Police Entered 40 Minutes After Shooting At Uvalde Started

Amidst gunshots and screaming parents outside of Robb Elementary School as shooter Salvador Ramos ended with the lives of 19 kids and two teachers, police waited for over an hour to enter the school.

Police forces in Texas have cleared details stated before regarding their actions around the shooting on Tuesday, placing them under massive national scrutiny. It seems like the police actions were not as efficient and heroic as Abbott first stated, he even revoked his statement and said that he was “misled” by the first press conference.

18-year-old Salvador Ramos shot his grandmother, stated on social media that he did and that he was on his way to shoot in the elementary school, crashed his car and entered Robb Elementary School with no issue before the police even started taking action. 

More than 40 minutes had passed since the shooting, and the police were still outside waiting to get in. Desperate parents who demanded them to enter the facilities were harrassed by the police, one mother even put in handcuffs for attempting to run inside to save her kid. Police first spoke of swift immediate action, but the parents saw otherwise.

“The police were doing nothing,” stated Angeli Rose Gomez for The Wall Street Journal, the woman who was handcuffed and eventually released. She had jumped over the school fence and ran inside to rescue her two children. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”

 Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn was killed in the shooting, told the Associated Press that “They say they rushed in, but we didn’t see that.”

Democratic State Senator Ronald Gutierrez also stated that the police’s slow response most likely cost the lives of some of the children who were killed on Tuesday. He spoke to the mother of one of the victims.

“The first responder that they eventually talked to said that their child likely bled out,” Gutierrez stated for CNN. “In that span of 30 or 40 minutes extra, that little girl might have lived. That little girl might have lived.”

Col. Steven McCraw of the Texas Department of Public Safety stated that the decision of waiting so long to enter the scene was “most likely” not the best idea in hindsight. He had to clear up a lot of declarations made during the first press conference after the shooting that revealed the poor performance of the police. 

Some of the new disclosed details include that hundreds of rounds were fired in the first four minutes. Several students made calls to 911 as the shooting unfolded and some even tried to escape through windows.

It seems unbelievable that after so many tragedies related to school shootings in the United States, mistakes like this continue to happen.