"It Was Hard to Discern Who Was in Charge"
allen griggs
Member Posts: 35,619 ✭✭✭✭
nypost.com
Texas shooter Salvador Ramos burst out of closet, shot at CBP agents as they entered classroom: report
May 27, 2022 10:20pm Updated
The 18-year-old Texas gunman who massacred 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday burst out of a closet and opened fire on US Customs and Border Protection tactical agents as they entered the classroom where he was barricaded, according to reports.
Gunman Salvador Ramos emerged from his hiding spot and opened fire just after two Customs and Border Protection BORTAC agents, a Border Patrol Search, Trauma and Rescue agent and at least one sheriff’s deputy entered the classroom around 12:50 p.m. huddled behind a tactical shield, an anonymous CBP official told The Washington Post.
The agents returned fire and killed Ramos, putting an end to his reign of terror, according to the report.
The move to bust into the classroom capped off a roughly 40-minute period of indecision outside of the room as law enforcement came up with a plan.
An off-duty BORTAC agent was the first to arrive outside of the “quiet” classroom at 12:15 p.m. and found several local police officers in the hallway there, the CBP official told The Washington Post.
There were bullet holes in the classroom door, which local cops told the off-duty agent were from Ramos firing at them. The agent began concocting a tactical operation to get inside, and reinforcements from CBP arrived around 15 minutes later, the source told the paper.
The other BORTAC agents, along with members from ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations unit, were late to get to the classroom after they were initially told by local police to wait outside the school upon arriving, two federal law enforcement sources told NBC News.
The HSI agents had been instructed to instead help retrieve children from the windows. But after roughly 30 minutes, the agents from both agencies ignored local law enforcement and entered the school, the report said.
With no battering ram on site to bust the classroom door down, agents opted to use a ballistic shield provided by a U.S. Marshal.
It was difficult to determine who had authority over the operation, the source said.
“They have not told me they were frustrated,” the official told the newspaper. “But they told me it was hard to discern who was in charge.”
The first BORTAC agent who arrived wanted to breach the door and get to the shooter immediately with the small team assembled outside. In the meantime, CBP and other law enforcement officers evacuated students and staff from other classrooms, the source said.
Officers sent for a key to unlock the classroom, which reportedly took 40 minutes to an hour to retrieve from a janitor.
Comments
allen griggs, therein lies a lot of the problem.
where was the school principle? He should have the keys , fire extinguishers, med equipt, etc in his office. And security tools , like an AR15.
May 28, 3:05 pm
Shooter fired on at least 6 occasions after police arrived
Alleged school shooter Salvador Ramos was in the classroom for 77 minutes before officers entered and killed him. During that time, he discharged 315 rounds of ammunition, with hundreds of those rounds fired within the first four minutes of his arrival, authorities said.
After the initial barrage, the police commander on the scene mistakenly believed the shooter was barricaded and it was no longer an active shooter incident, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told reporters in an update Friday. But as officers gathered outside the classroom, the gunman kept shooting on at least six occasions, the new details show.
At 11:35 a.m., as the first three officers entered the building and approached classrooms 111 and 112, the suspect fired into the hallway through a closed door, where two officers sustained "grazing wounds," McCraw said.
He fired an additional 16 rounds two minutes later -- at 11:37 a.m. -- and again at 11:38 a.m., 11:40 a.m. and 11:44 a.m., according to McCraw, who did not specify whether the additional discharges were directed at officers in the hallway or at those inside the classrooms.
At 12:21 p.m., with as many as 19 officers then gathered outside the classroom, the suspect again fired at the closed door, forcing officers to "move down the hallway," McCraw said.
Despite those additional spurts of gunfire – and a 911 call from inside one of the classrooms alerting a dispatcher that eight or nine people remained alive -- officers did not enter the classroom and kill Ramos until 12:50 p.m., according to McCraw.
-ABC News' Lucien Bruggeman
May 28, 1:14 pm
Texas active shooter training instructs 'move in, confront attacker,' manual shows
The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District in Texas hosted active shooter training for its six-member police force two months prior to the massacre at Robb Elementary, based on the "Active Shooter Response for School-Based Law Enforcement" course from the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement, which explicitly states: "First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm's way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent."
The course manual also includes this sobering instruction: "A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field."
Couldn't find a key. Really? How many windows were in that room? Possibly none, but I'd wager there were several windows. And what about the door that was propped open a couple mins before he entered? Who opened the door? Why? Lots of questions remain!
Uvalde shooter wasn’t the only sniveling little coward — so were the cops
By Piers Morgan
May 29, 2022 12:16pm
MORE FROM:
PIERS MORGAN
‘Kids are getting murdered. Get in the room. End of story.’
This was one of several impassioned tweets posted in the last 24 hours by Rob O’Neill, the Navy SEAL Team Six hero who shot and killed Osama Bin Laden.
Another read: ‘Hey cops, get in the room! The kids are calling you. Get in the f*cking room!’
And a third said simply: ‘I would never have left you alone, kids. I’m heartbroken.’
He wouldn’t.
