A14 EZ SU THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, MAY 29 , 2022
Texas school shootingHere in Uvalde, there is little
expectation that correcting the
record will lead to any real policy
change, especially with hyper-
partisan midterm elections
looming.
“I mean, there’s protests on
gun laws and stuff, background
checks, but it doesn’t go any-
where,” said Angel Flores, 17,
speaking at a San Antonio hospi-
tal where she was visiting two
relatives who were taken there
after being shot in Uvalde.
“Sandy Hook happened, what,
10 years ago?” said Angel’s father,
37-year-old David Flores, refer-
ring to the 2012 mass shooting at
an elementary school in New-
town, Conn. “It’s the same thing,
down the road again. Nothing
changes.”
Ninety minutes of terror
On Tuesday morning, Dora
and Bob Estrada settled in to
watch their favorite daytime
soap, “The Bold and the Beauti-
ful.”
While waiting for her show to
start, Dora heard two popping
sounds from the direction of
Robb Elementary across the
street. She told her husband she
thought it was gunfire.
“He said, ‘No, that can’t be,’”
Dora recalled. “I said, ‘No, that is
shots.’”
Dora worried about her grand-
son, Jayden, a second grader at
Robb. A short time later, her
daughter, Jayden’s mother, called
to warn her parents to lock their
door; she’d heard of an active-
shooter threat. The Estradas de-
cided to go outside and check on
the school and noticed “a bunch
of cops on the corner.”
“They were just standing
there,” Dora said.
Given the time frame, those
first pops Dora heard likely came
from early shots Ramos fired as
soon as he arrived at the school
at 11:28 a.m., targeting people on
the street who heard him crash
his truck into a ditch and were
coming to his aid. Minutes earli-
er he had shot his 66-year-old
grandmother in the face at their
nearby home, took her vehicle
and drove the short distance to
Robb Elementary. The grand-
mother survived and called 911;
authorities have not released the
exact timing or content of her 911
call.
New details have dispelled
earlier accounts of a confronta-
tion between the gunman and an
armed school police officer out-
side the school, a story the au-
thorities changed four times.
First, officials said the gunman
exchanged fire with the officer
outside the school before going
in. Later, McCraw said that there
was an encounter, but no gun-
shots were exchanged between
the two. On Thursday, officials
said there had been no confron-
tation at all and that the gunman
had simply walked in. On Friday,
McCraw added that the school
police officer was not on campus
but rushed there after the 911 call
about a man with a gun at the
crash.
“He drove right by the sus-
pect,” who was crouched behind
a vehicle in the parking lot, and
mistook a teacher for an intrud-
er, McCraw said.
Ramos entered the school at
11:33 a.m. through a back door
that should have been locked but
had been propped open, authori-
ties said. The shooter walked to
the rear of the building, turned
down a hall and began firing into
classrooms 111 and 112, authori-
ties said, unloading more than
100 rounds of ammunition in
those first moments.
At the sound of gunshots,
children and staff in other parts
of the building began streaming
out of the school, some heading
for safety in a nearby funeral
home. Others didn’t have time to
run.
In Room 109, teacher Elsa
Avila rushed to lock the door and
turn off the lights. She told her
students to hide under their
desks, recalled a 9-year-old survi-
vor, Daniel, whose mother asked
that his last name not be used.
Daniel saw Ramos approach
the window of his classroom
door and shoot through the
glass, striking Avila and another
student a few feet away from
him. Daniel said he and others
were “playing dead” inside the
classroom because they feared he
could see them.
Bullets zinged around the
classroom, with one fragment
striking a fellow student’s nose.
Daniel recalled a “crunching”
sound as it struck bone. Stymied
by the locked door, Ramos moved
back down the hallway, return-
ing to Rooms 111 and 112, the
adjoining classrooms.
UVALDE FROM A
McCraw said that three offi-
cers with the Uvalde Police De-
partment were the first officers
into the school and that two
received grazing wounds at that
time from Ramos.
McCraw said Ramos had
locked the doors to Rooms 111
and 112 but briefly re-emerged
into the hall — at a time McCraw
did not specify, but this is likely
when those in Room 109 were
shot at — before locking himself
in the adjoining classrooms
again.
Gunfire was heard at
11:37 a.m., 11:38 a.m., 11:40 a.m.
and 11:44 a.m., McCraw said.
Four more local officers —
from the police department and
county sheriff’s office — arrived,
according to McCraw, at a time
he did not say.
None of the officers attempted
to enter Rooms 111 and 112 and
engage the gunman, officials
said.
By at least 12:15 p.m. McCraw
said, “as many as 19 law enforce-
ment officers had converged on aschool hallway, including Border
Patrol tactical team members
who arrived with shields.
“There was plenty of officers to
do whatever needed to be done,”
McCraw said. But the incident
commander believed more
equipment and people were
needed for a “breach,” McCraw
said, and he added that there was
a sense that law enforcement
“had time” and saw “no kids at
risk.”
At almost exactly the same
time, the student in Room 112
called again. She said eight or
nine students were alive. Three
minutes later, at 12:19 p.m., a
student in Room 111 called 911
but hung up at the urging of
another student, McCraw said.
At 12:21 p.m., he said, three shots
could be heard over the 911 line.
As the attack was underway,
frantic parents began showing
up at Robb after receiving active-
shooter alerts. The scene outside
the police cordon grew tense as
families demanded to know why
officers weren’t storming intothe building to save their chil-
dren. Video shows distraught
families pacing, rushing the cor-
don, cursing at officers.
Dany Reyz, 51, heard about the
gunfire at his repair shop half a
mile from Robb, where his
grandson and six nieces and
nephews are enrolled. He im-
mediately drove over, arriving
around 11:40 a.m., according to
phone logs that detail the frantic
calls he was making as he looked
for a place to park.
