Frantic, wailing parents confined by yellow crime scene tape plead with police officers outside Robb Elementary, pushing and pacing with the desperation of pent-up animals headed to slaughter. Except it isn’t their own slaughter they’re trying to stop; it’s their children’s.
In cellphone footage that’s emerged from the chaotic scene that unfolded Tuesday as a teen gunman rampaged inside with an AR-15-style rifle, mothers and fathers are seen pleading, screaming for officers to do something to save their children, or at the very least, to let parents — without guns, without armor, with bare hands, if need be — charge into the school and give their babies a fighting chance.
“You know that they are kids, right?” a man yells in one video. “They’re little kids and they don’t know how to defend themselves!”
The officers refuse. Instead, as children faced an imminent threat inside, officers busied themselves corralling parents, patrolling the barrier with Tasers and even handcuffing and subduing parents on the ground if they didn’t comply, according to video and witness accounts.
For nearly an hour, as gunshots rang out through Robb Elementary, as bullets fatally pierced the little bodies of captive fourth-graders in two adjoining classrooms, as some children clung to hope by repeatedly calling 911 for help — “Please send the police now,” one girl begged more than an hour into the siege — no help came.
Earlier this week, Gov. Greg Abbott drew harsh criticism for saying the massacre of 19 elementary school children and their two teachers could have been worse. Nothing, many of us thought, could be worse.
We were wrong.
Revelations that Abbott’s initial heroic law enforcement narrative was a complete fabrication, and that many other details he relayed were false, only deepen the pain and rage.
“The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials do what they do,” Abbott said solemnly at a news conference Wednesday. “They showed amazing courage, by running toward gunfire, for the singular purpose of trying to save lives.”
In reality, newly emerging timelines from officials with the Texas Department of Public Safety depict excruciating delays, tragic false assumptions and a clumsy if not cowardly response by officers or their commanders sworn to protect the vulnerable children who needed them.
“They should have moved in,” Jesse Rodriguez, who lost a daughter and a niece in the shooting, told CNN. “I don’t think they had a right to sit there on their ass waiting.”
The governor, who says he merely relayed the information given to him, at first told us the gunman had engaged with a school resource officer. Never happened, law enforcement officials now say.
Apparently, after shooting his grandmother in the face, the gunman crashed a truck by the school, opened fire on people at a funeral home nearby, then roamed around outside the school building for 10 to 12 minutes. Having drawn two 911 calls by then, and by some accounts more, he entered the school, completely unobstructed through an unlocked door.
We were initially told officers couldn’t enter during an agonizing period of time because the gunman had barricaded the door. In fact, there was no barricade, DPS said Friday, and it didn’t appear anyone even tried to open the classroom door.
Law enforcement officers appear to have attempted to enter the school early but retreated after taking fire. As numbers of officers grew, they converged in the hallways outside the classrooms where children lay dead, dying or injured, and merely waited until the massacre was over.
Law enforcement officials have been consistent in crediting a special tactical unit led by U.S. Border Patrol agents with ultimately confronting the gunman and killing him.
But in one of the most maddening, most enraging revelations, media reports now indicate that the Border Patrol unit actually arrived much earlier than previously thought, shortly after the shooting began, and were ordered by the local commanding officer to wait nearly an hour before intervening.
But why?
“The on-scene commander considered it a barricaded subject and that no more children were at risk,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said. “Obviously, based upon the information we have, there were more children at risk and not a barricaded subject.”
The commander was identified as the Uvalde Consolidated ISD chief of police, listed on the district’s website as Pete Arredondo.
“It was a wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that,” McCraw said.
Uvalde’s police department is small, of course, but it’s not without equipment and training — its Facebook page even boasts of its own SWAT team — designed to prepare it for just such a horror as unfolded at Robb Elementary this week. But what’s so deeply shocking is that police officers, any police officers who are sworn to protect, would fail to respond at all. After the Columbine massacre, general guidance is for officers to immediately pursue and try to neutralize active shooters rather than waiting for back-up or to secure the scene.
We may never know how many lives could have been saved if the first law enforcement on the scene had done their jobs and acted with the courage we admire and sometimes take for granted in our first responders. We are reminded in this moment how precious it is.
But there are things we can know, and things the parents of murdered, injured or traumatized children in Uvalde deserve to know, about what happened on the darkest day of their lives. Chief among them: What on earth made the commanding officer assume the shooter was barricaded and not an active threat to students?
The governor has some explaining to do as well. He said Friday he was given bad information: “I was misled,” he said. “I am livid about what happened.”
He should be. But his administration only exacerbated the confusion at times, with DPS officials giving incomplete and inaccurate information even as they tried to clarify the timeline of events. Abbott has assured Texans that the truth will emerge through a thorough investigation overseen by the Texas Rangers and now the FBI.
We’ll hope so. But don’t ask us to trust. We hope the false narratives in this case don’t make suffering Uvalde families any more vulnerable to the kind of online harassment and outrageous hoax accusations that Sandy Hook parents have endured for years.
The families of Robb Elementary were failed in every conceivable way. Their sorrow and grief has been compounded by incompetence and apparently faltering courage.. Truth is the very least we owe them.
George is Digismak’s reported cum editor with 13 years of experience in Journalism