Police who waited at least 40 minutes for backup before entering the classroom where a gunman killed 19 children made the “wrong decision”, a law enforcement official has said.
Salvador Ramos, 18, slaughtered 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on Tuesday morning.
The bloody massacre lasted about 90 minutes before he was eventually shot dead by police.
After days of mounting questions around the law enforcement response, Colonel Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that “in hindsight”, the choice made by the onsite commander to delay entering the classroom was the “wrong decision”.
“It was the wrong decision. There’s no excuse for that,” he said.
“In retrospect, from where I’m sitting now, clearly there were kids in the room, clearly they are at risk.”
Survivors of the shooting, including children, were calling the 911 emergency number from the classroom for some time after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
But police officers stayed in the hallway outside the room waiting for a specially trained tactical team and more equipment, said Colonel McCraw.
He said the decision was made that Ramos was a “barricaded subject”, which contributed to the officers' lack of immediate action.
Colonel McCraw added the onsite commander believed the incident had “transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject” - despite pleas from schoolchildren inside their classrooms.
Someone whom McCraw did not identify called 911 multiple times starting at 12:03 p.m.
They told police in a whisper that there were multiple dead and that there were still "eight to nine" students alive, the colonel said.
A student called at 12:47pm (local time) and asked the operator to send police "now."
Officers did not go into the classroom until 12:50pm (local time), according to McCraw, when a US Border Patrol tactical team used keys from a janitor to open the locked door and kill Ramos.
Colonel McCraw made comments suggesting the timeframe of the incident likely meant earlier police intervention may not have been enough to dramatically change the outcome of the shooting.
“You go back to the timeline…hundreds of rounds were pumped into the room in four minutes, okay, into those two classrooms,” he told reporters.
“You look at what happened afterwards, it was sporadic and it was at the door.”
The Colonel’s words came after a schoolgirl was shot dead by the Texas gunman.
The gunman fired more than 25 shots at the outset of the attack, the majority of times he fired, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The massacre, the latest in a years-long string of mass shootings, has reignited a national debate over the country's gun laws.
President Joe Biden and his fellow Democrats have vowed to push for new restrictions, despite resistance from Republicans.
