Law enforcement response to the shooting has recently been called into question after differing reports came out initially that seemed to indicate that the shooter was alive and unchallenged in the building before police breached for at least an hour.
There were earlier reports that there had been an officer that confronted him when he entered the building, but those turned out to be false. The shooter Salvador Ramos walked in the back door and entered a classroom and it looks like there is a bout an hour of time left unaccounted for. During this hour, there is evidence of a slow police response.
Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that officers were reluctant to engage Ramos, who was murdering children inside, because they “could have been shot.”
“Don’t current best practices, don’t they call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?” Blitzer blitzed Olivarez.
“The active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life, but also one thing that – of course, the American people need to understand — that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots,” DPS official Lt. Chris Olivarez said.
“At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school,” he continued telling the CNN host.
“Please send the police now,” Texas DPS now says a girl inside the classroom where the gunman opened fire said over the phone to 911. This was all while police were waiting outside. She called multiple times.
The DPS representative’s statement rings hollow when compared to a story from the Wall Street Journal. In it, one mother, who was handcuffed by the police, said that law enforcement was “doing nothing” during the shooting. She later jumped the fence and ran into the school after being released to save her two kids inside.
Her name was Angeli Rose Gomez and she drove 40 miles to the school after hearing about the shooting. She had two children enrolled in Robb Elementary in the second and third grade and when she got there she was dismayed with the police response.
“The police were doing nothing,” Gomez told The Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
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Gomez was handcuffed by federal marshals for “intervening in an active crime scene.”
Ramos was left in school for an hour while authorities kept parents from entering. There is evidence from the AP that shows that law enforcement took time to wait for a key so that they could get in the classroom where the shooter was slaughtering kids. It’s tragic.
Do you think the police acted appropriately during the shooting in Uvalde?
