An 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers on May 25 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Four months after the shooting, the Uvalde school district on Friday, October 7, 2022, pulled their entire embattled campus police force off the job.
There was a recording of children crying out for help, and teachers trapped inside the school during the mass shooting in May. The recordings show a new level of details in law enforcement that failed to respond quickly. The reporting shows the first calls that day came in at 11:29 a.m. In this call a few minutes after the 11:29 phone call, a panicked caller yells “He’s inside the school shooting at the kids!” At 12:10 p.m. a young girl pleads “I’m in classroom 112. Please hurry, there are a lot of dead bodies.” That call was student Khloie Torres; she was 10 years old and it would be 40 minutes from the time after her first call until police forced their way into her classroom. 19 children and 2 teachers were killed during the shooting. Some reports say more than 20 calls, including those between officers and dispatchers, reveal a chaotic response without clear communication. Since the shooting, law enforcement response has been widely criticized. Several top officials have been fired due to this shooting. The police took an hour to get inside the school while the shooter was in the building killing kids and teachers. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from more than 2 dozen agencies were gathered at the scene that day. More than 1 officer knew at an early point that the gunman was still in a classroom with students. A medic was telling the officers that they were taking too long to get into the school. That was minutes before Khloie Torres started her 3rd 911 call. She survived the shooting. One of the officers said that they knew the gunman was in one of the rooms, but didn’t know what was happening behind closed doors because they couldn’t hear screams or cries. They did hear several gunshots ringing out.
You would think that they would go in and get the students out after locating the gunman, but they didn’t because the police waited over an hour to go inside the school. 19 kids were killed and 2 teachers. An officer’s wife was a 4th grade teacher at the school and was shot and she called her husband and kept saying she was dying. Multiple police outside incorrectly said Arrendondo, the husband, was in the classroom with the shooter, but Arrendondo didn’t have his radio on him. On footage obtained through another officer’s body camera, he said “we have victims in there. I don’t want any more. You know what I’m saying?”
Aside from two students, all of the kids and teachers killed were Mexican Americans.