At least two children made multiple emergency calls from a pair of adjoining fourth-grade classrooms after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos walked in on Tuesday with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, according to department director Col. Steven McCraw Texas Public Safety.
Ramos, who drove from his home to Robb Elementary School after shooting and wounding his grandmother there, later killed 19 children and two teachers in America’s deadliest school shooting for nearly a decade.
“He’s in room 112,” a girl whispered over the phone at 12:03 a.m., more than 45 minutes before a US Border Patrol-led tactical team finally burst in and ended the siege.
The on-scene commander, the chief of the Uvalde, Texas, school district police department, believed at the time that Ramos was barricaded inside and that the children were no longer in immediate danger, leading to the police time to 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, period.”
The revelation of local law enforcement’s delay in pursuing the teenager armed with a semi-automatic rifle came as the nation’s leading gun rights advocacy group, the National Rifle Association, opened its annual convention 275 miles from there, Houston.
Gov. Gregg Abbott, a Republican and staunch gun rights advocate, who addressed the meeting in a pre-recorded video, lashed out at the apparent failings of Uvalde police, later telling a press conference that he had been misled and that he was “livid about what happened”.
Mr Abbott denied that recently passed Texas gun laws, including a controversial measure removing license requirements for carrying a concealed weapon, had ‘any relation’ to Tuesday’s bloodbath . He suggested that state legislators refocus on tackling mental illness.
SEND THE POLICE NOW
Although the shooting has reopened the long-running, intractable national debate over easy access to military-style weapons in the United States, the latest timeline of the Uvalde school attack has drawn public dismay, including among the very officials who reported it.
McGraw, whose voice sometimes choked with emotion, said: “We are here to report the facts, not to defend what has been done or what action has been taken.”
Some of the students, mostly aged 9 and 10, caught with the shooter survived the massacre, including at least two who called 911, McCraw said. He did not offer a precise count.
There were at least eight 911 calls from classrooms between 12:03 p.m., half an hour after Ramos entered the building, and 12:50 p.m., when Border Patrol agents and police made burst in and took down Ramos.
It’s unclear if officers at the scene were aware of the calls while they waited, McCraw said.
A girl whom 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 girl who made the first call implored the operator to “send the police now” at 12.43pm and then again four minutes later.
Officers entered three minutes after that last call, according to McCraw, when the tactical team used a janitor key to open the locked classroom door.
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. when the first 911 call from inside the classroom was received, McCraw said.
Videos that emerged on Thursday showed anguished parents outside the school urging police to storm the building during the attack, with some having to be subdued by police.
Standard law enforcement protocols call for police to deal with an active shooter in the school without delay, rather than waiting for reinforcements or more firepower, a point McCraw acknowledged on Friday.
Medical experts also stress the importance of evacuating patients with serious gunshot wounds to a trauma center within 60 minutes – what emergency doctors call “the golden hour” – in order to save lives.
McCraw described other times when Ramos could have been thwarted. A school officer, responding to calls about an armed man who crashed into a car at the funeral home across the street, passed right by Ramos as he crouched next to a vehicle on the property from school. Police said Ramos shot at two people standing outside before climbing a fence to enter the school grounds.
The door that gave Ramos access to the building had been left unlocked by a teacher, McCraw said, in violation of school district security policies.
NRA CONVENTION
The attack, which comes 10 days after a Buffalo, New York, shooting that left 10 people dead, has heightened the long-running national debate over gun laws.
At the NRA meeting, prominent Republicans, including former President Donald Trump and U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, reiterated arguments that tougher gun laws would do little or nothing to alleviate the increasing frequency of mass shootings in the United States.
Around 500 protesters holding crosses, signs and pictures of Uvalde shooting victims gathered outside the convention shouting “NRA go away”.
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 for the attack. Ramos, who had dropped out of high school, had no criminal record and no history of mental illness.