Onlookers urged police to charge into Texas Robb Elementary School shooting

On Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas, a shooting was reported at Robb Elementary School earlier in the day. A police officer talks to people outside Uvalde High School.

Witnesses urged police officers to enter the Texas elementary school where a gunman’s rampage killed 19 children and two teachers, a witness said Wednesday, as investigators tracked the massacre that lasted up to 40 minutes and ended with the Border Patrol team killing the 18-year-old shooter.

“Go inside!” “Go inside!” Juan Carranza, 24, saw what happened from outside his house in Uvalde, which is across the street from Robb Elementary School. He said that when the attack started, women in the area started shouting at the officers. Carranza said that the officers did not go in.

A few minutes earlier, Carranza had seen Salvador Ramos crash his truck into a ditch outside the school, grab his semi-automatic AR-15-style rifle, and shoot at two people in front of a nearby funeral home. The people were not hurt, and they ran away.

Travis Considine, a spokesman for the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that the man then fired at a security officer for the school district, ran inside, and shot at two Uvalde police officers who were outside the building when they arrived. He said that all of the police officers were hurt.

After a few hours, Considine said that the police did not know for sure if the school resource officer and Ramos had traded gunfire.

A law enforcement official said that Ramos ran into one classroom and started killing people.

Lt. Christopher Olivarez of the Department of Public Safety told CNN that the shooter “barricaded himself in by locking the door and then just started shooting the kids and teachers in the classroom.” “It just shows how evil the shooter was in every way.”

He said that everyone who died was in the same classroom.

Steve McCraw, who is in charge of the Department of Public Safety, said that it was “about 40 minutes” between when Ramos shot the school security officer and when the Border Patrol team, which looks like SWAT, shot him. Later, law enforcement officials said they didn’t know if the gunman and the security guard had shot at each other.

Border Patrol agents had difficulty breaking into the classroom door, according to a law enforcement official who was familiar with the investigation. They had to get a staff member to open the room with a key. In order to protect his identity, the official spoke anonymously about an ongoing investigation.

Carranza thought that the police should have come into the school sooner.

He said, “There were more of them, but there was only one of him.”

Uvalde is a town of about 16,000 people, most of whom are Latino. It is about 75 miles (120 km) from the Mexican border. Robb Elementary has almost 600 students in the second, third, and fourth grades. It is a one-story brick building in a neighborhood where most of the houses are small.

Ramos shot and hurt his grandmother at her home before he went to the school. Considine said that when the woman stumbled outside and her neighbours saw that she had been shot in the face, they called the police.

Authorities say that Ramos bought the gun and another one like it last week, right after his birthday.

Investigators haven’t found out why the attack happened, which also hurt at least 17 people. Gov. Greg Abbott said that Ramos, who lived in the small town about 85 miles west of San Antonio, did not have a criminal record or a history of mental illness.

“Yesterday, evil swept through Uvalde,” Governor Greg Abbott said.

Abbott said that Ramos sent the first of three online messages about a half hour before the mass shooting. Ramos wrote that he was going to shoot his grandmother, and then he wrote that he had already done so. Abbott says that in the last note he sent, which was sent about 15 minutes before he got to Robb Elementary, he said that he was going to shoot up an elementary school. Investigators said that Ramos didn’t say which school he was going to.

Ramos sent the private, one-to-one text messages through Facebook. A company spokesman, Andy Stone, said that they were found “after the terrible tragedy.” He said that Facebook is helping the police find out what happened.

As news spread about the latest mass killing to shake the U.S., Uvalde was filled with grief.

Eliahna Garcia, a 10-year-old who loved to sing, dance, and play basketball, was one of the dead. So was Xavier Javier Lopez, a fourth-grader who was looking forward to swimming this summer, and Eva Mireles, a teacher with 17 years of experience whose husband is a police officer for the school district.

“You can just tell by their angelic smiles that they were loved,” Uvalde Schools Superintendent Hal Harrell said, fighting back tears as he talked about the children and teachers who died. “That they loved going to school and were just wonderful people.”