The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-27)

A8 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, MAY 27 , 2022

cers unable to get to him. Police and public officials have cautioned that their investigation is ongoing and what is known about the shooting may change in coming days and weeks. In the meantime, social media postings and witness interviews have helped reconstruct portions of what happened. The school announced on Face- book at 11:43 a.m. that it was locked down due to gunshots in the area. “The students and staff are safe in the building,” it said. At that point, the shooter had been inside the school for three minutes, according to the timeline Escalon gave Thursday. One minute after that — at the exact time that Escalon said officers attempted to enter the building and then retreated after being fired at — a resident said in his own Facebook post that there was a shootout in front of the school. Some children managed to flee the school at 12 p.m., according to video reviewed by The Washing- ton Post. At 12:06, the school pub- lished another alert on the lockdown, again stating: “The students and staff are safe in the buildings.” Eleven minutes after that, however, it updated with a starker message: There was “an active shooter at Robb Elemen- tary. Law enforcement is on site.” Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-Tex.), whose district includes Uvalde, said he was told in a briefing that gunfire appeared to halt for a half-hour a fter the gunman was barricaded or trapped in the classroom. “That’s where there’s kind of a lull in the action,” Gonzales told CNN. “All of it, I understand, last- ed about an hour, but this is where there’s kind of a 30-minute lull. They feel as if they’ve got him barricaded in. The rest of the stu-

faces a parking lot. “There were a lot of cops surrounding that door,” Sotelo said, adding that he did not know if any of the officers entered. At a news conference on Wednesday, Texas DPS chief Ste- ven C. McCraw said that after the gunman opened fire, officers “en- gage[d] the active shooter and continue[d] to keep him pinned down in that location” until a tactical team could get inside. But Escalon on Thursday appeared to play down the notion of ongoing exchanges of fire between the time the gunman entered the fourth-grade classroom and when police confronted him about an hour later. “The majority of the gunfire was in the beginning” of the incident, he said. Previously, police spokesmen had said the gunman “barricaded himself inside” the classroom for a period of time, rendering offi-

said officers were taught to immediately neutralize a shooter. “Under all circumstances, that is their first priority,” said Schweit, who cautioned that it was still early and that all of the facts were not known yet about the response to the Uvalde shooting. “Even if somebody locks themselves be- hind a door, we want to go in and get that guy,” she said. And even if a shooter is no longer firing, she said, “anybody with a gun who’s killed people is an active threat until they’re neutralized.” According to witnesses and video, there was a substantive police presence outside the school as frantic parents and onlookers gathered. Derek Sotelo, who runs a near- by auto shop, said he watched from the funeral home as officers arrived and began clustering around a school entrance that

Officers from the Uvalde Police Department and the school district police department arrived four minutes after the gunman entered the school, according to Escalon, who offered unclear statements about how close those officers got to Ramos. Having first said the officers were “inside mak- ing entry” and took cover after coming under fire, he then said: “They don’t make entry initially because of the gunfire.” Since Columbine in 1999, many police departments have trained officers to go after an attacker as soon as possible, to minimize the number of teachers and children shot. Before then, guidance often emphasized waiting for specially trained officers, such as a SWAT team. The speed and willingness of officers to pursue shooters into buildings has been called into question following other attacks in recent years, including the massacre at a high school in Parkland, Fla., in 2018. Uvalde Police Department’s policy on responding to an active shooter is not publicly available, but a sample policy manual offered to local departments by the Texas Police Chiefs Association states: “The first two to five responding officers should form a single team and enter the struc- ture.” The sample manual con- tains best practices and has been used by more than 100 agencies, according to the association. “In any active shooter situa- tion, the protocol is to address the threat. You go at the threat, you go at where the gunfire is at because you’re trying to stop the threat,” Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Lt. Chris Olivarez said in an interview Thursday. Katherine Schweit, a retired senior FBI official who started the bureau’s active-shooter program,

Texas school shooting

BY HANNAH KNOWLES, JON SWAINE AND JOYCE SOHYUN LEE

Two days after a gunman’s
massacre at an elementary
school, which killed 19 children
and two teachers, key questions
remain about how the attack
unfolded and how law enforce-
ment responded during about an
hour when the gunman was in
the school.
Texas public safety officials
initially said 18-year-old Salva-
dor Rolando Ramos stormed the
school despite encountering a
school police officer and offered
conflicting information about
whether the two exchanged gun-
fire. But Victor Escalon Jr., South
Texas regional director for the
state Department of Public Safe-
ty, said Thursday that officials’
early reports were wrong and
that Ramos was not challenged
as he entered.
Interviews, video and emer-
gency line audio show how about
an hour passed before officers
stopped the gunman.

Late morning: Ramos’s
grandmother calls police
after he shoots her

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott (R)

said Ramos’s 66-year-old grandmother was able to call police after Ramos shot her. Authorities have not released the exact timing or content of the call. Ramos sent private messag- es about his attack just before- hand on one of Facebook’s plat- forms, according to the social media giant; Abbott said at a news conference Wednesday that Ramos expressed his inten- tions to shoot his grandmother about 30 minutes before arriving at Robb Elementary and said he was going to “shoot an elementary school” less than 15 minutes before arriving. A woman who identified her- self as Ramos’s mother told The Washington Post this week that his grandmother was expected to recover.

