Texas school massacre: Police admit ‘wrong not to storm class earlier’
The on-site commander believed the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, was barricaded in a classroom during Tuesday’s attack and that the children were not at risk, a senior official told a press conference
Steve McCraw, Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, speaks during a press conference about the mass shooting
Friday’s update on the attack’s timeline came only after authorities declined to explain why officers had not been able to stop the gunman sooner, with Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, telling reporters on Thursday that he had “taken all those questions into consideration”, but was not ready to answer them.
The Thursday briefing, called by Texas safety officials to clarify the timeline of the attack, provided pieces of previously unknown information.
But by the time it ended, it had added to the troubling questions surrounding the attack, including about the time it took police to reach the scene and confront the gunman, and the apparent failure to lock a school door he entered.
After two days of providing often conflicting information, investigators said that a school district police officer was not inside the school when Ramos arrived and, contrary to their previous reports, the officer had not confronted Ramos outside the building.
Instead, they sketched out a timeline notable for unexplained delays by law enforcement.
Mr McCraw outlined the path the shooter took before he carried out the massacre
AFP via Getty Images
After crashing his truck, Ramos fired on two people coming out of a nearby funeral home, Mr Escalon said. He then entered the school “unobstructed” through an apparently unlocked door at about 11.40am.
But the first police officers did not arrive on the scene until 12 minutes after the crash and did not enter the school to pursue the gunman until four minutes after that. Inside, they were driven back by gunfire from Ramos and took cover, Mr Escalon said.
The gunman was still inside at 12.10pm when the first US Marshals Service deputies arrived.
They had gone to the school from nearly 70 miles away in the border town of Del Rio, the agency said in a tweet on Friday.
The crisis came to an end after a group of Border Patrol tactical officers entered the school at 12.45pm, said Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Travis Considine.
They engaged in a shootout with the gunman, who was holed up in the fourth-grade classroom. Moments before 1pm, he was dead.
Mr Escalon said that during that time, the officers called for backup, negotiators and tactical teams, while evacuating students and teachers.
Many other details of the case and the response remained murky. The motive for the massacre remained under investigation, with authorities saying Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history.
During the siege, frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the school, according to witnesses.
“Go in there! Go in there!” women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside a house across the street.
Mr Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner: “There were more of them. There was just one of him.”
Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz did not give a timeline but said repeatedly that the tactical officers from his agency who arrived at the school did not hesitate.
He said they moved rapidly to enter the building, lining up in a “stack” behind an agent holding up a shield.
“What we wanted to make sure is to act quickly, act swiftly, and that’s exactly what those agents did,” Ortiz told Fox News.
But a law enforcement official said that once in the building, the agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key.
Department of Public Safety spokesman Lt. Christopher Olivarez told CNN that investigators were trying to establish whether the classroom was, in fact, locked or barricaded in some way.
Mr Cazares said that when he arrived, he saw two officers outside the school and about five others escorting students out of the building. But 15 or 20 minutes passed before the arrival of officers with shields, equipped to confront the gunman, he said.
As more parents flocked to the school, he and others pressed police to act, Mr Cazares said. He heard about four gunshots before he and the others were ordered back to a car park.
“A lot of us were arguing with the police, ‘You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs’. Their response was, ‘We can’t do our jobs because you guys are interfering’,” Mr Cazares said.
As for the armed school officer, he was driving nearby but was not on the premises when Ramos crashed his truck, according to a law enforcement official.
