48 2GM Saturday May 28 2022 | the times
Wo r l d
It may have been the moment he shot
his grandmother in the face with an
AR-15 assault rifle that the Uvalde
school gunman’s breakdown could be
considered to have begun.
Or when he bought two guns after he
turned 18 last week. Or perhaps it went
back two years, when he withdrew
socially, threatening classmates and
harming himself and animals.
“Wherever this started, if only we
could turn the clock back and change
it,” said Julie de Luna, 22, whose second
cousin, Ellie Garcia, due to turn ten
Miah Cerrillo
feared that the
gunman would
return to kill herChief admits
officers stood
in hallway as
children died
gun, you find them, you neutralise
them, period. “
Asked what effort was made to break
into room 112 — a fourth-grade class-
room where the gunman told a teacher
“Goodnight” then shot her dead at the
door — he answered: “None at that
time.”
In the classroom, at least one terrified
survivor called 911 many times, begging
for help and reporting at least eight to
nine children still alive. “Please send
police now,” she whispered to an emer-
gency dispatcher in what appeared to
be her fifth call. She was told to stay on
the line and keep quiet.
Unusually, McGraw named the inci-
dent commander as Pete Arredondo,
the Uvalde independent school district
chief of police.
On the other side of Texas, at the
National Rifle Association’s annual
convention in Houston, which went
ahead despite heavy opposition,
Donald Trump called for “real solu-
tions” to mass shootings.
Trump, 75, said it was a time for “real
leadership... not politicians and parti-
sanship” before his sixth appearance at
an NRA conference, as several other
Republican politicians and most of the
musicians due to perform at the event
withdrew out of respect for the victims
and their families.
Greg Abbott, the governor of Texas,
who was due to speak at the conven-
tion, was among those who pulled out.
Last night he said: “Let’s be clear about
one thing. None of the laws I signed this
past session had any intersection with
this crime at all... No law that I signed
allowed [the shooter] to get a gun.”
Outside the convention centre in
Houston, 300 miles away from the
grieving town of Uvalde, hundreds of
demonstrators, including prominent
Democrats and national teachers’
leaders, protested loudly for restric-
tions on powerful guns.
Wayne LaPierre, chief executive of
the NRA, said that every member was“mourning right now 21 beautiful
lives ruthlessly and indiscriminately
extinguished by a criminal monster”.
However, new gun laws were not the
answer, he said.
“If we as a nation were capable of
legislating evil within the hearts and
minds of criminals who committed
these heinous acts we would have doneit a long time ago... restricting the
fundamental human right of law-
abiding Americans to defend them-
selves is not the answer.”
He called for better funding for police
and school protection officers as well as
a “comprehensive security programme
tailored specifically to that school”,
funding for mental health and strongerprison sentences. The NRA, which
claims to have more than five million
members, has suffered from internal
squabbles but remains a powerful lobby
group that donates funds to many
American politicians and hands
out gradings from A to F that can sway
elections.
Ted Cruz, the Republican Texas‘I thought I would be next, so I covered myself in my friend’s
next week, was among the 19 children
slaughtered at Robb Elementary
School. “I wish her parents could see
their daughter at least once more in
their dreams — one more time to say
their goodbyes,” de Luna said.
What is known is that shortly before
11.30am Salvador Ramos sent the last of
three messages to a girl in Germany
that he had befriended online telling
her that he had shot his grandmother
and was going to shoot people at a
school. At 11.28am he crashed his
grandmother’s pick-up truck into a
ditch outside the school and jumped out
of the passenger-side door holding a
rifle and a bag containing ammunition.
Seeing two staff from the Hillside
funeral home across the street, he fired
at them, then climbed a fence into the
school car park, discharged more
rounds towards the building and strode
in through an unlocked door.
Elvira Menchaca, 81, said her son
Jaime Perez, 43, a janitor at the schoolfor 20 years, was usually responsible for
locking the door. On Tuesday he had
been called to the cafeteria and asked a
colleague to do it instead, she said.
Parents had been on campus that
morning to attend an honour roll cere-
mony — a possible explanation for the
door-locking routine not to have
gone as usual. Menchaca’s
understanding is that the col-
league encountered the gun-
man and was shot and
injured. Her son declined to
speak to The Times, saying
that he had been told by
“my boss” not to do so.
When she heard
from a neighbour
that there was a
gunman on cam-pus, Menchaca hurried down the street
and pleaded with police for news of
Jaime. “I was crying. I just lost a son a
few months ago and I didn’t want to lose
another,” she said, recalling how Refu-
gio Perez Jr, 51, died of a heart attack in
front of her in December. “I was plead-
ing ‘my son, my son’ — but the police,
they didn’t want to go inside because
he was killing and shooting,” she
added. “He was in there killing the
kids. They said ‘No, control yourself,
control yourself. Your son will be
coming out.’ They said, ‘We can’t go
over there, the shooter’s in there’.”
Miah Cerrillo, 11, survived by
dropping to the floor along-
side a friend’s body and
smearing herself with
their blood as the shooter
moved to an adjoining
classroom. “She could
hear screams, she heard
a lot more gunfire then she
heard music... she said itsounded like ‘I want people to die’
music,” said Nora Neus, a CNN produc-
er who spoke with the traumatised girl,
with her mother’s permission.
“She put her hands in her friend’s
blood and smeared it, she said, all over
her body. She was scared that the gun-
man was going to come back. she
wanted to be able to play dead.
“She said ‘I heard the grown-ups later
say police were outside and they
weren’t coming in. Why didn’t they
come in, why didn’t they save us? The
police were outside?’ ”
Parents of some of the children inside
the school confronted police, demand-
ing that they go in. One mother ordered
them to “go fight”. Another parent was
placed in handcuffs. One was wrestled
to the ground by officers. Some were
pepper-sprayed. “Don’t fight with us —
get in there,” a man shouted. One
mother smashed a classroom window
to get children out.
Victor Escalon, regional director ofSurvivors have been
reliving the dreadful
45 minutes
before the killer
was shot, writes
Jacqui Goddard
Texas police have
admitted blunders in
their handling
of the mass
killing, writes
David Charter
Police made the “wrong decision” when
they waited for nearly an hour instead
of breaking down a classroom door and
confronting the Texas mass killer as
schoolchildren lay dead, injured and
pleading for rescue, an enforcement
chief admitted last night.
Colonel Steven McCraw, director of
the Texas public safety department,
broke down in tears during a news
conference as he revealed astonishing
failures in the handling of the shooting
at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, in
which 19 children and two teachers
died.
“Of course it wasn’t the right deci-
sion, it was the wrong decision. Period.
There’s no excuse for that,” he said.
There were 19 officers outside the
classroom, McGraw said, but “the
incident commander believed they
needed more equipment and officers to
do a tactical breach.”
The officers stood in a hallway for
more than 45 minutes before agents
used a master key to open a door and
confront the gunman.
The commander was convinced that
there was no further threat to the child-
ren, that the gunman was barricaded
inside and that police had time to get
into the classroom, McCraw said.
“Clearly they were at risk... there
were maybe kids who were shot and in-
jured and it’s important for lifesaving
purposes to immediately get there and
render aid... there should have been an
entry as soon as you can,” he added.
“As long as there’s kids, as long as
there’s somebody firing, you go to the