texas shooting essay

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Read the Justice Department’s full report on the Uvalde school shooting police response

A Justice Department report released Thursday details a myriad of failures by police who responded to the shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, when children waited desperately for over an hour before officers stormed a classroom to take the gunman down.

WATCH: Uvalde struggles with trauma, unanswered questions a year after school shooting

The federal review, which was launched just days after the May 2022 shooting, provides a damning look at the missteps by police after a gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School. It was not a criminal investigation but one of the most exhaustive reviews of law enforcement’s failure to stop the attack. Nineteen students and two teachers died in the shooting.

“The victims and survivors of the shooting at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, deserved better,” Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters in Uvalde.

Local officials are still weighing whether to bring charges.

Click on the image below to read the full report in English.

Haga clic en la imagen de abajo para leer el informe completo en español.

Here are some of the major takeaways from the report:

The most significant failure

The Justice Department concluded that the chief failure was that law enforcement didn’t treat the crisis as an active shooter situation and push forward to engage the gunman until the threat was eliminated. Several of the officers who first arrived at the school did in fact move quickly toward the classrooms where students were trapped inside with the gunman, but retreated after he fired at them.

Law enforcement then treated the situation as if the gunman was barricaded, dead or otherwise contained, focusing on calling for more SWAT equipment and evacuating surrounding classrooms instead of immediately engaging the shooter and saving lives.

Some officers believed they had to wait for equipment such as shields or a specialized tactical team before they could enter, the report said.

READ MORE: Principal who was critically injured protecting students during Iowa school shooting has died

“As more law enforcement resources arrived, first responders on the scene, including those with specific leadership responsibilities, did not coordinate immediate entry into the classrooms, running counter to generally accepted practices for active shooter response to immediately engage the subject to further save lives,” the report said.

The report includes excerpts from a 911 call from terrified 9- and 10-year-old children trapped with the shooter while law enforcement waited in the hallway just outside the classrooms. “I don’t want to die. My teacher is dead,” one of them said. At that point, the students and their teachers had been trapped in classrooms with the shooter for 37 minutes. The call lasted for nearly 27 minutes, the report says. It would be another 13 minutes after the call ended before survivors were rescued.

There were numerous signs that should have prompted police leaders to send officers in sooner, the report states, including the victims’ injuries and the gunman firing about 45 rounds “in law enforcement officer presence.”

“For 77 agonizing, harrowing minutes, children and staff were trapped with an active shooter,” the report said, “They experienced unimaginable horror. The survivors witnessed unspeakable violence and the death of classmates and teachers.”

The recommendations

The report includes a slew of recommendations designed to prevent similar failures in the future. Chief among them is that officers responding to such a crisis must prioritize neutralizing the shooter and aiding victims in harm’s way.

The report says “an active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject.” Evacuations should be limited to those who are immediately in danger and “not at the expense of the priority to eliminate the threat,” the Justice Department said. And officers must be prepared to engage the shooter “using just the tools they have with them,” even if they are armed only with a standard issue firearm, it said.

Other recommendations address coordination between agencies responding to shootings, the release of information to the public, and providing proper support and trauma services to survivors.

What are the victims’ families saying?

The Justice Department also outlined failures in communication to families during and after the shooting, including instances of incomplete, inaccurate or disjointed releases of information that led to lingering distrust in the community.

The report cites the county district attorney telling family members that authorities had to wait for autopsy reports before death notifications could be made. Family members who had not been told that children had died, yelled back: “What, our kids are dead? No, no!”

Family members, many of whom had been briefed on the federal report before its release, had mixed reactions to the findings and the report itself. Some told news outlets they were grateful that the federal investigation supported their criticisms of the response.

READ MORE: Students rally at the Iowa Capitol days after Perry school shooting

Many families had hoped the report would come with a recommendation for federal charges against some of those criticized most heavily in the failures.

Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the teachers killed, told The Associated Press Thursday that she was grateful for the federal agency’s work but disappointed that local prosecutors have yet to bring any charges.

“A report doesn’t matter when there are no consequences for actions that are so vile and murderous and evil,” said Duran. “What do you want us to do with another report? … Bring it to court,” she said.

Richer reported from Boston and Lauer reported from Philadelphia. Associated Press reporters Lindsay Whitehurst and Eric Tucker in Washington, D.C.; Jake Bleiberg in Dallas; and Acacia Coronado in Uvalde, Texas, contributed to this report.

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2024 brings new gun restrictions in several states

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Uvalde elementary school shooting

Here's what experts say police should have done in the uvalde school shooting.

Bill Chappell

Cheryl Corley

People visit memorials Thursday for victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images hide caption

People visit memorials Thursday for victims of the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.

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In active shooter situations, police officers are trained to confront the shooter immediately — not to wait.

But in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas , the gunman spent more than an hour inside the school before a tactical unit killed him, despite officers' earlier arrival. That has raised questions about the police response — and whether some of the 19 children and two teachers who died might have been saved if officers had taken a different approach.

