UVALDE, Texas: Nearly 20 police officers waited for nearly an hour in a hallway outside the classrooms where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in a Texas elementary school, even as panicked 911 calls were placed from inside the rooms pleading for police to intervene, authorities said on Friday (May 27).
At least two children called the 911 emergency number from the two connecting classrooms after 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, according to Colonel Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The on-site commander, the chief of the school district’s police department in Uvalde, Texas, believed Ramos was barricaded inside the classroom and that children were no longer at risk, giving police time to prepare, McCraw said.
“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course, it was not the right decision,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision.”
Some of the students trapped in the classrooms with the gunman survived the massacre, including at least two who called 911, McCraw said, though he did not offer a specific tally.
Someone whom McCraw did not identify called the 911 line multiple times starting at 12:03pm, telling police in a whisper that there were multiple dead and that there were still “eight to nine” students alive, the colonel said. One student called at 12:47pm and asked the operator to “please send the police now.”
Officers did not go into the classroom until 12:50pm, according to McCraw, when the US Border Patrol tactical team used keys from a janitor to open the locked door and kill Ramos.
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