04/16/2024

Update (1630ET): The gunman who massacred 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas lingered outside for 12 minutes firing shots at people in a funeral home across the street, before scaling a fence onto school grounds where he fired more shots. He then entered the school and barricading himself in a classroom before opening fire, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Victor Escalon, a regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said he couldn’t say why no one stopped the deceased gunman, 18 year-old Salvador Ramos, from entering the school during that time Tuesday. Most of the shots Ramos fired came during the first several minutes when he entered the school, Mr. Escalon said.

DPS officials previously said an armed school officer confronted Ramos as he arrived at the school. Mr. Escalon said Thursday that information was incorrect and no one encountered Ramos as he arrived at the school. “There was not an officer readily available and armed,” Mr. Escalon said. -WSJ

Ramos began Tuesday morning shooting his grandmother in the face, then using her truck to drive to the school – crashing it into a ditch at around 11:28 am according to a timeline laid out by Escalon.

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Texas law enforcement officials ignored pleas from distraught parents as a gunman was left alone for up to an hour at a Texas elementary school – killing 19 children and two teachers, before a Border Patrol agent charged into the school and killed the suspect.

“Go in there! Go in there!” women shouted at the police soon after the attack began, according to neighbor Juan Carranza, who told the Associated Press about the parents’ efforts to get the police to confront the shooter. Carranza said the officers did not go in.

Minutes earlier, Carranza had watched as Salvador Ramos crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home who ran away uninjured.

Officials say he “encountered” a school district security officer outside the school, though there were conflicting reports from authorities on whether the men exchanged gunfire. After running inside, he fired on two arriving Uvalde police officers who were outside the building, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine. The police officers were injured. –RealClear Politics

One parent, Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter Jacklyn was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, only to find that police weren’t moving in.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said, adding “More could have been done.”

“There were five or six of [us] fathers, hearing the gunshots, and [police officers] were telling us to move back,” he told the Washington Post. “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building. We were saying, ‘Let’s go’ because that is how worried we were, and we wanted to get our babies out.”

One clip shows officers tackling parents outside the school to prevent them from rushing in. However, the precise timeline of the below videos compared to what was happening inside the school remains unclear…