"When there's an active shooter, the rules change," Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told journalists on Friday , as he gave the most complete account yet of the tragedy that unfolded at Robb Elementary.

Officials call it the 'wrong decision' to delay confronting the Uvalde school shooter

McCraw identified a crucial flaw in the police strategy: The incident commander on the scene believed the situation had moved from being an active shooter scenario to one where the gunman had barricaded himself inside the school, McCraw said, with "no kids at risk," because any civilians inside were already dead.

That left a mass of officers waiting for tactical gear and keys to unlock a door, while at least two students inside frantically called 911 to plead for help.

"From the benefit of hindsight, where I'm sitting now, of course it was not the right decision," McCraw said. "It was the wrong decision, period. There's no excuse for that."

"Those kids need help" immediately, an expert says

There are few national standards when it comes to policing, but there is some consistency. In the years since the Columbine school shooting, law enforcement officers have been trained to engage an active shooter as soon as possible.

"The protocol is, as soon as you determine there is an active shooter you don't wait for anyone," says Steve Ijames, an expert who has led training sessions on active-shooter situations for police agencies since the mid-1990s.

In this aerial view, law enforcement officials work on scene at Robb Elementary School on Wednesday. Jordan Vonderhaar/Getty Images hide caption

In this aerial view, law enforcement officials work on scene at Robb Elementary School on Wednesday.

"You enter and move [to] neutralize and it may be at your peril," Ijames said. "It'd be great if you had some help — but I can assure you those kids need help more than you need help."

After the gunman shot at police officers in Uvalde, they called for resources like body armor and marksmen, assuming he was barricading himself inside. But McCraw said on Friday that if police believed people were still alive in the school, they would have been obligated to show greater urgency. There were "19 officers in there," he said, adding, "there's plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done."

What we know about the victims of the Uvalde school shooting

On that point, McCraw seemed to agree with parents who exhorted officers at the scene to take action. He said police should have closed in on the gunman as soon as they could do so, rather than worry about having the right equipment, or securing the outer perimeter.

Texas embraces widely accepted doctrine about dealing with an active shooter, McCraw said.

"That doctrine requires officers — we don't care what agency you're from, you don't have to have a leader on the scene — every officer lines up, stacks up, goes and finds where those rounds are being fired at, and keeps shooting until the subject is dead. Period," he said.

The best line of defense is keeping all the doors locked

Training experts say that what's crucial to school safety in an active shooter situation is for police agencies to work with school districts to draft emergency protocols, with details about schools' layout and personnel.

The very best way to make sure kids are safe inside their school, Ijames says, is having systems in place to make sure a dangerous person doesn't gain access to it at all.

"The first step is not about the police responding to an in-progress tragedy," he said. "It's keeping the problem outside the school. So it's physical security first."

The evolving narrative of what happened at Uvalde the day of the shooting

That entails locking doors and setting up practices to secure student areas if a person does get inside. In Uvalde, McCraw said that the gunman entered Robb Elementary through a back door that a teacher had left propped open. Moments earlier, the teacher had left the school to get her cellphone.

Experts say the tragic lesson of this latest school mass shooting is that there must be constant vigilance. And that law enforcement has to continue to adapt strategies and tactics to fight the devastation that's occurred in so many schools in the U.S.

• uvalde shooting

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The timeline of how the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, unfolded, according to a federal report

The uncle of the Uvalde school shooter who killed 19 students and two teachers begged police to let him try to talk his nephew down. In a 911 call released Saturday, the uncle told police he might be able to get him to stop shooting.

FILE - In this image from surveillance video provided by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District via the Austin American-Statesman, a gunman carrying an AR-15 style rifle enters and walks down a hallway at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday, May 24, 2022. (Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)

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FILE - A woman cries as she leaves the Uvalde Civic Center after shooting a was reported earlier in the day at Robb Elementary School, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (William Luther/The San Antonio Express-News via AP)

FILE - Law enforcement, and other first responders, gather outside Robb Elementary School following a shooting, Tuesday, May 24, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

This image provided by the city of Uvalde, Texas shows police body camera video of authorities responding to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. (City of Uvalde via AP)

ARCHIVO – Las fuerzas del orden y otros organismos de emergencia se reúnen afuera de la Escuela Primaria Robb tras un tiroteo, el martes 24 de mayo de 2022 en Uvalde, Texas. (AP Foto/Dario Lopez-Mills)

FILE - In this photo from surveillance video provided by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District via the Austin American-Statesman, authorities respond to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. (Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District/Austin American-Statesman via AP, File)

UVALDE, Texas (AP) — A scathing Justice Department report released earlier this year into law enforcement failures during the Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, includes a minute-by-minute account of missteps by police at the scene.

