Police admit ‘wrong decision’ to delay confronting Texas gunman – latest

Kimberly and Felix Rubio have refused to meet Governor Greg Abbott after their 10-year-old daughter Lexi was among the 19 children killed in the massacre in Ulvade.

“My first thought was, ‘My Lexi doesn’t even like him,’” Ms Rubio told The New York Times. “She was really little, but we talked about this stuff at home.”

This is the timeline of calls placed to 911 from Robb Elementary School on Tuesday, according to Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety:

A student called 911 from room 112 at 12.03pm. The call lasted one minute and 23 seconds.

She called back at 12.10pm to report several people were killed, and again three minutes later to report that eight to nine students are still alive.

At 12.19pm, a person in room 111 called. The caller hung up when another student told her to hang up.

On a call placed at 12.21pm, “you could hear over the 911 call that three shots were fired,” according to McGraw.

At 12.36pm, a 911 call lasted 21 seconds.

“The initial caller called back … and was told to stay on the line and be very quiet. She told 911 that he shot the door,” according to McGraw.

During a call at 12.43pm, the caller asked to “send the police now” according to McGraw.

More shots can be heard on another call at 12.50pm

At 12:51pm, a call got “very loud” and “sounds like officers are moving children out of the room,” McGraw said.

As officers arrived at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, they wrongly believed the mass shooting was over and had shifted to a “barricaded subject” scenario, electing to wait for backup before charging the classroom where gunman Salvador Ramos was locked inside with scores of terrified students.

Asked how any students were killed within the time that officers initially refused to engage the gunman and the point that a tactical team fatally shot him, Director McCraw says he does not have an answer.

“I don’t have that answer. We’re looking at that now,” he said.

Director McGraw, who has admitted that police wrongly believed the gunman was “barricaded” in a classroom, said, “What do I say to the parents? I don’t have anything to say to the parents, other than what happened.”

“We are not here to defend what happened, we are here to report the facts so they have the facts,” he said. “If I thought it would help, I would apologize.”

Director McCraw admitted that “obviously, based on the information we have, there were children in that classroom that were still at risk” despite police initially claiming that the gunman was “barricaded” by officers in a room, rather than an active shooter.

“From the benefit of hind sight where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” he said. “It was the wrong decision. Period.”

Donations for the teacher who was killed during the Uvalde massacre and her husband, who died just two days later, have poured in over the last few days, raising more than $2m for the young family the pair leave behind.

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said the gunman entered the school through a door that was propped open. Officers entered minutes later, and there were 19 officers in the school hallway by 12.03pm.

Officers did not breach a classroom door and kill the gunman until 12:50pm.

At 12.16 p.m., about 45 minutes before the gunman was killed, a caller told a 911 dispatcher who was in a classroom said that there was eight to nine children still alive.

In another call after 12.36pm, a student asked “please send the police now.”

Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, is giving a briefing from Uvalde on the state of investigations. Stay tuned.

A congressman’s letter to the FBI and growing demands for federal intervention in the Uvalde massacre follows conflicting and often wildly contradictory statements from Texas authorities, including a false statement that a school-assigned officer fired at the gunman before he entered the school, and a failure to fully account for the hour that followed.

Abbey Clements, who was a teacher at Sandy Hook during the 2012 massacre that killed 20 young children and six others, said he bears “witness to what happens, what can happen, what did happen, and what comes in the aftermath” of the horror of school shootings in America.

“Schools are unsafe working conditions for students and educators,” she said during a press conference in Houston with teachers unions, survivors and gun control advocates.

“Teachers are walking in every day these days crying, having to field questions from students,” she said. “They come in and lock eyes with us, because they know, but they don’t know what to say, and we don’t know what to say. … We need to help pave the way for them to tell their stories.”

She added that not only are children exposed to gun violence in schools, they are “bringing gun violence into their schools every day,” from shootings in their community to domestic violence in their homes.

“Woven into those stories, there’s poverty, there’s homelessness, there’s unfair immigration that weigh on parents, there’s racism – all of this now with easy access to guns,” she said. “This is not OK. We have too many guns in our country. But there are ways to make things safer for our students and our educators and in our communities.”