the times | Friday May 27 2022 2GM 33
Wo r l d
Grief turned to anger for relatives of the
19 children and two teachers killed in
America’s latest school shooting as it
emerged that the gunman was inside
for an hour before being shot.
Video clips showed that parents had
rushed to Robb Elementary School in
Uvalde, Texas, after hearing reports of
gunshots. They could be seen remon-
strating with heavily armed police who
had set up a perimeter, apparently to
await a tactical intervention team.
The tragedy claimed another life yes-
terday when the husband of one of the
teachers killed at the school died. Joe
Garcia, 50, suffered a heart attack after
visiting the memorial to his wife, Irma.
The trauma of the tight-knit mainly
Hispanic community was compounded
by information from the authorities
about how Salvador Ramos entered by
an unlocked back door “unobstructed”
because no school protection officer
was on the scene as previously claimed.
There was an exchange of gunfire
with at least two police officers whoDevastated town turns anger on police
arrived after four minutes. Ramos then
barricaded himself in the classroom for
more than 60 minutes, according to a
local official. All of the victims were in
the same room. About an hour and a
half elapsed between the first emer-
gency call at 11.32am and when Ramos
was shot dead by a border patrol agent
who went in as part of a tactical squad.
Police practice on confronting armed
intruders has evolved since the 1999
Columbine High School massacre of 12
students and one teacher, where offi-
cers waited for a Special Weapons and
Tactics team. Officers are now trained
to engage a gunman as quickly as poss-
ible despite the risk to themselves.
Jacinto Cazares, whose ten-year-old
daughter, Jacklyn, was killed, arrived at
the school while the incident was still
unfolding. Upset that the authorities
were not acting, he suggested charging
into the building with other fathers.
“We wanted to storm the building.
We were saying, ‘Let’s go’ because that
is how worried we were, and we wanted
to get our babies out.” He added: “There
were 40 lawmen armed to the teeth butdidn’t do a darn thing until it was too
late. More could have been done. They
were unprepared.”
Most if not all of the dead lost their
lives in the first few minutes after
Ramos, 18, gained entry to a classroom,
The New York Times said. Video that
emerged from outside the school
showed armed officers holding back
onlookers who pleaded with them to
intervene. Two officers can be seen
kneeling on one person as others yell:
“There’s shooting!” and “What the f***
are you doing?”
A briefing by Victor Escalon, of the
Texas Department of Public Safety,
raised more questions than answers.
He said that two Uvalde police officers
arriving after about four minutes
exchanged fire with the gunman. “They
take rounds, they move back, get cover.”
Then the officers called in help and it
was another hour before a raid by
Border Patrol agents, who shot Ramos.
Three pupils were still in hospital last
night with injuries, as was Ramos’s
grandmother, 66, who he shot before
going to the school.David Charter, Jacqui GoddardAdalynn Madrigal did not hesitate
when, as she played during her school
breaktime, she heard the shouted
instruction: “Run, run, run. Go, go, go.”
The nine-year-old and her class-
mates at Robb Elementary had re-
hearsed so many times, as children do in
the US, how to respond in the event of
a gunman on campus. They ran into a
classroom with their teacher, turned off
the lights, locked the door and lay low.
“When I heard the gunshots, I got
scared. There were four, or five, or may-
be three at first,” she said. The shots
continued until 19 children in the adja-
cent building were dead, along with two
teachers.
“My teacher who was with us, she
grabbed a pack of scissors and put them
in her pocket just in case he tried to hurt
us too. She said she was going to give
him a bad haircut if he came in,” Madri-
gal said, her pained face giving way to a
brief smile at the thought of the
teacher’s joke. “That was funny,” she
said, before the strained expres-
sion resumed.
Wearing a crimson bow
in her hair and a match-
ing T-shirt bearing
the Uvalde school
district motto “Be-
lieve in U. Loyal
and true”, Adalynn
twirled hands with
her little sister
Kinsley, six, as she
spoke outside the
school. On Wednes-
day evening, mourn-
ers held vigils in Uvalde
and in the nearest city of
San Antonio, 80 miles away,
where the cathedral’s bells tolled 21
times to commemorate the lives lost. A
violinist played Amazing Grace as sobs
rose from among the hundreds at the
town’s agricultural fairground.
“You may cry, because our hearts are
broken. We are devastated,” said Toby
Gruben, a pastor who addressed the
crowd. “We pray for the little children
who saw what happened to their
friends and we pray that God will heal
their little hearts and souls.”