And if someone like O’Neill had been in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, last Tuesday, then I would have given the sniveling little coward of a shooter two hopes of surviving longer than a few seconds: no hope… and no hope.
Yet incredibly, there were up to 19 armed police officers inside the school for 70 minutes before 18-year-old Salvador Ramos finished his hellish homicidal rampage.
That’s one for each of the 9 and 10-year-old children who were murdered.
These cops were all trained to use guns to protect the public and were all carrying guns to protect the public.
But when the moment came to protect the youngest, most vulnerable and defenceless members of the public, they went AWOL.
Or rather, they stood there outside the classroom where the kids were trapped, doing absolutely nothing.
This was despite several of the desperate children frantically calling 911 on cell phones pleading for help.
Eight calls in total were made from the classroom between 12.03pm and 12.50pm when the police finally entered.
We’re told they were waiting for keys to access the classroom, tactical equipment, and an order to go in.
But it sounds to me like what they were really waiting for was a collective infusion of bravery and duty like the kind Rob O’Neill and his fellow SEALs displayed in Abbottobad, Pakistan, 11 years ago.
And it never came.
Instead, these shameful excuses for ‘law enforcement’ did nothing as 19 children and two teachers were blown to pieces at close range by a maniac with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Only THEN, when it was all too horribly late, did they summon enough resolve to go into the classroom and shoot him.
What makes this even more pathetic and shameful is that at first, these same Uvalde cops tried to tell the world what brave heroes they’d been.
Their initial claim to the media was that they’d had a shoot-out with Ramos and taken him out, saving countless lives.
But that was an obscene lie.
In fact, they froze in terror after the first bullets began flying, and by doing so, they cost countless lives.
They even admit to their disgusting cowardice now, with no apparent shred of self-awareness at how awful it sounds.
Texas Department of Public Safety spokesman Chris Olivarez defended the officers by saying ‘they could have been shot, they could have been killed.’
Well, yes, they could.
But THAT’S THEIR BLOODY JOB They’re literally paid and trained with public money to defend people and tackle criminals.
As Fox News presenter Janice Dean tweeted: ‘It’s like a fireman not going into a building because they might get burned.’
And just when I thought this diabolical story couldn’t possibly get any worse, cell phone videos emerged on social media showing hysterical parents outside the school trying to run through the inactive heavily armed police to get their kids out – and being physically restrained from doing so.
‘You’re scared of getting shot?’ one mother shouts in one of the videos. ‘I’ll go in without a vest — I will!’
Another woman claimed she was handcuffed in the melee.
‘The police were doing nothing,’ Angeli Rose Gomez told the Wall Street Journal. ‘They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere
Ms Gomez has two children at Robb Elementary and drove 40 miles to the school after hearing of the attack.
But despite begging officers to be allowed to go and save her children, she says she was arrested for ‘intervening in an active investigation.’
Ms Gomez eventually jumped the school fence and rescued her children herself.
Isn’t this the most damnable thing you’ve ever heard?
A bunch of pathetically gutless armed police officers doing more to stop a mother from saving her kids than they were doing to stop a mass shooter murdering kids.
We saw all this before in 1999 at Columbine High School, where Colorado police waited an hour after gunfire first erupted in the school for SWAT teams to arrive, during which time 13 people were shot dead by two young men.
After that horrendous massacre, police were instructed to prioritise the safety of people under threat, not themselves.
They’re supposed to now act as fast as possible to neutralize a shooter in these situations, and shockingly, it’s transpired Uvalde cops were given specific guidance about this only two months ago.
CNN reported that in March, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District hosted active shooter training for Uvalde-area law enforcement officers, and gave them a manual which stated:
‘Officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker. This may include bypassing the injured and not responding to cries for help from children.’
But these officers didn’t do that.
They let those children die.
In an embarrassingly shambolic presser, tearful Texas Department of Public Safety director, Col. Steven McCraw said the police didn’t go in earlier because they ‘believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject.’
He added: ‘It was the wrong decision. Period. There’s no excuse for that.’
You think???
It was one of the worst decisions in the history of law enforcement.
And the imbecile who made that decision? Ulvade School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo.
There’s even a suggestion, revealed by the Post, that he didn’t have his police radio on him when he made the call for his officers not to go in, so may not have known the crucial fact that children were phoning 911 from the classroom.
If that’s true, it just adds to the picture of terrible incompetence that enveloped this police operation and Arredondo should resign.
Uvalde police chief Pete Arredondo speaks at a press conference following the shooting.
Austin American-Statesman-USA TO
If it’s not true, and he did know about the classroom calls, then Arrendondo should be fired immediately for appalling negligence.
Of course, he could tell us himself, but like his officers, he’s nowhere to see seen as the flak flies, and won’t answer questions.
Either way, Arredondo’s decision not to engage much earlier with this shooter cost many of those poor young children their lives, betrayed their parents, and indelibly shamed Texas police.
As did the decision by all his officers not to have the courage or sense of duty to ignore it and charge in to try to save those kids.
Salvador Ramos wasn’t the only sniveling little coward in this atrocity.