Heavily armed officers did not kill the 18-year-old gunman until about 77 minutes after the first officers arrived at the school. During that time, terrified students in the classrooms called 911 and parents begged officers to go in. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the May 24, 2022, massacre in the rural South Texas town.

An earlier investigation by Texas lawmakers also constructed a timeline of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Here is the Justice Department’s reconstruction of the shooting, which is similar to timelines previously offered by authorities:

11:21 a.m. — The gunman, Salvador Ramos, shoots and wounds his grandmother at their home, then sends a message to an acquaintance saying what he did and that he plans to “shoot up an elementary school.”

11:28 a.m. — The gunman crashes a vehicle he stole from his grandparents’ home into a ditch about 100 yards (90 meters) from Robb Elementary School.

11:33 a.m. — He enters the school through a closed but unlocked door, walks to classrooms 111 and 112, and opens fire on their doors from the hallway. The two classrooms are connected by an interior door.

11:36 a.m. — The first responding officers enter the school. The gunman is by now shooting inside the two fourth-grade classrooms. Two officers who run toward the classrooms are hit with shrapnel and retreat.

11:38 a.m. — The first request to activate the Uvalde SWAT team is made over the radio.

11:39 a.m. — A city police officer makes the first official request for shields. Officers in the hallway begin treating the gunman as a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter.

11:40 a.m. to 12:21 p.m. — More officers from multiple law enforcement agencies arrive. During these 41 minutes, according to the report, “there is a great deal of confusion, miscommunication, a lack of urgency, and a lack of incident command.”

12:21 p.m. — The gunman fires four additional shots inside the classrooms. At this point, officers move into formation outside the classrooms’ doors but don’t enter. Officers then test keys on another door while searching for additional keys and breaching tools.

12:48 p.m. — Officers open the door to room 111, which was likely unlocked. A minute or more goes by before the officers enter the room and engage the shooter.

12:50 p.m. — The gunman is fatally shot by officers after he emerges from a closet while opening fire.

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Seeing America, Again, in the Uvalde Elementary-School Shooting

On Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released a report titled “ Active Shooter Incidents in the United States in 2021 ,” which logged sixty-one mass shootings last year. The deadliest of these was at a supermarket in Boulder, Colorado, where ten people were killed, a death toll that was matched ten days ago, at a supermarket in Buffalo , New York, and then exceeded, at Robb Elementary School, in Uvalde, Texas, where an eighteen-year-old shot and killed nineteen children and two adults. Early reports indicate that he used a handgun and a rifle . Families who gathered at the local civic center, which was used as a reunification site, were asked for DNA swabs to assist investigators in identifying their loved ones. The shooting began around eleven-thirty in the morning; as darkness fell, many families were still waiting outside the civic center, without word of their children.

This is the second-deadliest K-12 school shooting in U.S. history, after the December, 2012, massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School , in Newtown, Connecticut, where twenty children and six educators were killed . Eventually, Sandy Hook also came to be seen as the graveyard of the gun-control movement : in 2013, a new assault-weapons ban, and also a bill to require universal background checks for firearm sales, failed in the Senate. If an entire classroom of dead first-graders could not spur even remedial action in Congress on gun control, nothing would. And nothing has.

A few months after Sandy Hook, the agitprop-documentary-maker Michael Moore , writing in HuffPost , imagined a scenario in which the parents of the victims leaked photographs of the classroom crime scenes to the press. If that were to happen, Moore argued, the horrifying images would have the same galvanizing effect on activist movements and public opinion as those of Emmett Till , in 1955, or Phan Thi Kim Phúc, in 1972. “There will be nothing left to argue over,” Moore wrote. “It will just be over. And every sane American will demand action.” (Just like that!) Sandy Hook parents swiftly shut Moore down, but there was a kernel of sense in his proposal—he was grasping for some method of defibrillation for a movement in arrest. Published images that represent school shootings are always heartrending and always the same: the surviving children filing out, some in tears, others in shock and excitement; the desperate parents; the sorrowful reunions. One of the many unforgivable obscenities of America’s gun obsession is how it can render the image of an anguished child and her caregiver, captured in real time as they absorb a life-altering trauma, as commonplace, interchangeable, even banal. Wait, which one is this again?

On Tuesday night, the poet Jana Prikryl shared the “Alas, poor country” passage from “Macbeth,” in which Ross laments that Scotland has become not a place to live but merely a place to die: “Almost afraid to know itself. It cannot / Be call’d our mother, but our grave . . . where violent sorrow seems / A modern ecstasy.” A modern ecstasy—and a habit, or a ritual, with its attendant ceremonies and scripts and rites. These always include cut-and-paste expressions of sympathy and concern from various bridesmaids of the National Rifle Association . Mitch McConnell, the Senate Minority Leader—who once said, following a school shooting in his home state of Kentucky, “I don’t think at the federal level there’s much that we can do other than appropriate funds” for school safety officers and counselling— tweeted that he was “horrified and heartbroken” by the tragedy at Robb Elementary School. Ted Cruz, the junior senator for Texas—who once ran a campaign ad that boasted, “After Sandy Hook, Ted Cruz stopped Obama’s push for new gun-control laws”— tweeted that he and his wife were “fervently lifting up in prayer the children and families in the horrific shooting.” Governor Greg Abbott—who last year signed seven pieces of gun-rights legislation into law, including one that permitted Texans to carry handguns without a license and another exempting the state from future federal gun restrictions— said that he and his wife “mourn this horrific loss and we urge all Texans to come together to show our unwavering support to all who are suffering.”

