UVALDE: The exact sequence of the Uvalde massacre in Texas, and the role of law enforcement in the tragedy, were at the center of questions on Thursday, with testimonies from parents who harshly charge the police, accusing them of having shown passivity on Tuesday.
“There were at least 40 officers armed to the teeth but they didn’t do anything until it was too late,” Jacinto Cazares, father of 10-year-old Jacklyn Cazares, who was killed in the incident, told ABC. massacre at Robb Elementary School in the Texas town.
In a video posted on social networks and obtained by Storyful, we can see frustrated parents, urging the police to enter the establishment at the time of the tragedy. The footage also shows a police officer roughly pushing one of the people outside the establishment.
One of the parents then exclaims: “You know they’re just children, huh? (…) 6-year-old children, they don’t know how to defend themselves against a shooter.”
“Desperate”
Daniel Myers, a 72-year-old pastor, had arrived with his wife Matilda outside the school about 30 minutes after the shooter entered the school.
He described to AFP how the police waited in the absence of a specialized unit to storm, and how the parents attending the scene were “desperate”.
“They were ready to go back (to the establishment). One of the relatives said: + I was military, just give me a gun, I will go. I will not hesitate. I will go + .”
Law enforcement said on Wednesday they had tried to prevent Salvador Ramos, the 18-year-old shooter, from entering the school.
But, after an exchange of gunfire, he managed to barricade himself in a classroom. This is where he killed 19 children, but also two teachers.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw told CNN that Salvador Ramos remained inside the school for about 40 minutes before police managed to shoot him.
Border police chief Raul Ortiz, whose officers were on site, assured him that the latter “did not hesitate”.
“They came up with a plan. They walked into the classroom and they worked this out as quickly as they could,” he also told CNN.
Burials
In addition to the 21 killed, 17 people were injured, including three police officers.
In the absence of a medical examiner, Eulalio Diaz, a local official, was tasked with identifying the bodies late into the night, he told the daily El Paso Times.
“Some of the children were in a bad state,” said the chosen one.
Parents awaiting news of their children provided DNA samples to speed up the identification process.
Eulalio Diaz expects that the bodies can be buried in the next 48 hours, the time to carry out the autopsies.
“It’s going to be tough when I have to write 21 death certificates,” he said.
The tragedy stunned Uvalde, a town of 16,000 inhabitants halfway between San Antonio and the Mexican border, and predominantly Hispanic, with pain.
At a press conference on Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott revealed the murderer shot his 66-year-old grandmother in the face before driving to Robb Elementary School, armed with a semi-gun. -automatic AR-15, a weapon fatally known to have been used in other massacres in the United States such as the one in a high school in Parkland, Florida which left 18 dead.
Along the way, Salvador Ramos had a car accident, and it was there that the police tried to arrest him, in vain.
Workouts
One of the school’s teachers, present at the establishment at the time of the tragedy, told ABC that her students were watching a Disney film to celebrate the upcoming end of the school year, when shots rang out .
His students then put into practice their years of training for such a situation, gathering silently under their table. These trainings have become the norm in schools in the United States, where deadly shootings are repeated tirelessly from year to year.
“They knew it was not a drill. We had to be quiet, or else we were going to alert him to our presence,” said the teacher, who wished to remain anonymous.
The shooter’s mother, Adriana Reyes, told the same channel that her son was not “a monster”, but that he could sometimes “be aggressive”.
“I had an uneasy feeling sometimes,” she said, wondering what was on his mind.
‘No explanation’
Hundreds of people gathered on Wednesday evening in the stands of a theater to mourn the victims of the massacre.
“I am heartbroken,” sobbed Ryan Ramirez, who lost his 10-year-old daughter Alithia in the shooting. By his side, his wife Jessica was crying softly, their other daughter in her arms.
In the United States, school shootings are a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far been powerless to stem.
The debate on gun regulation in the country is almost on hold, given the lack of hope that Congress will pass an ambitious national law on the issue.
The “March for our Lives” movement, created after the Parkland shootings, called for a large rally on June 11 in Washington to call for tougher gun regulations.