I asked the question yesterday as the news trickled out. More than 100 law officers converged on the Robb Elementary School in Uvalde while a shooter was killing students and teachers. Between 30-60 minutes assed before they broke into the classroom and shot the killer. Why did they wait so long when every second counted?
Parents and neighbors are asking the same question. Why the delay?
CBS reports:
Uvalde, Texas — Frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampagekilled 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.
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.
Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner.
“There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said…
Carranza, the neighbor, said he watched as the gunman, identified by authorities as Salvador Ramos, 18, 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, the shooter 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…
Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when the gunman 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 (the shooter) in the classroom.”
Olivarez said the officers who first responded to the scene “were at a point of disadvantage” and were not able to make entry.
“There was no way they were able to make entry, especially with the amount of manpower that was on scene,” he said. “So at that point, their primary focus was to evacuate as many children as possible.”
A specialized tactical unit made of local, state and federal law enforcement officers were eventually able to enter the classroom, authorities said. Three officers were injured, and all are in good condition, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said.
McCraw commended the officers who engaged the shooter before the tactical unit entered, saying they saved lives by keeping him “pinned down” at his location.
“Obviously this is a situation we failed in the sense that we didn’t prevent this mass attack — but I can tell you, those officers that arrived on the scene and put their lives in danger, they saved other kids,” he said. “They kept him pinned down, and we’re very proud of that.”
So, commendations to everyone involved. “We’re very proud of that.” Governor Abbott is proud, so is Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick. There were three good men with a gun who “engaged” the shooter. There were more than 100 good men and women with heavy weaponry who kept the killer pinned in one classroom. “Only” 21 died.
The dozens of officers debated what to do and who was in charge as the killer did his deadly work. They kept him “pinned down.” It was a single classroom, for God’s sake, not a bank vault! Wasn’t there one brave officer who would charge in and shoot the murderer dead before he finished off 21 beautiful souls? No. Thoughts and prayers. Maybe next time.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
The danger was so severe that ultimately it took this. Not an armed public school teacher or public school security officer. Instead, the TX gunman who killed at least 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde was shot to death by an experienced agent from US Border Patrol’s highly elite BORTAC unit.
The Del Rio-based Border Patrol Tactical team was working west of San Antonio. The VIOLENT world of drug smuggling & human trafficking stash houses is where they operate.
San Antonio is a way-station/hub city for the smuggling cartels. It is valued because of its rail, air, and road lines leading into the US interior.
The agent took the shot and was wounded in the leg but is expected to recover.
This was a war zone and not a school zone. A war zone created by the NRA, the GOPee, Greg Abbott & his associates. Many more too numerous to list. A complicated but well-documented complicity that now must reach a conclusion. We quite literally cannot LIVE this way any longer.
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You mean Mrs Smith with an assault rifle strapped over her shoulder as she taught reading would not have been able to stop the assailant .
Shocking who would have thought.
Sadly this may only stop when those empowering the NRA and the Gun Manufacturers have as much personal fear as a parent arriving at the school not knowing whether their child was alive . If you need proof of that ; where is Huey Newton(RIP) when we need him most . All it took was the threat of Black self defense at a time of rising radicalism ,to give Reagan’s California some of the toughest gun laws in the Nation.
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Just like we occasionally see people shoot loved ones they mistake for burglars, if this gets wide spread, someday a principal who decided to pop into a class at random will get a bullet right between the eyes. The teacher will have trained as a sharpshooter, after all.
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GregB
I prefer to think it was Betsy Devos who walked in . On a surprise tour with Ted my wife is ugly Cruz and Greg we wont be wont be second to no one on mass shootings Abbott.
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Sorry Diane. Have to disagree here. I was teaching at a nearby HS at the time of the Parkland shooting. Atlantic Technical College & HS. Look it up. Could have been my school. An officer there was fired & condemned for not rushing in fast enough. It’s easy to say what he should have done in hindsight, now knowing there was only one shooter. At the time, no one knew if there were more than one shooters or where they were exactly. But go ahead & charge in as a suicide mission cuz that’s your job. Even to top Navy Seals don’t enter an attack site until they know basics of how many shooters & where they are. I get that if it’s my kid, go in & save them no matter what the risk or bad odds to you, officer! I wish police would explain to the public what the protocol book says on how to handle active shooter situations. We did active shooter drills once a month over my last two years before I retired in 2020. I would huddle my kids in the closet & the corner of the room out of the sight line from the window in my door. Forget about if he shot from the other direction where a full set of windows faced the parking lot. So I would stand right next to the door, only because there was a concrete wall cuz it opened to the outside. That wouldn’t work so well if it were an inside corridor with only drywall walls. If he shot through the window or lock to get inside, at least being at the door side where he would enter would give me a fighting chance to wrestle him down while hopefully some brave students would jump in to help. Most teachers would hide away from the door, but if he got through into the classroom, you’re then a sitting duck at his mercy. I preferred to have a fighting chance, but again, only cuz I had a concrete wall protecting me & my kids so he couldn’t shoot through the walls from that side. From the window side—we’d be screwed!