Politicians like these are routinely criticized for their hypocrisy and empty gestures—their “thoughts and prayers.” But, if only for the sake of rhetorical hygiene, we should go a step further. Republicans, as we know, get what they want. It is their best feature. They have vacuumed up the state legislatures, gerrymandered much of the country, stacked the Supreme Court and the federal judgeships , turned back the clock on L.G.B.T.Q. rights , paralyzed entire school districts with engineered panics over critical race theory and “grooming,” ended (or so it seems) reproductive rights as a constitutionally guaranteed freedom, and blocked all attempts at gun-control legislation. If the leaders of this political movement, which in Texas managed to ban most abortions and criminalize health care for trans kids in the space of a school year, took real offense to murdered children, they would never simply accept their deaths as the unfortunate cost of honoring the Founding Fathers’ right to take up muskets against hypothetical government tyranny. They would act. If America were not afraid to know itself, we could more readily accept that gun-rights advocates are enthralled with violent sorrow. This is the America they envisaged. It is what they worked so hard for. Their thoughts and prayers have been answered.

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After Texas School Shooting, a Familiar Fight About How to Make Schools Safe

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Hours after the deadliest school shooting in Texas history, lawmakers and educators around the nation launched into another round of a tragically familiar debate about how to make “never again” a reality.

An 18-year-old student who was a “reported dropout” wrecked his car near Robb Elementary School in the largely Latino community of Uvalde, Texas, Tuesday, forced his way past on-site law enforcement and shot and killed 19 students and two adults in adjoining 4th-grade classrooms, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott told reporters Wednesday afternoon.

State leaders called the attack “incomprehensible,” but educators and school safety experts around the country said that the killings—and the resulting political arguments—follow a pattern established over a decade of high-profile mass school shootings that started in 2012 in Newtown, Conn.

“Unfortunately, I think we’ve seen the tone of the discussions,” said Amy Klinger, co-founder of the Educator’s School Safety Network, an organization that seeks to bring teachers and school administrators into school safety conversations.

“People latch onto one issue,” she said. “They retreat to their corners and scream at each other.”

Public leaders quickly restarted familiar arguments Tuesday. President Joe Biden—a Democrat who led an unsuccessful push for new gun restrictions as vice president after the Sandy Hook Elementary attack—argued for “common sense gun safety” measures, like universal background checks and bans on certain powerful rifles.

“Why are we willing to live with this carnage?,” he said in a White House address, without detailing a specific proposal. “Why do we keep letting this happen?”

Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, started pushing to “harden schools” through the presence of armed adults and physical security, efforts he had already championed in 2019, when the state passed a massive school safety bill following the 2018 shooting at Santa Fe High School that left 10 people dead.

“After any incident like this, of course, you reflect on lessons learned to ensure that we can prevent this kind of situation in schools going forward,” Abbott said at a Wednesday press conference, suggesting potential action in the state’s next legislative session, which is scheduled to start in January 2023.

Meanwhile, experts who study school safety caution that another round of task forces and best-practice reports won’t make a difference if the resulting ideas sit on a shelf unheeded.

Questions swirl: What, if anything, can lawmakers do to stop the pattern of gun violence in schools ? Are existing policies being adequately enforced? Will knee-jerk policy reactions add to districts’ burdens without helping the situation?

School shootings drive policy debates

Mass school shootings are statistically rare events that have increased in frequency alongside mass shootings in all settings, federal data show .

But, while schools are relatively safe places for children, the emotional impact of high-profile events drives policy debates, which often focus on the worst-case scenarios and ignore more-routine concerns, like a lack of school nurses and outdated buildings, school safety experts say.

Every headline-making attack in the last 10 years has sparked a new round of commissions, task forces, and special reports full of proposed solutions, said Matthew Mayer, a professor of educational psychology at Rutgers University who studies school violence prevention.

After the 2012 Newtown shootings, in which 26 people were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School, the Obama administration championed new grant programs designed to broaden the definition of safe schools and increase prevention efforts.

After the 2018 shootings in Parkland, Fla., and Santa Fe, Texas, the Trump administration convened a federal school safety commission, which issued an 180-page report of mostly familiar recommendations, like the use of positive behavioral supports and social-emotional learning. Controversially, the commission also recommended that schools consider training and arming some staff , an idea that was panned by many educators and members of law enforcement as unrealistic and unsafe.

