Cops responding to the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre “made the wrong decision” when they waited to breach the classroom door where a gunman had barricaded himself inside with children, a top law enforcement official said Friday.
The on-scene commander made the call that the carnage at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday had gone from an active shooter situation to a “barricaded suspect” situation, Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said in a briefing Friday.
“With the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision, it was the wrong decision, period,” McCraw said.
“There was no excuse for that.”
The admission came as police revealed the first time that 18-year-old shooter Salvador Ramos fired off at least 100 rounds and marched in through an unlocked door that had been propped open by a teacher before he killed 19 students and two teachers.
Police also revealed there were a series of harrowing 911 calls from several students while they were barricaded inside with the gunman — with one kid pleading with a 911 dispatcher “please send police now!” The calls were taking place until moments before Ramos was killed, showing that people were still alive in the class even though authorities believed the killing had stopped.
At least one of the children making the calls survived, he said.
The new details emerged as police have scrambled to explain their response to the shooting – with more than an hour from the moment Ramos’ rampage began to when he was fatally shot.
A new, revised timeline of the mass shooting showed officers were on the scene but hesitated to go into the room where Ramos was barricaded because on-scene commander Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo believed the killing had mostly stopped.
Most of the shots were fired in the first four minutes, McCraw said, and Arredondo mistakenly believed it had become a barricade or hostage situation. The only evidence anything had changed was that the shooting had slowed.
The latest from the Texas school shooting
“The incident commander at the time believed it was a barricaded subject, they had time and there were no kids at risk,” he said.
“There were 19 officers in there,” he said. “In fact, there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done, with one exception — the incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point.”
Ramos’ rampage began when shot his grandmother and drove her pickup to the school.
A teacher had propped open the door at 11:27 a.m. — a minute before Ramos crashed the truck into a ditch near the campus. The school district’s written policy says teachers are to keep their classroom doors “closed and locked at all times” and no “barriers are to be used.”
Ramos popped out of the passenger side door of the truck brandishing a long rifle and carrying a bag of ammo, then fired shots at two men at a funeral home nearby. The teacher ran into the building to get her phone and came back outside, but left the door propped open, McGraw said.
She made a 911 call at 11:30 a.m. while Ramos walked across the parking lot and opened fire on the school building authorities said.
An armed student resource officer wasn’t stationed at the school but drove to the back of the school toward a person he thought was the suspect but was actually a teacher, McCraw said.
“In doing so, he drove right by the suspect, who was hunkered down behind a vehicle where he began shooting at the school.”
Ramos marched into the building at 11:33 a.m. and walked into Room 111, which was connected with Room 112, where he fired off at least 100 rounds in total, McCraw said. Three officers followed two minutes later, he said, contradicting earlier timelines shared by authorities.
Two of the officers received “graze wounds” from gunfire from Ramos, he added.
At 12:03 p.m., a child inside one of the classrooms called 911 whispering for help.
She called back at 12:10 p.m. and said multiple students were dead, then said eight or nine children were still alive at 12:16 p.m.
A US Customs and Border Protection tactical unit armed with ballistic shields didn’t take out Ramos until 12:50 p.m., officials said. The shooter had locked the doors to the two connected classrooms and law enforcement had to get a key from a school janitor to get inside, according to authorities.
Authorities have been scrambling to explain the response amid criticisms that the slow response might have cost lives. McGraw couldn’t say how many people were killed in the time between Ramos walking into the classroom and the moment he was fatally shot.
Emergency response experts have said a quicker response may have limited the slaughter, or could’ve meant getting the injured life-saving treatment before it was too late.
McCraw said police recovered 58 magazine after the carnage – including eight combined in the classrooms. Ramos had 1,657 rounds of ammo between what he carried to the site and what was found in his home.
There were at least 35 spent cartridges from law enforcement fire – including 27 rounds found in Room 111, where Ramos was killed.
Reports that Ramos had posted on Facebook that he planned to shoot his grandmother and shoot the school before the massacre were false — though he did say that in private one-on-one messages to a user, McCraw said.
“That did not happen. It actually happened on a message.” McCraw said.
Ramos had asked his sister to help him buy a gun in September 2021, but she flat out refused.
He then engaged in an Instagram group chat Feb. 28, 2022 about him being a school shooter. On March 1, he discussed buying a gun. On March 3, another four-person chat he was asked if he bought a gun.
“Just bought something rn,” Ramos said, according to McCraw.
On March 14, he made the chilling message “10 more days.” A user replied “are you gonna shoot up the school or something?”
“No, stop asking dumb questions” and “you’ll see,” he replied, according to authorities.
Distressing videos have emerged in the aftermath of the massacre showing desperate parents outside the school begging with officers to storm the building while the madman remains inside with kids. Some parents were ready to take action themselves, and officers are seen in the clips holding one parent down and shoving another.
“We’re parents! Take him the f—k out!” one mother begs an officer in a video obtained by the Washington Post.
“You know that they are kids right?” one angry man yelled at cops, who appear to be standing their ground.
“They’re little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves… 6-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter!”
Law enforcement experts have questioned whether lives could have been saved had police stormed the classroom earlier. People who were wounded may have been able to receive life-saving treatment, experts added.
One shooting stops, authorities can assess the situation as “no longer active,” recently retired Howell, N.J. Police Chief Andrew Kudrick told The Post.
“So if the person becomes barricaded, it becomes different. Not knowing all the details, maybe they tried to develop a tactical plan,” he said — hypothesizing they were taking a step back and trying to regroup.
“But with the situation when you have a barricaded suspect, you can get a team in there you can start breaking down,” added Kudrick, who ran training programs though his department for school shootings in New Jersey.
McCraw said during an active shooter situation, responding officers need to find where the gunfire is coming from and everyone “keeps shooting until the subject is dead, period.”
“First of all, when it comes to an active shooter, you don’t wait for tactical gear — plain and simple,” he said.
“In the doctrine, you can transition from an ‘active shooter’ situation to a ‘barricaded subject’ or a ‘barricaded with hostage subject’, but if shooting continues and you have any reason to believe there are individuals alive in there you have an obligation to go back to an ‘active shooter’ posture and that means everybody at the door.”
At least one parent was reportedly allowed to go in — an off-duty border agent who rushed into the school and headed straight to a wing where he knew his daughter attended second grade. Jacob Albarado told the New York Times he helped evacuate his daughter and others when he headed to the school where his wife is also a teacher.