Adalynn could not sleep the first
Protests are expected today as the
United States’ most prominent gun
lobbying group holds its annual meet-
ing in Texas, with Donald Trump and
other top Republicans due to attend,
days after the Uvalde school massacre.
The National Rifle Association (NRA)
has defied calls to cancel the event fol-
lowing the killings at Robb Elementary
School, less than 300 miles away.
Promoted as “14 acres of guns and
gear”, the convention is the first since
Run, run, run!
Day when the
campus shooter
drill kicked in
night after the shooting and snuggled
into her parents’ bed crying. Earlier
that evening, she put on her football
team shirt in honour of her friend Tess
Mata, ten, who was at that point still
unaccounted for.
“She said she was wearing the shirt
for Tess and that she hoped Tess gets
home soon because she must be
scared,” her father, Mark Madrigal,
said. “And I said, ‘I don’t think Tess is
coming home, baby’. Then she broke
down. Then we broke down.”
Tess’s parents, Veronica and Jerry,
and her sister Faith, 21, were told later
on Tuesday night that the little girl had
not survived. She was a fan of baseball
and the singer Ariana Grande and
was saving up for a holiday to Disney
World.
“Sissy, I miss you so much,” Faith
wrote online. “I just want to hold you
and tell you how pretty you are. I want
to take you outside and practise soft-
ball. I want to go on one last family
vacation. I want to hear your conta-
gious laugh and I want you to hear me
tell you how much I love you.”
A paramedic who arrived at the
scene of the shooting dis-
covered that his daugh-
ter, Amerie Jo Garza,
ten, was among
those killed as he
tried to help other
victims. Angel
Garza was one of
the first respond-
ers to the shoot-
ing and asked a
girl who was
“covered in blood
head to toe” if she
had been shot. “I
thought she was injured,
I asked her what was wrong
and she said she’s OK,” an emotion-
al Garza told CNN.
“She was hysterical, saying that they
shot her best friend, that they killed her
best friend, she’s not breathing and she
was trying to call the cops. And I asked
the little girl the name and she told me,
she said Amerie.”
Weeping and clutching a framed
photograph of Amerie, Garza added:
“She was so sweet... she was the swee-
test little girl who did nothing wrong.
She listened to her mom and dad, she
always brushed her teeth, she was crea-
tive, she made things for us, she never
got in trouble in school.”United States
Jacqui Goddard Uvalde
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city of
iles away,
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“cov
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II IIasked her w
and she said she’s O
lG ldCAdalynn Madrigal, nine, lost two of
her cousins and two were wounded
NRA defies demand to cancel gun convention after atrocity
the pandemic and is expected to draw
gun manufacturers and enthusiasts
from across the country, together with
prominent political supporters, includ-
ing Trump, Greg Abbott, the governor
of Texas, and Ted Cruz, a Texas senator.
Although the convention celebrates
guns, firearms will be banned from the
conference floor for the former presi-
dent’s speech, his fifth address to the
event. Secret Service agents will guard
the conference floor and police are pre-
pared for protests outside as the US
mourns the death of 19 schoolchildrenand two teachers in Uvalde, prompting
more calls for tougher gun control.
The NRA, which pours millions of
dollars a year into promoting gun
ownership, condemned the shootings
as a “horrific and evil crime” and “the
act of a lone, deranged criminal”.
In Washington, debate continued on
Capitol Hill yesterday about the
response, with the search beginning for
any new gun-control measures that
might secure bipartisan support. With
the Senate tied 50-50, Democrats have
proposed ideas that they hope couldattract ten Republicans and produce
the 60 votes needed for legislation to
pass. Most Republican senators are
intractable in their opposition to
almost any expansion of gun control,
including tougher background checks.
Senators are discussing a national
“red-flag” law to allow the authorities to
confiscate weapons from people deemed
by the courts to be dangerous. Red-flag
laws exist in at least 19 states, and an
expansion is seen as the likeliest idea to
gain some Republican support.
After side-stepping questions aboutgun control in the aftermath of the
shooting, Mitch McConnell, the Repub-
lican Senate leader, said yesterday that
he had instructed the Texas senator
John Cornyn to lead his party’s
negotiations with the Democrats.
Cornyn has returned to Washington
from Uvalde and McConnell said he
was “hopeful that we could come up
with a bipartisan solution”. He declined
to endorse any specific proposals on
gun control, however.
Believe it or not, US gun deaths
have fallen, Gerard Baker, page 27Hugh Tomlinson Washington
CHANDAN KHANNA/AFP/GETTY IMAGESThe Duchess of Sussex laid flowers yesterday at the temporary memorial to the victims during a surprise visit to Uvalde