Mayer has contributed to several calls to action. After Newtown, he joined an interdisciplinary coalition of researchers and education organizations to urge a broad range of steps to reduce school and community violence, including “increased efforts to limit inappropriate access to guns and especially, assault type weapons.” After the Parkland shooting, many of those same researchers released similar recommendations.

“They know what they need to do but they are not going to do it,” said Mayer, who called for peaceful protests in support of new gun laws. “They are going to make plenty of speeches and vague promises, but we have 20 years of history showing that nothing has happened.”

A focus on prevention

Educational groups including AASA , the School Superintendents Association, and national teachers’ unions have pushed for changes to gun laws, like bans on high-capacity magazines, alongside efforts to create safe and supportive school climates.

Today, NEA President @BeckyPringle sent a message to Congress: Do your duty and protect our students. #EndGunViolence pic.twitter.com/D0VfBawWsT — NEA (@NEAToday) May 25, 2022

But Texas lawmakers, many of whom are scheduled to speak at a National Rifle Association meeting in Houston this week, said talk of gun laws amounted to “politicizing” the tragedy.

The 18-year-old Uvalde gunman legally purchased his weapons, had no known criminal record and no record of diagnosed mental health conditions, Abbott said. And, while experts say most attackers “leak” their intentions to friends and family beforehand, the only warning signs police had identified were three online posts the suspect made 30 minutes before the attack, he said.

Abbott spoke after his gubernatorial opponent, Democrat Beto O’Rourke, interrupted the press conference by yelling about the need for new gun laws.

“We don’t need to focus on ourselves and our agendas, we need to focus on the healing and hope that we are providing to those who suffered unconscionable damage to their lives,” Abbott said.

Following the Santa Fe attack, Texas lawmakers passed a raft of legislation that provided grants for threat assessment, required schools to create comprehensive school safety plans subject to an audit by state officials, and lifted caps on the state’s school marshal program , which allows trained school staff to carry guns on campus.

After the Robb Elementary shooting, politicians like Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, called for more armed adults and law enforcement in schools. Their push came even as officials revealed the gunman had evaded law enforcement, who confronted him before he began shooting and took up to an hour to stop him.

Taking stock of existing laws

In the rush to take action, policymakers shouldn’t try to reinvent the wheel with new mandates that aren’t practical for schools or backed by evidence, said Michael Dorn, the executive director of Safe Havens International who consults on school safety.

After previous shootings, some lawmakers have backed requirements for drills that teach students how to “run, hide, and fight,” despite concerns that such measures could cause confusion in the event of a crisis, he said.

“The demand is fix this right now when we know it’s not always that simple,” he said.

Similarly, schools can’t buy their way into safety with new gear and infrastructure, Klinger said. Rather, it takes careful work with families and communities to keep students safe.

Flo Rice, a substitute teacher who was severely injured in the Santa Fe shooting and advocated for resulting school safety laws , said Texas should do more to enforce the policies it already has in place.

After hearing a fire alarm, Rice was evacuating students from the gym in 2018 when a 17-year-old student shot her in both legs, altering her life forever.

As Rice walked with a cane and attended physical therapy appointments, she also met with lawmakers to push for more comprehensive school safety plans, the ability to communicate within a school building during a crisis, and threat assessment practices to help identify students who may harm themselves or others.

But, as another shooting dominates headlines in her state, Rice is concerned that actions after the 2018 attack amounted to false promises, she told Education Week.

An audit of districts’ compliance with the state’s school safety laws by the Texas School Safety Center, a state entity that reviews plans every three years, found that many fall short of full compliance. Of 1,022 districts reviewed by the agency, “only 200 had a viable active shooter policy” required by the law, known as Senate Bill 11, according to a 2021 report.

“Had this law been enforced, lives might have been saved,” Rice said in an email to Education Week. “Nothing has changed since 5/18/2018 to protect our children.”

A version of this article appeared in the June 01, 2022 edition of Education Week as A Familiar Fight About How to Make Schools Safe

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Tragic 911 calls, body camera footage from Uvalde, Texas school shooting released

The release follows a legal case brought by a coalition of media outlets, including the austin american-statesman, part of the usa today network, and its parent company, gannett..

The city of Uvalde, Texas, has released a trove of records from the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in May 2022 , marking the largest and most substantial disclosure of documents since that day.

The records include body camera footage, dashcam video, 911 and non-emergency calls, text messages and other redacted documents. The release comes as part of the resolution of a legal case brought by a coalition of media outlets, including the Austin American-Statesman, part of the USA TODAY Network, and its parent company, Gannett.

'FAILURE': DOJ's scathing Uvalde school shooting report criticizes law enforcement response

Body cameras worn by officers show the chaos at the school as the shooting scene unfolded. One piece of footage shows several officers cautiously approaching the school.

"Watch windows! Watch windows," one officer says. When notified that the gunman was armed with an "AR," short for the semiautomatic AR-15, the officers responds with a single expletive.

