According to new video, Uvalde cops were aware that children were still alive inside the Texas elementary school following a shooting last week.
During the massacre, Customs and Border Protection agents spoke to an injured child outside Robb Elementary school in a video first published on Facebook Live.
According to CNN, who released the video on Tuesday, the agent questioned the child, “Are you injured?”
‘I got shot!’ said the child.
‘A child was shot? ‘A child?’ As the child’s voice fades away, an adult can be heard speaking.
In addition, ABC News released footage Monday of a 911 call confirming officers knew children were alive after Salvador Ramos, 18, fired more than 100 shots into the classroom, contradicting the local police chief’s claims that they thought the scene was no longer active.
‘Room 12, are we able to .. is anybody inside of the building …’ the dispatcher asked. ‘2-1, child is advising he is in the room. Full of victims. Full of victims at this moment.’
The newly released video appears to contradict claims that Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Col. Steven McCraw made during a news briefing on Friday.
He repeatedly alleged police waited to enter the building because the incident commander had considered Ramos ‘a barricaded subject, and that there was time, and there were no more children at risk.’
At Friday’s press conference, McCraw shared the agonizing details of the 911 call made by the child trapped inside the classroom as the gunman entered.
‘She identified herself and whispered that she was in Room 12,’ McCraw said.
‘At 12:10pm she called back in Room 12 advised multiple dead. Again at 12:16pm she called back and said there were 8 to 9 students alive,’ McCraw said.
Ramos was inside the school building for 77 minutes before police reached the locked door with a key and killed the deranged madman.
Investigation revealed that the school district police chief wrongly believed the situation was no longer an active shooter, and ordered tactical teams not to enter the classroom. Prior reports, reveal nearly 20 cops waited at least 45 minutes to engage the gunman.
‘It was a wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that,’ McCraw admitted.
After nearly an hour, federal officers defying local authorities went into the building and shooting Ramos dead.
The U.S. Department of Justice announced Sunday it will review the law enforcement response to the shooting, which left 19 students and two teachers dead.
The mayor of Uvalde on Monday hit back at claims that local law enforcement lied about their initial response to the shooting, after the state’s lieutenant governor accused cops of dishonesty over the weekend.
Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News on Saturday that cops deciding not to immediately confront the shooter was a ‘bad decision, and that decision cost lives.’
‘I take this personally, and I know the governor takes it personally. And for me, it’s 140 or 150 people killed in Texas in the last six or seven years of collective anger when we’re not told the truth,’ he said.
Mayor Don McLaughlin slammed the lieutenant governor on Monday telling KHOU-TV: ‘Statements by Lt. Governor Dan Patrick that he was ‘not told the truth’ are not true. The victim’s families deserve answers, and the truth will be told.’
The mayor said he has asked the feds to conduct an independent investigation into the shooting and police response, saying: ‘If there’s holes, or we made a mistake, I want to be as transparent as we can.’
Meanwhile blame for an excruciating delay in killing the gunman has been placed with the school district’s homegrown police chief, Pete Arredondo. He apparently ordered cops to wait an hour before charging in to confront the barricaded shooter.
Arredondo, who grew up in Uvalde and graduated from the local high school, was set to be sworn in Tuesday to his new spot on the City Council after being elected earlier this month, but McLaughlin said in a statement Monday that wouldn’t happen.
It wasn’t immediately clear whether the swearing-in would happen privately or at a later date.
‘Pete Arredondo was duly elected to the City Council,’ McLaughlin said in the statement. ‘There is nothing in the City Charter, Election Code, or Texas Constitution that prohibits him from taking the oath of office.’
The 50-year-old Arredondo has spent much of a nearly 30-year career in law enforcement in Uvalde, returning in 2020 to take the head police job at the school district.
Parents, community members and politicians alike are outraged by the response to the shooting, with some alleging if authorities had acted sooner children who had been shot might still be alive.
The mother of a shooting victim was told by first responders that her daughter may have survived the massacre if authorities had acted quicker, a state legislator confirmed on Sunday. The fourth-grader had bled to death after being shot in her kidney.
‘Her child had been shot by one bullet through the back through the kidney area,’ State Sen. Ronald Gutierrez said. ‘The first responder that they eventually talked to said that their child likely bled out. In that span of 30 or 40 minutes extra, that little girl might have lived.’
Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers, likely shot the children in the first four minutes of his rampage, around 11.40am, yet none of them were removed from the building until at least 12.50pm, more than an hour later.
A person can bleed to death in less than five minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Gutierrez, a Democrat, argued that ‘many things went wrong’ when local police responded to the massacre and said he was ‘disgusted’ by law enforcement’s failure to take action.
‘Absolutely, these mistakes may have led to the passing away of these children,’ he stated, adding how he had ‘significant concerns’ about ‘operational control’ during law enforcement’s response to the shooting.
‘The protocols were breached. The active shooter protocols dictate that you go in,’ he said, noting that within minutes of Ramos opening fire, officers were on scene. ‘First there were seven officers, by 12.03pm there were 19 officers. So many things went wrong here.’
The lawmaker said his concerns about the situation extended beyond decisions made by Arredondo, alleging the failure to protect Texas’ children is on all authorities.
‘It is not fair to put it on the local ISD cop,’ Gutierrez said. ‘At the end of the day, everybody failed here. We failed these children. We even failed them in the Texas legislature.’
It remains unclear exactly how many children were in the classroom when the shooter opened fire, how many were killed immediately and how many were still alive but injured when police arrived.
Uvalde Memorial Hospital received two kids who had died by the time they got to the hospital.
Now, doctors are highlighting the importance of treating gunshot wounds as soon as they happen.
‘You can’t wait until patients go to a trauma center,’ Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at the University Hospital in Antonio, said. ‘You have to act quickly.’
He added that uncontrolled bleeding was the top cause of deaths among gun shot wound victims and that it can happen in as little as five minutes.
Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, officers across the nation have been advised not to wait for backup and to proceed into the school to find the shooter.
Instructions from the Texas Police Chiefs Association says: ‘The first two to five responding officers should form a single team and enter the structure.’
Why that advice was ignored in Uvalde is among the many aspects of the slow response that are now under investigation.
Another is why police falsely claimed at first that the shooter exchanged gunfire with a school resource officer before he even made it to the classroom.