11:28 a.m.: Ramos crashes,
prompting 911 call, and soon
starts shooting
Ramos crashed his grand-
mother’s gray Ford truck near
Robb Elementary at 11:28 a.m.,
Escalon said. Travis Considine, a
spokesman for the Texas Depart-
ment of Public Safety, said Ra-
mos rammed into a railing,
prompting a resident to call 911
and report that the driver

seemed to have a rifle. Derek Sotelo, who runs a f amily-owned auto repair shop, said he heard about six gunshots coming from the elementary school and ran into women who recounted trying to help the gunman after his crash. The women said Ramos shot at them, according to Sotelo. Escalon confirmed Thursday that Ramos shot at two “witnesses” and continued walking toward the school. “Now he’s in the parking lot, shooting at the school,” Escalon said. “Multiple times.”

11:40 a.m.: Gunman walks
into the school unhindered,
official says
Escalon said the gunman
walked “into the west side” of the
elementary school at 11:40 a.m.
“He was not confronted by any-
body,” Escalon said — despite
Department of Public safety offi-
cials’ earlier claims that a school
police officer “engaged” Ramos
and was wounded.
Considine had said the officer
and Ramos exchanged gunfire.
Department of Public Safety Lt.
Chris Olivarez told The Post on
Thursday that investigators re-
ceived an early report indicating

the officer shot at Ramos.

11:43 a.m.: School
announces lockdown after
gunshots
Robb Elementary announced
a lockdown “due to gunshots
in the area” at 11:43 a.m. and
claimed that students and staff
were “safe in the buildings.”

11:44 a.m.: Local police
arrive and come under fire,
authorities say
Four minutes after Ramos en-
tered the school, Escalon said,
Uvalde police and police with the
school district “are inside, mak-
ing entry.”
“They hear gunfire. They take
rounds. They move back, get
cover,” Escalon said. “And during
that time, they approach where
the suspect is at.”
Ramos quickly made his way
to a fourth-grade classroom, offi-
cials said. Olivarez told CNN that
Ramos “barricaded himself by
locking the door and just start-
ed shooting children and teach-
ers that were inside that class-
room.”
“Officers are there, the initial
officers,” Escalon said Thursday.
But they did not enter the class-
room because they were under

gunfire, he said. Ramos fired most of his shots early on, Es- calon said, saying he could not immediately offer a precise number.

11:54 a.m.: Video shows
family members frustrated
with police
A video recorded outside the
school starting at 11:54 a.m. cap-
tures parents criticizing the po-
lice response to the gunman
apparently inside the building.
“They need to go in there,” a man
says in the video verified by The
Post and Storyful, accusing po-
lice of “standing outside.” Just
before noon, the video shows
students’ family members con-
fronting a uniformed officer who
pushes a man back and yells at
people to retreat across the
street.
By 12 p.m., video showed chil-
dren running away from the
school.
Escalon said police were work-
ing to assemble the right re-
sources — “specialty equipment,”
body armor, negotiators — and
also evacuating students and
teachers.
“They were taking gunfire ...
developing a team to make entry
to stop him,” Escalon said.
6. 12:23 p.m.: Scene ‘remains
active,’ police say
In a Facebook update time-
stamped 12:23 p.m., the Uvalde
Police Department asked parents
to pick students up at SSGT
Willie de Leon Civic Center —
about a five-minute drive from
the elementary school — and
said the shooting scene was still
“active.” The Uvalde school dis-
trict wrote on Facebook at 12:
p.m. that students were being
taken to the civic center for
“reunification.”
7. 12:51 p.m.: ‘Shots fired’
Speaking over emergency
medical services audio, reviewed
by The Post, someone on the
public channel reported “shots
fired.”
8. 1:06 p.m.: Police say they
have stopped Ramos
The Uvalde Police Department
wrote on Facebook: “Update @
1:06 Shooter is in Police Cus-
tody.” Law enforcement fatally
shot Ramos, officials said.

Annie Gowen, Mark Berman, Meryl Kornfield, Silvia Foster-Frau and Shawn Boburg contributed to this report.

