At least two children called the 911 emergency number from connecting fourth-grade classes after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos walked in with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, according to Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Department of Texas Public Safety. Ramos killed 19 children and two teachers.
“He’s in room 112,” a girl whispered over the phone at 12:03 p.m., more than 45 minutes before police entered the classroom.
The on-scene commander, the chief of the Uvalde, Texas, school district police department, believed Ramos was barricaded inside and the children were no longer in danger, which gave police time to get on their feet. prepare, McCraw said.
“With the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it wasn’t the right decision,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision.”
Some of the students, mostly ages 9 and 10, trapped with the shooter survived the massacre, including at least two who called 911, McCraw said, though he didn’t offer a count. precise.
There were at least eight 911 calls from the classroom between 12:03 p.m., half an hour after Ramos entered the building, and 12:50 p.m., when police entered and killed Ramos.
A person McCraw did not identify called at 12:16 p.m. and told police there were still “eight nine” students alive, the colonel said. Three shots were heard during a call made at 12:21 p.m.
The same girl who made the first call pleaded with the operator to “send the police now” at 12.43 and 12.47.
Officers entered three minutes after that last call, according to Mr McCraw, when a US Border Patrol tactical team used a janitor key to open the locked door and shot and killed Mr Ramos.
Several officers had their first exchange of gunfire with Ramos shortly after he entered the school at 11.33 a.m., when two officers were grazed by bullets and took cover. There were as many as 19 officers in the hallway at 12:03 p.m., McCraw said, just as the first 911 call from inside the classroom was received.
Videos that emerged on Thursday showed distraught parents outside the school urging police to storm the building during the attack, with some having to be subdued by police.
Standard security protocols advise police to confront an active shooter at a school without delay, a point McCraw acknowledged on Friday.
“When there is an active shooter, the rules change,” he said.
Police recovered 142 bullets inside the school from Ramos’ rifle, along with nearly two dozen more on school grounds outside the building, McCraw said. Ramos fired at least 100 bullets into classrooms in the first minutes of his attack, according to audio evidence, before the first wave of officers confronted him.
In total, Ramos had 60 magazines and 1,657 cartridges, including some left in his truck when he crashed it outside the school before the attack and two magazines recovered from his home.
McCraw described other times when Ramos could have been thwarted. A school agent, responding to calls about an armed man who had crashed a car at the funeral home across the street, passed right by Ramos, who was crouching next to a vehicle on the school’s property. ‘school.
The door that gave Ramos access to the building had been held open by a teacher, McCraw said.
NRA CONVENTION
The attack, the deadliest school shooting in nearly a decade, intensified the long-running national debate over gun laws.
Elsewhere in Texas on Friday, the National Rifle Association, the nation’s leading gun rights advocacy group, opened its annual meeting in Houston. Prominent Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, were scheduled to address the convention.
Republican Texas Governor Greg Abbott, who was also scheduled to speak, will instead make recorded remarks and visit Uvalde for a press conference in the afternoon.
President Joe Biden, a Democrat who has urged Congress to approve new gun restrictions, will visit the community of 16,000 about 130 miles west of San Antonio on Sunday.
Investigators are still looking for a motive. Ramos, who had dropped out of high school, had no criminal record and no history of mental illness.
His assault began at the home he shared with his grandmother, when he shot her in the face and fled to school. She remains hospitalized.
The shooter’s father, also named Salvador Ramos, 42, expressed remorse for his son’s actions in an interview published Thursday by The Daily Beast news site.
“He should have just killed me, you know, instead of doing something like that to somebody,” the Ramos’ year told the site.