Officials have finally agreed to release surveillance footage from the mass shooting that left 21 students and staff dead in Uvalde, Texas, after more than a month of stonewalling the media and the public.
A key Texas state legislator said on Monday that state and local officials will share some of the video which captured what went on inside the hallway of Robb Elementary School during the 24 May massacre, according to ABC News. It is not clear how much of the footage will now be released or when.
A spokesperson for Rep Dustin Burrows – the chairman of the commitee investigating who has publicly called for the footage’s release – told The Independent that they had received no confirmation from state officials that they will be releasing the footage.
Matt Crow said that Rep Burrows has requested its release but, as far as he is aware, the state has not yet decided whether to comply.
The apparent development comes after victims’ families, survivors, the Uvalde mayor and the media have demanded to see the footage for weeks after it emerged that law enforcement officers waited for over an hour in the hallway before finally storming the classroom and shooting the gunman dead.
A staggering 77 minutes passed between the moment 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered the school and opened fire on innocent students and staff at 11.33am and the moment a Border Patrol unit breached the classroom and ended the massacre at 12.50pm.
During that time, Ramos continued to shoot at victims inside the classroom and the wounded bled out.
Desperate parents outside the school begged law enforcement officers to save their children – or to let them try to do it themselves.
Meanwhile, heavily armed officers from multiple agencies all waited to take action.
Nineteen students aged just nine to 11 years old and two heroic teachers were killed in the massacre.
The delay is believed to have cost the lives of some of those victims with one teacher dying in an ambulance on her way to hospital and three children succumbing to their injuries after arriving at hospital.
Since the delay came to light, multiple investigations have been launched into the actions of law enforcement and state and local officials have clashed over where the blame lies.
On Saturday, both Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin and state Rep Burrows said they were pushing for the surveillance footage to be released.
Mr McLaughlin said that the footage would show city police were not the only armed officers inside the school who failed to take action.
The Texas House Investigative Committee’s preliminary report into the massacre is expected to be released within the next 10 days and the committee chairman Mr Burrows was pushing for the 77 minutes of hallway footage to be released as part of that.
Any footage shared would not show images of the victims or of the violence, officials said.
The calls for its release come as the local mayor has repeatedly clashed with Texas Department of Public Safety Director (TDPS) Steve McCraw over the bungled response.
Last month, Mr McCraw testified at a Texas Senate hearing that there were enough armed officers on the scene to stop the gunman just three minutes after the shooting began.
But, instead, law enforcement waited another one hour, 14 minutes and eight seconds as on-site commander Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo failed to send officers into the classroom.
Mr McCraw, who is leading a state investigation into the law enforcement response despite his own officers also being among the agencies on the scene, branded the response an “abject failure”.
He said that Chief Arredondo waited for radios, firearms and keys rather than send officers into the two adjoining classrooms.
Chief Arredondo said much of the delay was due to him waiting for keys to the classroom door.
However, this has also been disputed with Mr McCraw saying that the door may have been unlocked the whole time. Surveillance footage reveals not a single officer tried the door handle to see if it was open.
The Uvalde mayor hit back at Mr McCraw’s version of events however pointing out that his own officers were also on the scene and accusing him of continuing to “lie, leak, mislead or misstate information” in order to distance his own department from the bungled response.
So far, two still images from surveillance footage have been released showing heavily armed law enforcement officers outside the classroom long before they entered the room – but the release of the footage has been blocked by officials.
One image shows at least four officers, dressed in helmets and bulletproof vests and protected by two ballistic shields, aiming long rifles towards the two adjoining classrooms where mass shooter Salvador Ramos was holed up with his victims.
The photo was taken at 12.04pm on 24 May – 46 minutes before officers with a Border Patrol unit finally breached the classroom at 12.50pm.
It is also 31 minutes after Ramos first entered the classroom at 11.33am and began unleashing a hail of gunfire on innocent students and staff.
And it was 28 minutes after the first officers arrived in the school hallway at around 11.36am armed with rifles and pistols and wearing bulletproof vests.
The Justice Department has also launched an investigation into the police response to the massacre, which marks the worst elementary school shooting since Sandy Hook in 2012.
On 24 May, Ramos shot his grandmother in the face before driving towards Robb Elementary School in the family’s truck.
He abandoned the vehicle in a ditch close to the school and entered the building through a door that was propped open.
Once inside, Ramos barricaded himself in a classroom where he shot dead 19 students and two teachers.
He was finally shot dead by Border Patrol agents after officials stormed the classroom.
Since the massacre, several more mass shootings have taken place across America.
On 4 July, seven people were murdered in a mass shooting at an Independence Day parade in Highland Park, Illinois.
