen pointing their rifles down the corridor. Two hide behind ballistic shields, wearing bulletproof vests. one wears a military-style helmet.
According to audio recordings from the officers, a special agent at the public safety department demanded to know if there were still children in the classrooms.
The agent said: ‘If there is, then they just need to go in.’ An officer answered: ‘It is unknown at this time.’ The agent responded: ‘Y’all don’t know if there’s kids in there? If there’s kids in there, we need to go in there.’
Finally, at 12.38pm, police chief Pete Arredondo ordered a Swat team to enter the classroom, which they did at 12.50. ramos, who bought his semi-automatic rifles for his 18th birthday, was killed in the ensuing firefight.
Mr Arredondo, who did not have a radio on that day, initially claimed the doors to two classrooms were locked. It emerged that police did not even try to open them before deciding to wait for a skeleton key. ‘The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering... was [ Mr Arredondo], who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,’ Colonel McCraw said.
Parents have already voiced their fury after police said officers did not enter the classroom earlier because they were ‘worried they would get shot’. At a meeting of the Uvalde district school board on Monday, families of children who died called on Mr Arredondo to quit.
‘His errors and lack of judgment and lack of decision making cost how many lives?’ said Brett Cross, whose ten-year-old nephew Uziyah garcia was among the victims.