Photo: Uvalde Leader News
Three days after agunman entered Robb Middle Schoolin Uvalde, Texas, and opened fire, killing19 students and 2 teachers, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety told reporters that the incident commander on the scene made the “wrong decision” to wait before breaching the classroom doors.
Col. Steven McCraw told reporters that the commander believed that the gunman had barricaded himself into an empty classroom, and that no children were at risk. “He believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject,” he said, characterizing that assessment as “the wrong decision.”
But now, a week after the shooting, new video and witness accounts seem to dispute that narrative — pointing to the likelihood that cops knew that the gunman was in a room with an “unknown number of kids.”
“Child is advising he is in the room, full of victims,” the dispatcher can be heard saying in the video. “Full of victims at this moment.”
A few minutes later, the dispatcher asked if any officers were inside the room — and said that there were “eight to nine children” still alive in the room.
Uvalde Leader News
Despite these calls, law enforcement waited fornearly an hourbefore entering the classroom and killing the suspect.
PEOPLE has spoken with multiple first responders — firefighters, paramedics and a police officer — who all say that they knew that the gunman was in the room with children, and that the shooting was ongoing while rescue operations continued.
An officer on the scene who is not authorized to speak to the media tells PEOPLE that while he was outside the classroom, he knew that there were children in the room with the shooter. “It was an unknown number of kids,” he says. “We didn’t know if it was 1 or 50. But we knew he wasn’t in there alone. That’s why some of us wanted to bust in.”
“The gunshots went on for about 40 minutes” says Ernest “Chip” King, a Uvalde firefighter at the scene. “Fathers smashed windows, and physically pulled their kids out of classrooms. It was chaos.”
PEOPLE’s request for comment from the Uvalde Police Department has not been returned.
source: people.com
