In the awakening of school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the state’s law enforcement agency received widespread criticism as the public learned more about what officers did and didn’t do to end the ongoing shootings. work.
While officials of the Department of Public Safety originally said the gunman, Salvador Ramos, confronted an armed officer outside the school, the same authorities denying that their version of events at a Press Conference Thursday. The Wall Street Journal report that the gunman fired a shot in 12 minutes after crashing his truck outside the school before walking in “unobstructed.” Police arrived at the scene four minutes later “and exchanged guns with Ramos, who locked himself in a fourth-grade classroom.”
According to the story, it was around 12:40 p.m. — about an hour later — when a Border Patrol tactical team entered the school, then the classroom, and killed the gunman. At that time, parent Angeli Rose Gomez speak She was handcuffed by United States Marshals outside the school, was later freed, jumped the fence, entered the school, grabbed her children, and fled. Video of that time expressing parental frustration and frenzy urged officers to act.
“The police did nothing,” Gomez told Magazine. “They were just standing outside the fence. They didn’t get in there or run away. “
Victor Escalon, a DPS official, say Thursday which officers called “everyone in the area” to help. Then they wait for “special equipment” and armor.
And so, on Thursday, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer had some pressing questions for Texas DPS Lt Chris Olivarez.
“Aren’t current best practices, Lieutenant, calling on officers to neutralize a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on the site?” Blitzer asked.
“Yes,” Olivarez replied. “In an active shooting situation, you want to prevent killing, you want to preserve lives. But one thing of course the American people need to understand is that officers are entering this building. They don’t know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunfire. They’re getting gunshots,” Olivarez said.
“At that point, if they had continued without knowing where the suspect was, they could have been shot, they could have been killed, and then that gunman would have had a chance to kill everyone else inside the house. that school. ,” he continued. “So they were able to keep that gunman in that classroom so he couldn’t go to any other part of the school to commit any other murders.”
Blitzer also asked Olivarez why authorities initially declared an armed officer to be confronting the shooter outside the school.
“So that’s the information we got very early in this investigation,” he replied.
“That goes back to what I mentioned earlier by trying to corroborate all this information by taking factual statements from these witnesses,” he added. “The Texas Rangers are currently conducting interviews with officers trying to determine exactly what their role is, and that will help us establish a more concrete, realistic timeline. .”