The bloodbath inside the classrooms of Uvalde's Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, is worst mass shooting at an educational institution in Texas history. The gunman armed with a semiautomatic rifle killed 19 fourth graders and two of their teachers before being taken out by officers more than an hour after the terror inside the building began.

Release includes 911 calls from teacher, shooter's uncle

The records include more than a dozen calls to 911, including in the earliest moments of the shooting. 

At 11:33 a.m., a man screams to an operator: "He's inside the school! Oh my God in the name of Jesus, he's inside the school shooting at the kids."

In a separate call, a teacher inside Robb Elementary, who remained on the line with a 911 operator for 28 minutes after dialing in at 11:36 a.m., remains silent for most of the call but occasionally whispers. At one point her voice cracks and she cries: "I'm scared. They are banging at my door."

The 911 calls also come from a man who identified himself as the shooter's uncle.

He calls at 12:57 – just minutes after a SWAT team breached the classroom and killed the gunman – expressing a desire to speak to his nephew. He explains to the operator that sometimes the man will listen to him.

"Oh my God, please don't do nothing stupid," he says. 

"I think he is shooting kids," the uncle says. "Why did you do this? Why?"

News organizations still pushing for release of more records

The Texas Department of Public Safety is still facing a lawsuit from 14 news organizations, including the American-Statesman, that requests records from the shooting, including footage from the scene and internal investigations.

The department has not released the records despite a judge ruling in the news organizations’ favor in March. The agency cites objections from Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell.

In June, a state district judge in Uvalde County ordered the Uvalde school district and sheriff's office to release records related to the shooting to news outlets, but the records have not yet been made available. The records' release is pending while the matter is under appeal.

"We're thankful the city of Uvalde is taking this step toward transparency," attorney Laura Prather, who represented the coalition, said Saturday. "Transparency is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow us to all understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies."

Law enforcement agencies that converged on Robb Elementary after the shooting began have been under withering criticism for waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman. Surveillance video footage first obtained by the American-Statesman and the Austin ABC affiliate KVUE nearly seven months after the carnage shows in excruciating detail dozens of heavily armed and body-armor-clad officers from local, state and federal agencies in helmets walking back and forth in the hallway.

Some left the camera's frame and then reappeared. Others trained their weapons toward the classroom, talked, made cellphone calls, sent texts and looked at floor plans but did not enter or attempt to enter the classrooms.

Even after hearing at least four additional shots from the classrooms 45 minutes after police arrived on the scene, the officers waited.

Not all officer video from Texas school shooting was released, Uvalde police say

Police say that not all officer video from the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in 2022 was given to news organizations following a court order

Not all officer video from the the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting in 2022 was given to news organizations following a court order, police said Wednesday as they announced an internal investigation into why the material was not discovered until after a large trove of footage was released over the weekend.

A large collection of audio and video recordings from the hesitant police response at Robb Elementary School, where a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers inside a fourth-grade classroom, was released by city officials on Saturday following a prolonged legal fight with The Associated Press and other news organizations.

It was not immediately clear what the unreleased video shows. The department discovered “several additional videos” after a Uvalde officer said a portion of his body camera footage from the May 24, 2022, shooting was not included in the original release of material, the city said in a statement.

The statement said an internal investigation will determine “how this oversight occurred," who was responsible and whether any disciplinary action is needed.

“The Uvalde community and the public deserve nothing less,” Uvalde Police Chief Homer Delgado said in the statement.

The unreleased video was turned over to the office of Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell for review.

Jesse Rizo lost his niece, Jacklyn Cazares, in the shooting and said the news of the omitted video was disappointing and tears at a frail system of trust. But, he said he was pleased to know the police chief was forthcoming and hopes the investigation produces consequences.

“Anybody that was at fault, you’ve got to send a strong message that these mistakes are not tolerable,” Rizo said.

The Associated Press and other news organizations brought a lawsuit after the officials initially refused to publicly release the information. The massacre was one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history.

“The public has a right to know what happened on May 24, 2022, at Robb Elementary School and it is the job of the AP and other news organizations to bring those facts and the events of that day to light," said Julie Pace, AP's executive editor.

The delayed law enforcement response to the shooting has been widely condemned as a massive failure: Nearly 400 officers waited more than 70 minutes before confronting the gunman in a classroom filled with dead and wounded children and teachers. Families of the victims have long sought accountability for the slow police response in the South Texas city of about 15,000 people 80 miles (130 kilometers) west of San Antonio.

Nearly 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state police officials, as well as school and city police, responded to the shooting. While terrified students and teachers called 911 from inside classrooms, dozens of officers stood in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. Desperate parents who had gathered outside the building pleaded with them to go in.

Some of the 911 calls released over the weekend were from terrified instructors. One described “a lot, a whole lot of gunshots,” while another sobbed into the phone as a dispatcher urged her to stay quiet. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!” the first teacher cried before hanging up.

