Police walk near Robb Elementary School following a shooting, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills A Texan official walked back earlier statements about events at Robb Elementary on Thursday. There are questions over what officers were doing in the crucial hour while the shooter was on site.
It has left families seeking answers about the efforts made by law enforcement. Police on Thursday made crucial changes to their timeline of the shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, adding to the confusion around how the massacre took place. On Thursday, officials changed the timeline of events and contradicted earlier information.
Reporters clamored for answers from Victor Escalon, a regional director from the Texas Department of Public Safety. Escalon’s revised version of events included retracting a claim that an official intervened to try to stop the gunman, who killed 19 children and two teachers. Here are the main changes to details that law enforcement has offered since the shooting:Nobody actually confronted the gunman before he went inAt a Wednesday press conference, the director of Texas Department of Public Safety Steve McCraw said that “a brave resource officer” engaged with the gunman.
“At that time, gunfire was not exchanged, but the subject was able to make it into the school,” McCraw said. However on Thursday, Escalon said this was incorrect, according to The Wall Street Journal. —Sarah Boxer (@Sarah_Boxer) May 26, 2022″There was not an officer readily available and armed,” Escalon said at a press conference, per the Journal.
The gunman was firing at people outside the school for 12 minutesIn a 12-minute window between the gunman’s arrival and his entering the school, the gunman shot at two funeral home workers and towards the school itself before police arrived, Escalon said Thursday, per NPR. Before Escalon’s press conference, authorities had not offered detail about how the gunman spent the time period after crashing his vehicle and before entering the school — other than the now-retracted claim that an officer engaged him. It appears he was instead firing as he pleased.
What were police doing while the gunman was killing kids?The crucial window of around 11. 40 a. m.
and 12. 40 p. m.
was the time when, according to Escalon, the gunman was in the school. He was killed at around 12. 40 p.
m. , per Escalon. Police arrived at the school four minutes after the gunman entered, and exchanged fire with him, Escalon said.
Then the gunman barricaded himself into a classroom. Lt Chris Olivarez on Wednesday in an interview with NBC’s “Today” show emphasize the speed of the police reaction. He said that police responded “within a moment’s notice.
“He also said that officers “without hesitation tried to make entry into that school,” but were stopped by the gunman firing at them. Some were shot, he said. With the gunman barricaded inside, Olivarez said, police began breaking windows and evacuating people until more heavily-armed officers arrived and killed the gunman.
The first narrative did not make clear how long this took. On Thursday, Escalon said that this took an hour, according to the BBC. He declined to explain what precisely the officers were doing in that hour.
Even when backup arrived, those officers struggled to enter the classroom and had to ask a teacher to get a key and unlock the door, the Associated Press reported, citing an anonymous law-enforcement source. Desperately frustrated familiesAsked at the press conference why authorities didn’t engage sooner, Escalon said: “That’s a tough question,” the FT reported. He cited the need to evacuate people as a possible reason, and added in the officers’ defense that there was “a lot going on” and that it was “a complex situation.
“This did little to placate those in Uvalde. “Nothing is adding up,” Jay Martin, a local man, told The Wall Street Journal. “People are just really frustrated because no one is coming out and telling us the real truth of what went down.
“One video, shared by DailyMail. com, shows police holding back desperate parents who wanted to go into the school and rescue their kids. One woman, Gladys Castillon, told the Journal that she had been begging police to be more proactive before the arrival of the tactical unit.
Officers temporarily handcuffed a mom trying to get into the school, the Journal reported. Escalon said he had heard these rumors but had not investigated them, per the FT. The Texas Department of Public Safety and Uvalde PD did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
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From: insider
URL: https://www.insider.com/texas-police-change-timeline-of-uvalde-shooting-retract-key-claim-2022-5
