A disturbing report has come out this morning detailing how parents were screaming at police officers to enter Robb Elementary School where the psychopath gunman was massacring children.
There’s also a video which seems to substantiate this report:
Here’s the report from the AP:
Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, witnesses said Wednesday, as investigators worked to track the massacre that lasted upwards of 40 minutes and ended when the 18-year-old shooter was killed by a Border Patrol team.
“Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.
One parent wanted to get several others there to just charge into the school because cops weren’t going in:
Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school when he heard about the shooting, arriving while police were still gathered outside the building.
Upset that police were not moving in, he raised the idea of charging into the school with several other bystanders.
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”
“They were unprepared,” he added.
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.
After entering the school, Ramos charged into one classroom and began to kill.
He “barricaded himself by locking the door and just started shooting children and teachers that were inside that classroom,” Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Department of Public Safety told CNN. “It just shows you the complete evil of the shooter.”
All those killed were in the same classroom, he said.
The gunman was in the classroom where he massacred the children for the better part of an hour before he was finally shot and killed by Border Patrol:
Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him, though a department spokesman said later that they could not give a solid estimate of how long the gunman was in the school or when he was killed.
“The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” McCraw said. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”
Meanwhile, a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation said the Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak publicly about the ongoing investigation.
Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner.
“There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said.
I can’t imagine being a parent outside the school while all of this was unfolding, knowing that a gunman is in the classroom gunning down your kid while cops secure the scene and wait for tactical teams to take out the gunman.
You would think that cops would just rush in, surround the classroom and take out the shooter.
But at the same time I realize that this was essentially a hostage situation, with an active shooter having already fired at two officers who had responded to the scene, injuring them. I’m no expert on these kind of situations, but I don’t think police just charge into a hot situation where someone is shooting at cops. And they certainly don’t let parents and bystanders anywhere near a scene like that.
There will certainly be more questions about the police response from parents as all of this is sorted out. I’m not ready, however, to cast judgement on police and claim this is Parkland 2.0, where at least one cop hid and refused to engage the shooter at a Florida high school. It may be that police did just what they were trained to do in a situation like this. Or maybe they were unprepared, as this one parent suggests.