So that was our normal training. I wonder why my governor worries more about hurting children’s feelings by learning about CRT or other negative aspects of our history (which my generation learned about & didn’t end up traumatized or hating our country), but no problem traumatizing kids while doing active shooter, code red drills. Go figure. I’m just glad I’m retired & out of that madness, but I feel horrible for my colleagues & friends who are still out there just trying to educate this country’s children.
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When I was teaching 24 years ago, all we had to worry about was fire drills. Kids calling in fake bomb threats was just beginning to become a phenomenon. Now it is a living nightmare with no end in sight.
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Sorry, not buying it. Everyone knows the protocol after Columbine (in 1999!) is to get in as quickly as possible to subdue the shooter. The only way I would give them a pass is if they exhibited a sense of urgency and did as you say. There is no evidence of that here. These were poor Hispanic kids not those of the affluent and politically powerful.
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Yes, Greg! A thousand times, yes! We are told that law enforcement would be on the scene within minutes of a reporter intruder, and their main objective is to neutralize the threat while we get to safety. This is what we are trained to tell the students. This situation was not anywhere near an example of this.
And loved2teach, I would expect that a law enforcement officer would put themselves on the line for a school. Isn’t that what they signed up for? There isn’t time to make “a plan.” You do your best to train these tactical scenarios BEFORE anything happens, but the last thing we should expect is that you don’t even try to subdue the shooter immediately whether or not you trained for that particular situation. That makes zero sense. Unfortunately, law enforcement officers’ families worry every time they are out on duty. It comes with the job. Parents should not have to worry. Teachers’ families should not have to worry. They didn’t choose a profession that potentially puts them in harm’s way. One of the first responders lost his wife in this. He has to be asking why.
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The guy in the white cowboy hat who has taken to the microphone to speak officially in defense of the police in Uvalde, said the local police were busy calling for help. He then enumerated that they called for a hostage negotiator, etc.
We can assume that there were one or more cowards who thought they and their fellow officers should first, protect themselves, and should rely on miles-away, specialized backup to take out the shooter.
Those cowards should return their pay out of shame.
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Do we know if the classroom the gunman was contained in had any victims in it? Do we know if medical assistance was not given to victims as a result of the gunman being held up in the building? Maybe I’m missing something, but if the gunman was contained in an empty room, could not do any additional harm, and was not keeping medical teams from getting to victims or children from exiting the building it seems okay to keep the gunman confined to an empty room?
If there were victims in the room…this will go down as a catastrophic blunder.
As someone who can be hard on law enforcement, I worry that articles like these do little to advance the conversation without greater detail.
I’m a fan of yours Diane…what am I missing?
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I was with you until I saw the video Diane posted later. Watch it. It doesn’t answer questions, but it raises hundreds.
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Lars,
The room where the gunman was contained had at least 19 children and two teachers. I have not heard any reports about whether there were children who survived. No one entered the classroom where he was killing people for a period of 30-60 minutes. After police eventually entered and killed him (details not yet available), medical assistance was rendered to the victims, most or all of whom were taken to a hospital. I have not heard of any survivors from that classroom.
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Lars, I hope I was clear. The gunman was contained in a fourth grade classroom with students and teachers. The classroom was not empty.
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A parent & her very smart little 4th Grader were interviewed today & told the story of the child “playing dead” by smearing her dying classmate’s blood on herself & lying still.
A nightmare this child will have to live with forever.
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Bc they don’t know what’s going on inside and are taking directions while situation is assessed.
You’re speculating
Parents there will naturally be unsatisfied bc their kids are inside and it’s dangerous.
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“dissatisfied” is the understatement of the year, given the horror of the outcome.
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In my district, every police officer has access to a master key that can unlock any door in the building. There is no excuse for a law enforcement officer to NOT enter a room they know contains the threat. That is their job. The so-called “safety protocols” at this school were a sham, and it reflects mostly on law enforcement as they are the experts in security—the school bears some responsibility (open door and implementation of plans training students and staff), but this is on the law enforcement.
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I’m horrified by the video of law enforcement standing on the opposite side of barricades pacing, then also subduing (arresting?) a parent while his child may or may not be still alive. while law enforcement is putting together a “plan” that we all know should already be in place. It has been practiced over and over by the children and teachers for years. Throughout my life, I have been a supporter of law enforcement, but the videos that folks have been sharing about this event and others don’t lie. There is so much wrong here I can’t begin to articulate it, but how dare anyone suggest at this point that arming teachers and “hardening” schools could possibly be the answer!
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Sorry about the typos. I’ve been teaching through a pandemic with kids not wearing masks, and COVID finally nailed me. No excuses, though. I’m literally and figuratively sick and tired.
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