Police were under fire Thursday, May 26 in Texas, suspected of having taken too long to intervene in the school of Uvalde, where an 18-year-old teenager killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.
During a press conference, a police official, accused of passivity, suffered a barrage of questions from the press, without answering many of them on the exact course of the killing.
Read also Killing in Texas: “For some Americans, including Democrats, the firearm is a cultural object”
The White House announced that Joe Biden would go with his wife Jill on Sunday to "
share the mourning of the community
" of this small town in Texas devastated by one of the worst shooting massacres in recent years in the world. country.
According to a video and numerous testimonies, parents waited outside the school, according to them for an eternity, without the police intervening, while the high school student, Salvador Ramos, was carrying out his massacre in a classroom. class.
A “complex” situation
“
About an hour
” after the suspect entered the school, US Border Patrol units arrived, “
entered the school and killed the suspect
,” Victor said at the press conference. Escalon, the regional director of the Texas Department of State Security.
Faced with the press in number and the pain of the families, he repeated that there was "
a lot of information, many fluctuating points
" in the investigation.
"
It takes days, hours, it takes time
," said Victor Escalon.
He said that, contrary to what had been mentioned before, the perpetrator of the killing had "
faced no one
", no police, before entering the school.
Before entering it, underlined Victor Escalon, he shot at the school.
“
Four minutes later
”, the first local police arrived on the spot.
"
They hear gunshots, take bullets, retreat and take cover
," the police chief said Thursday.
It was then 11:40 a.m. Tuesday, and Salvador Ramos was in Robb Elementary School.
It was from this moment that parents began to arrive in front of the school.
In a video posted on social networks and obtained by Storyful, we can see frustrated parents, urging the police to enter the establishment at the time of the tragedy.
The footage also shows a police officer roughly pushing one of the people outside the establishment.
"
During this time
," said Victor Escalon during his press conference, the police, hit by gunfire, "
evacuated staff, students, teachers... A lot of things are happening, it's complex
”.
Then, an hour later, the specialized police arrived and killed the young man behind the massacre.
The debate on the possession of weapons does not advance
In addition to the 21 killed, 17 people were injured, including three police officers.
The shooter had targeted his grandmother before going to school with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle.
Thursday, the manufacturer of this weapon announced that it would not go to the big convention organized in Texas this weekend by the NRA, the main lobby of the weapons of the country.
The tragedy stunned Uvalde, a town of 16,000 inhabitants halfway between San Antonio and the Mexican border, and predominantly Hispanic, with pain.
In addition to a similar memorial in front of the school, twenty-one white crosses have been lined up in the central square of Uvalde, around a fountain, to mark the memory of each of the victims.
Dozens of residents, relatives, students and friends gathered there on Thursday, laying wreaths of flowers, as did Meghan Markle, wife of British Prince Harry.
In the United States, school shootings are a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far been powerless to stem.
The debate on gun regulation in the country is almost on hold, given the lack of hope that Congress will pass an ambitious national law on the issue.
The
March for our Lives
movement , created after the Parkland shootings, called for a June 11 rally in Washington to call for tougher gun regulations.
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