THE eighteen-year-old perpetrator of the massacre Tuesday at a primary school in the small town of Uvalde, Texas, entered the building unhindered through an unlocked doorkilled 19 children and two teachers and was fortified in the classroom for about an hour, before an intervention team invaded and killed him, police revealed yesterday Thursday, giving new version of eventssignificantly different from the original, amid criticism for the “passivity” of its members.
During a press conference, a representative of the law enforcement forces suffered a barrage of questions from the presswithout giving answers to many of them, about exactly how this tragedy unfolded.
In the meantime, the White House announced that US President Joe Biden will be with his wife Jill, on the spot the day after Sunday, to “share the mourning of the community”, in the small town of the American South where the worst mass murder in a school in the last ten years was committed.
According to at least one video and eyewitnesses, parents waited with increasing agony in front of the school, for an eternitythey say, without the police intervening, while the perpetrator, the high school student Salvador Ramos, committed the massacre.
“About an hour” after the young man entered the building, Border Patrol intervention units arrived, “invaded and killed the suspect,” Victor Escalon, a Texas Public Security Officer, told a news conference.
Pressed by the press, he spoke about “a lot of information”, about various facts that remain to be clarified, something that “will take time”.
Mr Escalon, however, acknowledged that, contrary to what had been said at the outset, the perpetrator of the murders “was not confronted with anyone” –With no police officer guarding the building– when he broke into the school.
According to the new schedule he gave, the young man was involved in a car accident with his grandmother’s truck at 11:28, opened fire on two people in an adjacent funeral home, then climbed a fence, entered the premises of the educational institution and found an unlocked door through which entered the building at 11:40.
“Four minutes” later, the first police arrived on the spot. “They heard gunshots,” they said, “fired and retreated,” according to the same police officer.
Then, it was fortified in a classroom where 9-year-old and 10-year-old children studied. At least 25 shots were fired in the first minutes of the siege.
“It’s complicated”
Theoretically, the school implements permanent security precautions, such as locking the doors, including the classroom doors. But students narrated, many doors were unlocked on Tuesday because parents would visit the school to attend a child award ceremony.
After the young man, armed with a semi-automatic AR-15 assault rifle, had now entered the building, parents began to arrive.
In one of the videos uploaded to social networking sites, you can see them insane, begging or demanding that police enter the building. It depicts a member of the law enforcement force forcibly pushing a parent out of school. Some parents were even forced to handcuff police.
THE Daniel Magers, pastor, 72, arrived on the scene with his wife, Matilda, about 30 minutes after the gunman entered the school.
The parents were ready to go to school, he said. “One of them said, ‘I was in the military, just give me a pistol, I’ll go. I will not hesitate. Will go'”.
At the same time, police officers “removed staff, students, teachers (…) Many things were happening at the same time, it is complicated”, according to Mr. Escalon.
The timing of the operation runs counter to the approach of many US law enforcement agencies, which are to deal with active shooters, especially in schools, as soon as possible to avoid bloodshed.
Asked if the police could intervene en masse sooner, Mr Escalon limited himself to saying “this is a difficult question” and promising that the authorities would return after resolving everything.
21 white crosses
In addition to the 21 people killed, the two teachers and the 19 children, another 17 were injured, including three police officers.
The teenager who committed the massacre had initially shot his grandmother at her home.
Eulalio Zeus, a local official, took over the identification of the bodies late Tuesday night, he himself told the El Paso Times newspaper. Some of the dead children “were in a very bad condition”, mutilated, the elected official said characteristically.
The tragedy plunged the small town of about 16,000 people halfway between San Antonio and the US-Mexico border, inhabited mainly by people of Mexican and Latin American descent.
Twenty white crosses were placed in the center of Uvalde, around a fountain, in memory of the victims. Dozens of residents, relatives, students, went to leave flowers at the spot. “I love you cousin, again,” a little girl wrote on the cross representing one of the victims, Jackie.
The list of victims of the tragedy became longer yesterday. Joe Garcia, the husband of one of the missing teachers, a couple with Irma Garcia for a quarter of a century, suffered a heart attack while preparing for her funeral and died. “Out of sadness,” commented a relative.
The couple left behind four children.
“Victim” but also “perpetrator” of school bullying
On Tuesday, the explosions “were very loud,” Madison, a schoolgirl, told a classroom other than the one where the young man had invaded. When they started, “the teacher told us to gather in a corner, and the whole class
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