Nearly an hour and a half of video footage of the events leading up to officers confronting the gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas on May 24 has been released to the public.
The man then walks toward classrooms 111 and 112, theAmerican-Statesmanreported, seconds before a child emerged from the bathroom and peaked around the corner to see the gunman before he fired the weapon. The child quickly retreated back into the bathroom. The student was later rescued, the paper said in a follow-up editorial.
Several shots are heard in the first minute of the video.
Austin American-Statesman/Youtube
About three minutes after the gunman first entered the school, officers arrived in the hallway he had entered. Some officers made their way towards the classrooms where the gunman was, theAmerican-Statesmanreported.
After more gunfire rang out, the paper reported, all of the officers near the door retreated back to the end of the hallway, where a school surveillance camera was positioned above.
The footage continues for over an hour and shows the hallway continuing to fill up with law enforcement officers, who ultimately did not confront the gunman for an hour and 14 minutes after police first arrived, theAmerican-Statesmanreported.
As seen in the video’s timestamp, around 12:21 p.m., a group of armed officers are seen making their way toward the classroom. At 12:30 p.m., one of the armed officers waiting at the end of the hallway walked over to what appears to be a hand sanitizer dispenser to squirt some onto his hands, before rubbing them together.
According to theAmerican-Statesman, the video shows several law enforcement agencies on the scene, including officers from the Uvalde Police Department, Uvalde County sheriff’s department, Texas Department of Public Safety, Texas Rangers, U.S. Border Patrol and U.S. Marshals Service.
“There’s no reason for the families to see that,” Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said of the footage, CNN reported. “I mean, they were going to see the video, but they didn’t need to see the gunman coming in and hear the gunshots. They don’t need to relive that, they’ve been through enough.”
CNN said the footage from theAmerican-Statesmanhad been slightly edited to blur the image of at least one child and remove the sound of children screaming. In KVUE’s report, the station wrote that they had “blurred parts of the video out of sensitivity for the victims and their families.”
Uvalde families grieve for loved ones.Brandon Bell/Getty Images
“They just didn’t act. They just didn’t move,” Uvalde County Commissioner Ronald Garza said of the officers' actions on CNN’s “New Day” on Wednesday, the outlet said. “I just don’t know what was going through those policemen’s minds that tragic day, but … there was just no action on their part.”
TheAmerican-Statesmanreported that State Rep. Dustin Burrows,the chairman of the House committee investigating the shooting,said Tuesday that the committee plans to show the footage to members of the Uvalde community on Sunday. Burrows, who is a Republican from Lubbock, said they will also discuss the panel’s preliminary report.
“Our goal is to continue to bring to light what happened at Robb Elementary, which the families and friends of the Uvalde victims have long been asking for,” Garcia wrote, later adding, “We have to bear witness to history, and transparency and unrelenting reporting is a way to bring change.”
source: people.com
