The police made a “bad decision” by not quickly entering the Uvalde school where a shooter had taken refuge in a class who committed a massacre there, a senior Texan official admitted on Friday. The police waited outside for an hour.
“Looking back now, of course it wasn’t the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period,” Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told a conference tense press. “If I thought it could help, I would apologize,” he said, very moved.
Nineteen officers at the scene waited for a Border Patrol intervention unit, about an hour after the shooter broke into the building on Tuesday. The 18-year-old teenager killed 19 children and two teachers. Pressed by journalists to explain this highly criticized delay in intervention, the official said that the police thought “there may be no more survivors”.
However, the police received numerous calls from several people in the two affected classrooms, including one from a child at 12:16 p.m., more than half an hour before the police intervention at 12:50 p.m., warning that ” eight to nine students were alive,” McCraw said.
“Good night”
In an unpublished testimony, an 11-year-old student survivor told CNN that she, with a friend, recovered the cell phone of a dead teacher to call the police and ask them to intervene.
This student, Miah Cerrillo, described off-camera to the American channel the irruption of the shooter into the class when her teacher was going to close the door. According to her, Salvador Ramos looked at the teacher, said “good night” to her and then shot her, before shooting her colleague and then some students. He then went to the other classroom.
Miah said she then smeared herself with the blood of a deceased comrade and played dead for fear that the shooter would return.
At another press conference on Friday afternoon, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said he was “misled” into the police response by inaccurate initial information. “It makes me furious,” he said.
Trump in Houston
A few hours away, the first American arms lobby, the National Rifle Association (NRA), launched its annual convention in Houston, shaken by a controversy due to the timing of the event.
“These tragedies make our stomachs twist,” Wayne LaPierre, head of the NRA, said Friday at the opening of the conference. But “restricting the most basic human rights allowing Americans to defend themselves is not the solution, and never has been,” he added.
Donald Trump then took the floor to reaffirm his attachment to weapons, which according to him allow him to face “evil”. “The existence of evil in our society is no reason to disarm law-abiding citizens,” the former Republican president said. “The existence of evil is the reason for arming law-abiding citizens,” he said.
Malaise
Sign of the unease around this convention, politicians, several country stars and the manufacturer of the rifle used by the author of the shooting had chosen not to come.
In the aisles of the sprawling convention center filled with manufacturers’ booths, thousands of gun enthusiasts strolled, examining rifles and rejecting new restrictions.
“Personally, I think there needs to be more gun education,” Lisy, 31, a former soldier who is looking to find a new gun to slip under her skirt, told AFP, “because it’s It’s too hot in Texas to wear pants.”
“New Sandy Hook”
Outside the building, demonstrators had gathered with signs calling for a ban on assault rifles or asking “stop killing children”.
On a crowded stage, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, who will face Greg Abbott in the gubernatorial election in November, called on the crowd Friday noon to “action” against guns. “Our children’s lives are really at stake in the voting booth,” he said.
The shooting, described in the American press as the “new Sandy Hook”, in reference to the appalling massacre at a Connecticut elementary school in 2012, has awakened the traumas of America.
The faces of the very young victims, aged 11, 10 and 9, broadcast repeatedly on television, and the testimonies of their collapsed relatives have moved the country, relaunching a wave of calls for better regulation of firearms. This movement is unlikely to translate into action, given the lack of hope of an ambitious national law on the issue being passed by Congress.
This article has been published automatically. Sources: ats / afp