Disturbing new video footage shows children fleeing the Texas massacre school as a police dispatcher can be heard advising that a classroom is ‘full of victims’ of the mass shooting.
The clip, broadcast by Good Morning America on Monday morning, shows cops smashing windows at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24.
Children and a few adults can be seen fleeing the building moments later. Meanwhile, chilling audio footage can be heard being broadcast over police radios detailing the scale of the bloodbath.
That saw 19 children and two teachers shot dead by gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, who was later shot dead by cops.
A 911 dispatcher can be heard to ask: ‘Room 12, are we able to .. is anybody inside of the building … 2-1, child is advising he is in the room. Full of victims. Full of victims at this moment.’
The video and audio sheds fresh light on the 77 gut-wrenching minutes Salvador Ramos, 18, was inside the building, before he opened fire and went on a shooting spree killing 19 children and two teachers, and injuring others.
On Monday, the Justice Department said they are planning to review police response after angry and grief-stricken parents wanted to know why police didn’t engage with the shooter more quickly.
At a press conference, top cop, Col. Steven McCraw, Director of Texas Department of public safety, appears shaken and teary-eyed, as he shares the agonizing details of a call by a 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, ABC News reported.
The video unveiled the 77 gut-wrenching minutes Ramos was inside the school building before police reached the locked door with a key and killed the deranged madman.
The 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, the news outlet reported.
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, source said federal offices defying local authorities went into the building and shooting Ramos dead.
Survivor Daniel Garza, 9, whose cousin was killed in the Tuesday massacre shared the terrifying experience.
Garza explained with his mother by his side, how how his teacher, Elsa Abala, was shot twice but survived by playing dead.
‘She locked the door quickly and she was running and got shot and dropped on floor and she was like playing dead,’ he said. ‘He [Ramos] was standing there with his gun tapping on the window.’
On Sunday, President Biden and First Lady visited the school as angry, frustrated and grieving parents yelled, ‘Do something! Do something!’
US Customs and Border Protection agents (left) are seen alongside local police (center) and sheriff’s deputies (right) working to rescue kids from Robb Elementary on Tuesday
U.S. Border Patrol agents and local police rush Robb Elementary school children to safety moments after they were freed from inside a classroom via the window. The rescue took place early Tuesday afternoon
Police try to gain entry to a classroom at Robb Elementary during the siege on Tuesday in Uvalde
On Friday, response in last Tuesday’s school massacre at Robb Elementary School in the tight-knit working class community of Uvalde, Texas as questions mount about why police didn’t engage the shooter more quickly.
Photos released on Friday were taken outside the school as the siege unfolded and show US Customs and Border Protection agents alongside local police and sheriff’s deputies, lifting children out of a window at the school.
New photos have emerged depicting part of the law enforcement response to the school massacre in Uvalde, Texas on Tuesday, as questions mount about why police didn’t engage the shooter more quickly.
The photos released on Friday were taken outside Robb Elementary as the siege unfolded on Tuesday, and show US Customs and Border Protection agents alongside local police and sheriff’s deputies, lifting children out of a window at the school.
After a siege lasting nearly an hour, it was eventually Border Patrol agents who used a master key to open the locked door of a classroom where they confronted and killed gunman Salvador Rolando Ramos, who killed 19 students and two teachers while barricaded inside.
Officials admitted on Friday that nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside of the classrooms during the attack, believing any potential victims inside were already dead.
‘Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,’ Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference.
The on-site commander ‘was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize’ to get into the classroom, McCraw said.
McCraw said there was a barrage of gunfire shortly after Ramos entered the classroom where they killed Ramos but that shots were ‘sporadic’ for much of the 48 minutes while officers waited outside the hallway.
He said investigators do not know whether or how many children died during those 48 minutes.
Ramos entered the classroom and locked the door at 11.34am. In the first few minutes, he fired more than 100 shots inside classrooms 111 and 112.
He carried on shooting ‘sporadically’ until 12.21pm, and it wasn’t until 12.50pm that police eventually gained access to the classrooms with a key from the janitor.
Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: ‘Please send the police now,’ McCraw said.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, from where I am sitting now – of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. There is no excuse,’ McCraw said.
After a siege lasting nearly an hour, it was eventually Border Patrol agents who used a master key to open the locked door of a classroom where they confronted and killed gunman Salvador Rolando Ramos
The on-site commander ‘was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize’ to get into the classroom, an official said
Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: ‘Please send the police now,’
He latter sobbed as he said he and other police officers ‘take an oath to protect people’ but failed.
‘We want to know why this happened and know if we can do better next time,’ he said.
Scores of Border Patrol agents also rushed to the scene after hearing the incident unfold on scanners. When they arrived, the Uvalde Police Department also told them not to go inside, according to a law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to The New York Times.
Eventually, the agents joined parents and a handful of local police officers in pulling kids through windows from other classrooms.
The agents did not understand why they were being told not to go inside when the gunman was still in the building.
Experts have slammed the decision to wait for back up as ‘outdated’ and ‘disgusting’.
‘Waiting an hour is disgusting. If that turns out to be true, then it is a disgusting fact,’ Sean Burke, a retired school resource officer from Massachusetts who now is the president of the School Safety Advocacy Council, told NBC.
Texas cops said last night that they didn’t immediately rush in to find the shooter on Tuesday’s attack after being shot at because they feared they might be killed, and even suggested that they deliberately locked the gunman in the classroom where he slaughtered 21 people in order to trap him.
This is how the shooting played out over the course of nearly two hours from when Ramos killed his grandmother at home. He arrived at the school at 11.28am and the first 911 calls were made. He then walked unobstructed into the building with his AR-15 and headed towards the classroom. He fought off cops at 11.44am, then was left alone in the room with the victims until around 12.44pm – when SWAT arrived. The incident was declared over at 1.06pm
As the gunman unleashed terror inside the school, desperate parents were forced to wait outside and some were even put in handcuffs after they tried to enter the school to find their kids and rescue them
Department of Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez made the astonishing comments during an appearance on CNN last night.
He was being challenged by Wolf Blitzer over why the first officers who responded to the shooting retreated after Salvador Ramos shot at them with his AR-15 and then waited an hour for tactical SWAT teams to take him out, leaving him alone in a classroom with the 19 fourth graders and two teachers who he slaughtered.
‘Don’t current best practices, Lieutenant, call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?’ Blitzer asked.
He replied: ‘In the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life. But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots.’
He then appeared to try to take credit for the gunman being locked in the classroom with the kids for an hour – including some he shot at the start of the rampage who later died in the hospital – claiming it saved other lives.
Police initially said that the gunman barricaded himself inside the classroom and that they had trouble gaining access to the room, and one unnamed law official anonymously spoke out to say SWAT teams had to wait for a different school staff member to bring them a key to the class.
‘At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and at that point that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school.
‘So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings,’ Lt. Olivarez said.
Surgeons at the hospital in Uvalde have also suggested that the delay in responding to the shooting may have cost some kids their lives.
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.
‘You have to act quickly,’ Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at the University Hospital in Antonio, said.
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.
On Thursday night, Olivarez said that was the information police received.
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