Questions mount over police delays in stopping shooter
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The gunman who slaughtered 19 children and two teachers inside a Texas elementary school was in the building for more than an hour before he was killed by law enforcement officers, authorities say.
It was 11:28 a.m. Tuesday when Salvador Ramos' Ford pickup slammed into a ditch behind the low-slung Texas school and the driver jumped out carrying an AR15-style rifle.
Twelve minutes after that, authorities say, the 18-year-old Ramos entered the halls of Robb Elementary School and found his way to a fourth-grade classroom, where he killed 19 students and two teachers in a still-unexplained spasm of violence.
But it wasn't until 12:58 p.m. that law enforcement radio chatter said 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 town of Uvalde, has fueled mounting public anger and scrutiny over law enforcement's response to Tuesday's rampage.
"They say they rushed in," said Javier Cazares, whose fourthgrade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, and who raced to the school as the massacre unfolded. "We didn't see that."
On Friday, safety officials scheduled yet another briefing to clarify the timeline and address the anger over the response. But that came only after declining to explain why officers had not been able to stop the shooter sooner, with Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, telling reporters
Thursday that he had "taken all those questions into consideration," but was not ready to answer them.
The Thursday briefing, called by Texas safety officials to clarify the timeline of the attack, provided bits of previously unknown information. But by the time it ended, it had added to the troubling questions surrounding the attack, including about the time it took police to reach the scene and confront the gunman, and the apparent failure to lock a school door he entered.
After two days of providing often conflicting information, investigators said that a school district police officer was not inside the school when Ramos arrived, and, contrary to their previous reports, the officer had not confronted Ramos outside the building.
Instead, they sketched out a timeline notable for unexplained delays by law enforcement.
After crashing his truck, Ramos fired on two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, Escalon said. He then entered the school "unobstructed" through an apparently unlocked door at about 11:40 a.m.
But the first police officers did not arrive on the scene until 12 minutes after the crash and did not enter the school to pursue the shooter until four minutes after that. Inside, they were driven back by gunfire from Ramos and took cover, Escalon said.
The gunman was still inside at 12:10 p.m. when the first U.S. Marshals Service deputies arrived. They had raced to the school from nearly 70 miles away in the border town of Del Rio, the agency said in a tweet Friday.