The teen gunman who carried out the Texas school massacre walked into the building unchallenged through an apparently unlocked back door and barricaded himself inside a classroom for over an hour before a tactical team killed him.
Victor Escalon, Texas Department of Public Safety regional director, said Thursday at an impromptu press conference that the shooter was never engaged by a school resource officer, contradicting a report that the department provided a day earlier.
“It was reported that a school district police officer confronted the suspect as he was making entry. Not accurate,” Mr. Escalon said at the briefing in Uvalde, Texas. “He walked in unobstructed initially. So from the grandmother’s house to the [unintelligible] to the school, into the school, he was not confronted by anybody.”
Instead, he said, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos crashed his grandmother’s truck at 11:28 a.m., climbed the school fence and entered the west side of the school at 11:40 a.m. through the back door without facing police resistance.
The revised account addressed and yet failed to answer mounting criticism about why it took so long for officers to confront the gunman, who killed at least 19 students and two teachers in a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School.
The only people the armed teen encountered before entering the school were employees outside the funeral home across the street. The gunman fired toward them and at the school building as he approached, Mr. Escalon said.
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There was no officer “readily available armed” at the school, he said.
Four minutes after the teen entered the school with an AR-15 rifle, Uvalde police and school resource officers arrived and were met with gunfire.
“They don’t make entry initially because of the gunfire they’re receiving, but we have officers calling for additional resources,” Mr. Escalon said.
The officers placed calls for more equipment and backup, including tactical teams, precision riflemen and negotiators, as they evacuated students and teachers from the school.
“Approximately an hour later, the U.S. Border Patrol tactical teams arrive, they make entry, shoot to kill the suspect,” Mr. Escalon said. “You also had a Zavala County deputy and Uvalde police department that made entry and killed the suspect.”
Ramos was reported dead on radio chatter at 12:58 p.m., according to The Associated Press.
Pushing back on reports, Regional Director for DPS South Texas Victor Escalon claims it is “not accurate” that police officers confronted the Robb Elementary School shooter outside the school.
— The Recount (@therecount) May 26, 2022
“From the grandmother’s house … into the school, he was not confronted by anybody.” pic.twitter.com/HYx4HQNiWa
The delay appeared to run counter to the widely adopted protocol developed after the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, which is to move toward the gunfire and rush the shooter as soon as possible.
“Could anybody have got there sooner?” Mr. Escalon said. “You’ve got to understand, it’s a small town. You’ve got people from Eagle Pass, from Del Rio, Laredo, San Antonio responding to a small community.”
Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez said in a Thursday statement that officers arrived “within minutes alongside Uvalde [Consolidated Independent School District] officers” and that several were hit by gunfire.
“Responding UPD officers sustained gunshot wounds from the suspect,” Chief Rodriguez said. “Our entire department is thankful that the officers did not sustain any life-threatening injuries.”
Mr. Escalon said most of the gunfire occurred at the beginning of the incident. During that hour, officers sought to negotiate with the gunman as he was barricaded in the classroom with the students and teachers.
“It was a lot of gunfire in the beginning. During the negotiations, there wasn’t much gunfire other than trying to keep the officers at bay, but that could change once we analyze the video,” Mr. Escalon said.
After the tactical unit breached the classroom and killed the gunman, “now it turns into a rescue operation: How do we save these children?” he said.
The updated account also called into question the insistence by law enforcement officials that officers acted to end the threat immediately.
Steven C. McCraw, Texas Department of Public Safety director, triggered the questions at Wednesday’s press conference by saying the law enforcement response took “like 40 minutes or something, an hour.”
He added, “I don’t want to give you a particular timeline.
“The bottom line is that law enforcement was there. They did engage immediately,” said Mr. McCraw. “They did contain him in the classroom. They put the tactical stack together in a very orderly way and of course breached and assaulted the individual.”
Video posted online showed distraught parents in some cases screaming at officers to let them go inside as they were held behind yellow tape at a police perimeter surrounding the school. One adult is shown lying on the ground between cars being attended to by others.
An officer is shown holding a stun gun. It’s unclear what was happening in the school at the time the video was taken.
Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raised the possibility with other parents of charging the school themselves because the police were “unprepared.”
“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” Mr. Cazares told The Associated Press. “More could have been done.”
Compounding the tragedy was a report Thursday that Joe Garcia, the husband of slain teacher Irma Garcia, died of a heart attack after the shooting. They had four children, according to a GoFundMe account started by Mrs. Garcia’s cousin Debra Austin.
“I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart and losing the love of his life of more than 30 years was too much to bear,” Ms. Austin said on the page, which she created Wednesday.
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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