When he made it to the scene,
Reyz said, more than a dozen
parents already were huddled
near the entrance of the school,
demanding that officers do more
to intervene. On the east side of
the building, he said, another
group of parents were trying to
push through a fence to get
inside the school, but were being
repelled by police.
Felix Rubio, 39, a relative of
Reyz, heard enraged parents tell
officers to “go do your f----- job.”
When authorities insisted they
were doing their jobs, Rubio said,a man yelled for them to, “get
your f----- rifle and handle busi-
ness.”
The distraught parents could
do nothing but wait, trusting
that authorities were doing all
they could to protect students.
“Six-year-old kids in there,”
lamented one man in a video
taken outside the school that day.
“They don’t know how to defend
themselves from a shooter.”
By the time authorities de-
clared the attack over, just after
1 p.m., the Estradas had found
their grandson’s teacher and
learned that he was safe. Reyz’s
grandson and nephews also got
out, but a niece, 9-year-old Eli-
ana Garcia, was shot and killed.
Some parents only learned
their children were dead hours
later, at a local civic center where
families were asked to wait for
updates and, in some cases, sub-
mit DNA samples to help identify
victims. Over and over, witnesses
said, parents were led to a private
room where authorities broke
the news.The families’ screams could be
heard from outside the building.Aftermath and
accountability
Even for a nation hardened by
the frequency of mass shootings,
the tragedy in Uvalde seemed too
much to bear. News anchors
wept on live TV. Families eulo-
gized slain children in widely
shared social media posts, draw-
ing Americans into a visceral
experience of grief.
At a news conference the day
after the attack, Texas Gov. Greg
Abbott (R), flanked by state law
enforcement officials, mourned
the deaths but praised law en-
forcement for what he described
as a brave response that likely
saved lives. The event was briefly
interrupted by Democratic gu-
bernatorial candidate Beto
O’Rourke, who was removed
while heckling Abbott about lax
gun laws.
The governor’s praise for law
enforcement agencies also didn’t
sit well with Robb Elementary
parents who had video evidence
showing how they pleaded with
officers to go inside the school.
Fact-checkers found other holes
and inaccuracies, and soon the
official story collapsed in what
one cable-news anchor called “a
Texas-sized mess.”
On Friday, Abbott backed off
his earlier remarks, saying he
was livid about being “misled.”
McCraw said an incident com-
mander in charge of the police
response made “the wrong deci-
sion” when he stopped treating
the gunman as an active shooter
and instead viewed him as a
“barricaded subject” as his shots
became less frequent.
An off-duty Border Patrol tac-
tical agent from the agency’s
BORTAC unit was the first of
several agents to arrive outside
the classroom around
12:15 p.m., according to a U.S.
Customs and Border Protection
official who spoke on the condi-
tion of anonymity to share pre-
liminary details of the investiga-
tion. Local police and other
officers assembled in the hall-
way told the agent the shooter
was barricaded inside the class-
room, which the agent de-
scribed as “quiet,” according to
the official.
“They have not told me they
were frustrated,” the official said
of the decision not to go after the
shooter. “But they told me it was
hard to discern who was in
charge.”
The agents did not have a
battering ram or breaching tools.
A U.S. Marshal on the scene
provided the agents with a ballis-
tic shield, the official said.
McCraw said Friday that offi-
cers finally used keys they got
from a janitor to unlock the
classroom doors. When the team
finally moved on the shooter,
they found him hiding in a closet
in Room 111. He came out firing
as the Border Patrol tactical
agents entered the room behind
the ballistic shield.
One of the BORTAC agents
was grazed on the head and took
some shrapnel in the foot, but
wounds were light. The agents
saw children piled up around the
room, huddled together, some
still alive but many deceased, the
official said.
“It hurts to think there are
many things that they didn’t do,”
said Joe Rodriguez, 64, who was
heading to Robb Elementary on
Friday to drop flowers off at a
wooden cross to memorialize his
granddaughter, Tess Mata.
“They could have saved her,”
Rodriguez said. “They could have
saved some lives.”
At the memorial on Uvalde’s
Main Street, Amanda Flores said
she knew all 21 victims. Some
were close family friends while
others were friends of her grand-
children, one of whom was at
Robb Elementary on the day of
the shooting.
Flores said she was hesitant to
criticize the law enforcement
response — she said Uvalde is
proud of its police force, and is
also home to scores of Customs
and Border Protection agents.
She said one of her close friends,
a border agent, sprang from the
barber’s chair in the middle of a
haircut to respond to the shoot-
ing.
Still, Flores said, there’s no
getting around the hard facts of
the law enforcement response:
“We needed the help ASAP for
our kids, and it wasn’t there.”Te o Armus and Peter Jamison in
Uvalde; Joanna Slater in
Williamstown, Mass.; Jon Swaine in
New York; Kim Bellware in Chicago;
and Nick Miroff, Hannah Knowles,
Joyce Sohyun Lee and Timothy Bella
in Washington contributed to this
report.Terror turns into shattered trust in a small Texas town
A gun at the scene of the attack. Officials say the shooter unloaded
100 rounds of ammunition shortly after entering the school.Children run to safety after escaping through a window. Some who
fled early ran to a nearby funeral home.PHOTOS BY PETE LUNA/UVALDE LEADER-NEWS/REUTERS
Law enforcement officers on the scene of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex., on Tuesday. A U.S. Customs and
Border Protection official who spoke on the condition of anonymity said officers told them it was “hard to discern who was in charge.”“There was plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done,” said Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven C. McCraw. But
the incident commander believed more equipment and people were n eeded to breach the classroom where the shooter was.