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Texas State Historical Association (TSHA) https://www.tshaonline.org

https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/university-of-texas-tower-shooting-1966

University of Texas Tower Shooting (1966)

By: Gary M. Lavergne

Updated: June 29, 2017

The University of Texas Tower Shooting, one of the worst mass murders in American history, took place on August 1, 1966, on and around the University of Texas at Austin (UT) campus when Charles J. Whitman , an enrolled student, took control of the observation deck of the iconic Tower and fired various weapons onto the campus and its surrounding business district.

Whitman’s murderous spree began in the early morning hours of August 1, 1966, when he killed his mother, Margaret Elizabeth Whitman, at her apartment near downtown Austin. Approximately, three hours later, he returned to his small south Austin home and killed his wife Kathleen as she slept in their bedroom. From about 3:00 A.M. to his arrival on the UT campus at approximately 11:30 A.M., he wrote several notes and meticulously prepared for an extended siege of the campus by purchasing and packing an array of guns, about 700 rounds of ammunition, and survivalist supplies. Wearing overalls to disguise himself as a janitor, Whitman entered the Tower on the ground floor, boarded an elevator, and wheeled a footlocker on a two-wheeled dolly to the twenty-seventh floor. Afterwards, he hauled his gear up three flights of stairs to the twenty-eighth floor reception area and observation deck. His first victim on campus was a university employee who served as a receptionist on the twenty-eighth floor. Minutes later, using an illegally-modified shotgun, Whitman gunned down a family of tourists in a stairwell as they attempted to enter the reception area. Two of the family members died immediately; two others were severely wounded.

At 11:48 A.M., Whitman began shooting from the Tower’s outdoor observation deck, which completely encircles the entire twenty-eighth floor. The outer walls of each side of the deck included three openings that were intended to function as rainspouts. Whitman was able to use these openings as turrets, which effectively shielded him from return gunfire below. For the next ninety-six minutes, the “Sniper in the Tower” fired approximately 150 rounds of ammunition onto the public below. The incident ended at 1:24 P.M. when Whitman was ambushed on the northwest corner of the deck by two uniformed Austin Police Department patrol officers—Ramiro “Ray” Martinez and Houston McCoy. An armed civilian, University Co-op employee Allen Crum, had also accompanied Martinez to the observation deck and waited near the doorway on the south side of the deck, and, according to Crum’s statement to the police, Austin police officer Jerry Day was also present at the door.

The death toll, including Whitman’s wife and mother, was a total of seventeen: fifteen (including Austin police officer Billy Speed) died on August 1, another died on August 8, and a final victim died of a gunshot-related wound in 2001. Thirty-one individuals were treated for wounds, ranging from superficial to life-threatening, in Austin’s hospitals and the University Student Health Center.

As a result of the shooting, the observation deck was closed for several months to repair damage done to the outer walls near the clocks and the face of the building itself. During the first thirty years of the building’s history, a total of three people had committed suicide from the Tower’s deck. After the Tower shooting, in a six-year period from 1968 through 1974, four people chose to end their lives there. After the last of the suicides, the twenty-eighth floor was closed again in 1974. In February 1976 the UT regents voted to close the observation deck permanently. In 1999 UT’s president Larry Faulkner presented a plan to the regents to reopen the deck to the general public. The plan included a number of modifications to the twenty-eighth floor (to make it more accessible and American Disabilities Act compliant) and the outer deck (to make it safer by enclosing it with a mesh of stainless steel bars). The observation deck was reopened to the public shortly after the dedication of the Tower Memorial Garden on August 1, 1999. In the 2010s public access to the top of the Tower was by appointment in a guided tour only.

The first on-campus memorial to the victims of the Tower shooting was not dedicated until August 1, 1999. A small grassy area immediately north of the Tower, including what is popularly known as the “Turtle Pond,” was dedicated as the “Tower Garden” or “Garden of Reflection.” A small memorial plaque attached to a boulder was added to the garden in 2007, but it did not include names of any of the victims. On August 1, 2016, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Tower shooting, a much larger monument made of Texas pink granite and including the engraved names of the seventeen murdered victims was dedicated.

The University of Texas Tower shooting was a seminal event in law enforcement history because of how it influenced changes in police departments throughout the United States. During this incident it became tragically evident that officers of the Austin Police Department had no tactical training, clear lines of communication, adequate weapons, appropriate uniforms, or a unified command/coordination. Along with the 1965 Watts Riots, the UT Tower shooting is often cited as the precursor to the formation of Special Weapons and Tactics Teams (SWAT) that are now part of most police departments serving populations of 50,000 or more people. In Texas during the regular session of the 1967 legislature, Senate Bill 162 provided for the creation of police forces for institutions of higher education. The bill, signed into law by Governor John Connally on April 27, 1967, led to the formation of the University of Texas Police Department. The UTPD replaced UT Traffic and Security Services which had consisted of unarmed watchmen who supervised traffic and parking and never investigated felonies.

