Uvade police were slow to react to the entry of a young man armed with an automatic rifle into the Uvalde primary school.
Colonel Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged this Friday at a press conference that the police were wrong in their response to the Uvalde massacre.
The aggressor fired 100 cartridges, as he has explained.
He ended up crying.
“What do I tell the parents?
I have nothing to say to the parents, apart from what happened.
We are not here to defend what happened, we are here to report the facts so that they have the facts”, she has said.
"If I thought it was going to help anything, I'd apologize."
McCraw has acknowledged that precious time was wasted waiting for special forces and handling the situation the way he did.
As many as 19 officers were in the hallway, with the assailant inside the classroom on the other side of the door, for about 45 minutes.
With the information he now has, “it was a wrong decision not to break down the classroom door” from the start, he has admitted.
The police considered that at that time there were no children at risk, he has explained.
The police arrived at the school earlier than was known, but did not confront the murderer for an hour.
The police also prevented access to parents who wanted to go in to look for their children due to police passivity.
The Uvalde massacre has left 19 children and two teachers dead.
It is the second largest multiple shooting in a school in the United States, only behind the one a decade ago in Sandy Hook, Connecticut.
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Police in Uvalde, near a tribute to the victims of the massacre. CHANDAN KHANNA (AFP)
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