What did police do at the school rampage? A timeline begins to take shape.

dents in the school are now leav- ing.” Citing preliminary information, Escalon on Thursday said that “during the negotiation there wasn’t much gunfire, other than trying to keep the officers at bay.” Authorities had not previously mentioned negotiations between law enforcement and the gunman, and Escalon did not elabo- rate. Eventually, a tactical team of federal and local officers was put together. Agents from an elite Border Patrol tactical unit led a phalanx into the classroom pro- tected by a ballistic shield. They fired at the gunman, according to two federal law enforcement officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to provide preliminary details. The gunman fired at the officers as they entered, one official said. During the exchange of fire, the official said, one agent was shot in the foot and grazed in the head. Authorities have not said pre- cisely what time the gunman was shot, but Escalon on Thursday said it was approximately one hour after the first responding officers arrived. Uvalde police announced on social media at 1: p.m. that the gunman was under the control of law enforcement. Police elsewhere have faced similar scrutiny over their re- sponses to mass shootings. More than a week after 17 people were killed at Parkland in February 2018, officials acknowledged that the Broward County sheriff’s dep- uty working as a school resource officer remained outside through- out the massacre and failed to confront the attacker. Scot Peterson, the former depu- ty, was charged with child neglect and negligence in 2019. He has said he did not know where the shots were coming from. An arrest affidavit said that he had active- shooter training two years before the Parkland massacre. A state commission investigat- ing the shooting later faulted multiple other officers for not acting quickly enough, saying that several had failed to try to confront the attacker. Several deputies from the Broward County Sher- iff’s Office were seen or described taking the time to put on ballistic vests, “sometimes in excess of one minute and in response to hearing gunshots,” the commission said. A half-dozen deputies arrived near the building where the shooting took place, most of them heard gunshots and they “did not immediately move toward the gunshots to confront the shooter,” the report concluded. After the June 2016 massacre at the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, police were criticized for waiting for hours to breach the club’s walls and attack the gunman after they had pursued him earlier inside the building. Police had fired at the shooter before settling into a standoff w hile he remained inside a bathroom with patrons. The then-Orlando police chief defended the agency’s response, saying that the gunman had stopped firing while barricaded inside the bathroom, transform- ing the scene from an active- shooter into a hostage standoff.

Tim Craig in Uvalde, Tex., and Silvia Foster-Frau, Alice Li, Nick Miroff, John Woodrow Cox and Meryl Kornfield in Washington contributed to this report.

parents pleading with officers in
tactical gear — some carrying ri-
fles or Tasers — to go inside the
school and tackle the gunman, or
allow them to do so themselves.
Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-
old daughter, Jacklyn, was inside
the school, said in an interview
that he and other men demanded
action from police as they hud-
dled by a door to the school.
“There were five or six of [us]
fathers, hearing the gunshots, and
[police officers] were telling us to
move back,” Cazares said. “We
didn’t care about us. We wanted to
storm the building.”
Cazares later learned Jacklyn
had been shot and killed.
Abbott, whose uncompromis-
ing pro-gun stances have been
sharply criticized by Democrats
since the massacre, hailed the
swiftness of the police response
on Wednesday and praised their
tactics.
“It is a fact that because of their
quick response getting on the
scene, being able to respond to the
gunman and eliminate the gun-
man, they were able to save lives,”
Abbott said at a news conference.
Escalon defended the police re-
sponse at Thursday’s news confer-
ence, beginning with emotional
remarks about the toll taken on
law enforcement. “It’s hard to
take. It is traumatic. We’re all
hurting inside,” he said.
But after two days in which
officials had offered partial and
contradictory details of how the
shooting unfolded, Escalon’s ac-
count also was confusing and un-
clear at points.
He said the gunman, who shot
his grandmother and fled in a
pickup truck, crashed the vehicle
at 11:28 a.m. Photographs from
the scene show the gray Ford pick-
up stopped next to broken railings
at a ditch-like concrete area be-
side the western perimeter of the
school grounds.
At 11:30 a.m., police received
the first 911 call reporting that a
man who had crashed a vehicle
was carrying a gun, according to
Escalon.
Escalon said witnesses de-
scribed the gunman exiting the
passenger side of his truck, carry-
ing a rifle and a bag. He opened
fire on two people who had
walked out of a funeral home
across the street, according to Es-
calon’s telling of the witness ac-
counts. The gunman then walked
toward the school, climbed a
fence, and shot at the school from
a parking lot.
He appears to have entered the
school through a door that was
unlocked, Escalon said.
Officials had previously stated
that the gunman was confronted
by a school police officer who fired
at him. Later, they said the officer
had confronted him but did not
open fire. Escalon said Thursday
that both versions were inaccu-
rate:
No officer confronted the gun-
man before he entered the west
side of the school at 11:40 a.m.,
Escalon said, adding “there was
not an officer readily available.”
A Uvalde school district secu-
rity plan says the fencing around
Robb was “designed to limit and/
or restrict access to individuals
without a need to be on the cam-
pus” and that the district operates
a “locked classroom door policy”
at all times.

SHOOTING FROM A

Scrutiny of police response mounts as key details revised

DARIO LOPEZ-MILLS/ASSOCIATED PRESS A police officer speaks with residents Tuesday outside Robb Elementary School. Texas authorities contradicted previous statements about how law enforcement officers confronted and killed the gunman. The shooter entered the school unchallenged and was stopped approximately one hour after the first responding officers arrived.

SARAH L. VOISIN/THE WASHINGTON POST Flowers commemorating victims are seen Thursday at a memorial outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.

The Washington Post - USA (2022-05-27)

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