Police Response Questioned As Gunman Was Inside Texas School For Hour

UVALDE, TX — The gunman who killed 19 students and two teachers Tuesday in a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, easily walked into the school and did not encounter a school district police officer outside as new details provided at a news conference Thursday contradicted earlier accounts from law enforcement officials.

Police have also faced the ire of parents as it's unclear what steps were taken while the gunman remained inside the school before a tactical team would arrive and eventually kill the shooter. People reportedly urged police to go inside and a parent suggested storming the school with other onlookers.

Early reports indicated the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, exchanged gunfire outside the school with a school district police officer. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, later clarified that an armed officer "encountered" Ramos outside the school but that there was no exchange of gunfire until after the shooter entered the school.

Authorities now say there was no school district police officer at the school prior to the shooting.

Ramos crashed his grandmother's truck outside the school at 11:28 a.m. and got out of the vehicle armed with an AR-15 style rifle. He shot at two people outside a nearby funeral home, missing them, Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said.

He entered the school at 11:40 a.m. through a back door on the west side of the building and made his way through a couple short hallways to a classroom, where he fired "more than 25" rounds. Officials believe the back door was unlocked but are working to confirm that through their investigation.

Police for the city of Uvalde and the Uvalde school district entered the school at 11:44 a.m. and exchanged gunfire with Ramos, who barricaded himself in the classroom. Authorities set up a negotiation team while a tactical team was called in and preparing, but Ramos did not respond to negotiations, Escalon said.

Approximately an hour later, a tactical team of Border Patrol agents and local law enforcement forced their way into the classroom and exchanged gunfire with Ramos, killing him. After the immediate threat was over, officers began rescue efforts to save as many children as possible, according to Escalon.

Authorities did not provide more information to reporters on what steps law enforcement officers took to end the threat in the hour Ramos barricaded himself before the tactical team confronted him. Officials also declined to answer a question regarding how Ramos barricaded himself in the classroom.

Officials are still investigating the timeline of the shooting, which began when Ramos shot his grandmother in the face before driving to the school. The grandmother, 66, is now stable at University Hospital in San Antonio, officials said.

As more details about the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre emerged Wednesday and Thursday, law enforcement officials faced questions and criticism on its response.

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Once Ramos barricaded himself in a classroom, the one in which all of the deaths occurred, officers were "responsible" for pinning him down until the tactical team could force its way inside, McCraw said. Ramos shot and injured two officers outside the school during this standoff, according to McCraw.

Uvalde police officers responded "within minutes" along with officers from the school district, Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez said in a statement defending law enforcement. Rodriguez also confirmed Uvalde police officers were shot and suffered non-life-threatening injuries.

Rodriguez acknowledged that "answers will not come fast enough" for the public but that all the questions will be answered by the ongoing investigation.

While police were outside the school, people shouted for law enforcement to "Go in there!" onlooker Juan Carranza, 24, told the Associated Press.

Video featuring graphic language posted to social media appears to show parents in a heated exchange with an officer outside the school and urging police to confront the shooter and "take him out."

Javier Cazares, the father of fourth grader Jacklyn Cazares, who was killed in the shooting, told the Associated Press he proposed storming the school with other onlookers when he saw police weren't moving into the building.

“More could have been done. They were unprepared," Cazares said.

Angeli Rose Gomez, a parent of two Robb Elementary students, was briefly arrested after urgently pressing officers to storm the building, she told the Wall Street Journal. After she was set free, she jumped the fence, entered the school and retrieved her children.

McCraw praised law enforcement's response, saying they engaged "immediately."

"They put a tactical stack together, in a very orderly way, and breached and assaulted the individual," McCraw said.

But a law enforcement official told the Associated Press that Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to unlock it with a key.

The school announced it entered lockdown at 11:43 a.m., according to KSAT 12 San Antonio.

Following Texas mass shootings at Santa Fe High School in 2018 and El Paso in 2019, the Uvalde school district doubled its security budget in recent years, according to NBC News.

The small school district employs four police officers, has threat assessment teams at each school, social media threat monitoring, a threat reporting system and a locked-door policy for classrooms, according to a security plan on the district's website.

The Associated Press contributed to this story.