Texas Police admit it was a mistake not to enter the school earlier

“Get in there and get them out, do something!” “They are killing them!” “Shoot him once and for all!” These were the cries of “five or six” parents, said one of them, Juan Maldonado, who even arrived at the scene of the latest school massacre at Robb Elementary School, as soon as the school’s Facebook page announced that the premises had been sealed off by a shooting.

Uvalde is a small town of 16,000 inhabitants. Some of these parents lived in the vicinity of the school and only had to cross the street. The police already surrounded the school and prevented them from entering to look for their children. Outside, looking at the building, they heard the shocking shots with a chill. His children were being killed at the time.

“But do you realize that they are children, that they do not know how to defend themselves?” One of the parents shouted at the policeman who prevented him from entering, according to the video that has circulated on social networks. “Why don’t you guys go in and do something?” he asked her frustrated. Because I have to take care of people like you! Get back!” the agent bellowed as he pushed him with the barrel of the rifle. “Okay, okay,” she said, a woman. «We go back, but you go in to get them out».

The outrage could not be greater. So much so that, for the first time, the authorities have reconsidered and have apologized. “Viewed from here, it was a bad decision. Point”, admitted this Friday the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw, who did not apologize to the grieving parents. “If he knew that this was going to help something, he would do it,” he justified.

Instead of galloping in and finishing off the gunman to minimize the loss of human life, the police acted as if it were a hostage kidnapping, which gave Salvador Ramos time to kill each and every one of them in cold blood. the children and teachers who were in the class in which he barricaded himself. “They did not enter because many shots came out,” a spokesman admitted the day before. The initial five officers called in riot “tactical teams” and awaited their arrival, breaking protocol that requires immediate action to stop the carnage and treat the wounded.

The shooting stopped after 20 minutes. At that point, about twenty police officers were in the building, but the commander, whose name has not been revealed, “thought that the situation had gone from being an active shooting to a subject who had barricaded himself while facing the police or even sought to be killed to commit suicide, without there being a risk to other human lives,” McCraw explained this Friday. “It was the worst possible decision,” he admitted.

Since the Columbine High School massacre in Colorado, which in 1999 etched in the collective memory of all disturbed teenagers the possibility of dying with their boots on, taking down as many as they could, US law enforcement no longer waits to talk to the gunman . According to the San Antonio Express, in Uvalde “negotiation teams called him on the phone but he hung up.” The head of public security explained this Friday that Ramos closed the class from the inside and “only came out once.”

A Washington Post investigation into videos taken by parents and neighbors on their cellphones during that harrowing hour and a half it took for police to say they had shot the suspect cemented the criticism that always follows every shooting. They have never been as bloody as these, despite the fact that Scot Peterson, the deputy sheriff of Parkland (Florida), where 17 students died in 2018, is still defending himself in court on eleven charges, including child neglect and depraved indifference.

“They have to kill me so I don’t go in there to save my son,” Johnny Ramírez, a resident of Uvalde, said the next day. The police were unable to stop Javier Cazares from trying. At 12 o’clock, twenty minutes after Ramos entered the school shooting, he managed to avoid the attention of the agents to enter the building by breaking the windows along with other parents, whose names he did not want to reveal. The assault was led by Maldonado, a state police officer who lives in Uvalde. Many frightened children who had hidden where they had been taught in each drill ran out of those broken windows: under desks, in closets and even on top of toilets. However, Cazares could not save what he loved most. His 9-year-old daughter, Jacklyn, was already dead. Most of the shooting happened at the beginning.

student failure

Cazares would find out much later, when the police asked for photographs and even DNA samples to identify the tiny corpses so mangled by the bursts of bullets that in some cases they were unrecognizable.

The rampant orgy of blood had begun when Ramos, an 18-year-old who couldn’t graduate this week with his classmates because of his student failure, got into a fight with his grandmother and shot her in the face. He took the AR-15 assault rifles he had bought the week before, the day after he turned 18, the legal age to purchase them in Texas, and fled in his grandmother’s station wagon, which he didn’t even know about. lead. He clasped minutes later next to the school grounds where his own grandmother had taught.

It was 11:28 in the morning. The tragedy that could have been avoided had only just begun. Two employees from the nearby funeral home ran to help the driver who had fallen into the ditch. They saw him leave through the passenger window pointing the rifle at gunshots and they ran like hell, Estela, a 21-year-old neighbor, told this newspaper: “Get out of here, this is not safe!” !”, remember. “They got in the car and left. We hid in the basement.”

It was the second notice received by the emergency services. The first had been given by the wife of Beto Gallegos, while the couple helped the child’s grandmother, who has survived. “There has been an accident, but the driver is armed and is shooting,” the men told the operator.

Ramos still had ten minutes to wander the facility looking for a ticket. He climbed the fence with no problem, loaded with more than 600 bullets for his carnage, almost triple what a soldier in a combat zone carries. He found the door open, as gun advocates criticize. A teacher who went out to look for her cell phone in the car left it open. Unlike earlier versions, no one engaged him as he opened fire through the corridors, in which 142 shell casings and 173 other rounds have been found. The police would still take four minutes to arrive and would be busy sealing off the premises and evacuating children from other nearby buildings.

“We think he entered that one simply because it was the first one he found,” says Eva Zalbara, a Robb school teacher who lost two classmates and several of her students. The investigation, barely open, forced by press coverage, can still change the version of events, but it no longer allows Governor Greg Abbott to continue claiming that “rapid police action saved lives.”