Immediately after the shooting Governor John Connally formed a thirty-two-member commission of experts in mental health and other medical fields to examine every aspect of the Tower tragedy. After a careful analysis of all available information on the life and death of Charles Whitman, the commission could not positively identify a cause for his rampage. One of their suggestions, however, that mental health and counseling services for college students be dramatically expanded, resulted in the replacement of a “mental hygiene clinic” in the Student Health Center, to what in the 2010s was the UT Counseling and Mental Health Center. The center provides students, families, faculty, and staff with counseling, psychiatric, consultation, and prevention services twenty-four hours a day.

The incident is also unique in the annals of American crime because of the unsolicited arrival of significant numbers of non-deputized armed civilians using privately-owned firearms to return fire upon the sniper. It is the only example in modern times of an uncoordinated group of armed civilians assisting law enforcement by firing upon a criminal during the commission of a crime. (The only other well-known example is the ambush of the James/Younger Gang in Northfield, Minnesota, during an attempted bank robbery in 1876.) In the aftermath, the civilian groundfire drew mixed reactions. Governor Connally commented that it impeded the progress of the police in stopping the sniper in that officers had to also be cognizant of taking cover from shots fired up at the Tower. Officer Ray Martinez later expressed gratitude regarding the civilians who, armed with personal hunting rifles, had returned fire and forced Whitman to take cover, thereby limiting his ability to target victims.

The causes of the sniper’s rampage will probably never be established with absolute certainty. Since 1966 searches for an explanation for such senseless and deadly violence have resulted in several cause-effect theories, which include: the organic causes of violence and the discovery of a small brain tumor during an autopsy of the sniper; chemical and drug abuse that some believe may have produced an amphetamine-induced psychosis; psychological causes such as the training he received as a United States Marine and child abuse at the hands of his dangerous and surly father, including witnessing significant domestic violence directed towards his mother; and growing up in a gun-loving household in Florida. However, in the forty-eight-hour period immediately preceding the Tower shooting, judging by his actions, serial decision-making, and choices, there is little or no direct evidence that Charles Whitman was impaired mentally or physically during his spree killing on August 1, 1966.

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• Bibliography
• Image Use Disclaimer

Austin, Texas, Police Department Records of the Charles Whitman Mass Murder Case, Offense number M968150, Austin History Center. BEHIND THE TOWER: New Histories of the UT Tower Shooting, Public History Seminar at UT Austin, initially published summer 2016 (http://behindthetower.org/), accessed January 26, 2017. Gary M. Lavergne, A Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (Denton: University of North Texas Press, 1997). Ramiro “Ray” Martinez, They Call Me Ranger Ray: From the UT Tower Sniper to Corruption in South Texas (New Braunfels, Texas: Rio Bravo Publishing, 2005). Vertical Files, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, University of Texas at Austin (Tower Sniping).

Categories:

• Law, Law Enforcement, and Outlaws
• Lawless Activities and Outlawed Activity

Time Periods:

• Texas Post World War II

The following, adapted from the Chicago Manual of Style , 15th edition, is the preferred citation for this entry.

Gary M. Lavergne, “University of Texas Tower Shooting (1966),” Handbook of Texas Online , accessed August 16, 2024, https://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/entries/university-of-texas-tower-shooting-1966.

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After Shooting, Texas State Fair Bans Guns. Republicans Want Them Back.

The Texas State Fair, a beloved institution, has imposed a ban on firearms. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, is threatening a lawsuit.

By J. David Goodman

Reporting from Houston

After a gunman wounded three people at the Texas State Fair last year, organizers took the unusual step of prohibiting firearms at the annual celebration.

The new policy, announced last week , has already sparked a powerful reaction from gun groups and many Republican state officials. The state attorney general, Ken Paxton, has threatened to sue the City of Dallas, which owns the fairgrounds, if the policy is not reversed.

The dispute cuts to the heart of what has been a difficult balance between state laws that increasingly allow people to carry guns in public and the need to protect large public events from devastating outbreaks of gun violence.

It also underscores a fundamental rift between those who support broader Second Amendment rights as a means of self-defense, and gun control advocates who argue that a greater number of guns in public increases the likelihood of deadly violence.

“While it may be that your new policy placates some, the result will make your patrons less safe,” read a letter signed by dozens of Republican members of the Texas Legislature and several Republican candidates who are on the ballot in November. “Gun-free zones are magnets for crime because they present less of a threat to those who seek to do evil.”

The state party’s platform calls for an end to “gun-free” zones across Texas.

Organizers of the state fair said that the decision was reached after careful consideration, “reviewing the policies of similar Texas events and consulting with all of our security partners.” In the organization’s statement, Karissa Condoianis, a spokeswoman, said that the fair continues to be “a strong supporter of the rights of responsible gun-owning Texans.”

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