Should they fire police officers who responded to the shooting in Uvalde?
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(CNN) --
The gunman entered the elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, casually brushing back his long hair before moving into adjoining classrooms where he killed 19 students and two teachers, according to edited portions of surveillance video. of the law enforcement response.
The 82 minutes of haunting footage from the Robb Elementary School shooting shows police officers, some armed with rifles and ballistic shields, concentrated in a hallway for more than an hour before entering a classroom and killing the shooter.
The agents involved in the Uvalde massacre may never face consequences due to a web of conflicting rules and interests
At one point, officers approached the door of the classroom, minutes after the shooter entered the school unhindered.
They then quickly retreated after the gunman opened fire with his semi-automatic rifle.
The video of the shooting does not shed light on why officers waited so long to confront the shooter, nor does it reveal who was responsible for the delay.
In fact, days after it was published by the Austin American-Statesman, the video raises more questions than it answers.
The shooter apparently fired the bulk of the shooting between the time he entered the classrooms and when officers approached the classroom minutes later only to retreat under a volley of gunfire.
Here's what surveillance video revealed about the much-criticized and baffling police response, and key questions still unanswered as a Texas House investigative committee is set to release its preliminary report on Sunday.
A delayed entry and withdrawal under fire
For this reason a policeman looked at his cell phone in the middle of the shooting in Texas 0:46
In the first edited video of the shooting, which is just over four minutes long, the audio captures the screams of desperate teachers as the gunman crosses the parking lot after crashing his truck just outside Robb Elementary School.
He entered the school at 11:33 a.m. on May 24, walked down a hallway with a semi-automatic rifle (his face was briefly shown), and entered a classroom, where he opened fire again, firing dozens of rounds.
When the shots rang out, a student who had been looking around the corner of the hallway at the gunman quickly turned and ran.
Multiple volleys of gunfire echoed through the hallways for nearly three minutes.
The American-Statesman edited the footage to blur the identity of at least one child and remove the sound of the children's screams.
The victims are not shown.
Approximately three minutes after the attacker entered, at least nine officers made what appeared to be a coordinated entry into the building.
This was about 10 seconds after the last burst of gunfire was heard from the classrooms, followed by a long pause.
At least two officers entered from one end of the corridor and seven in single file from the other.
Video of the shooting showed, for the first time, how quickly officers got to the scene and close to the gunshots.
Indignation, anger and astonishment: this is how the relatives of victims and police experts reacted to the video of the Uvalde massacre
"It's an incredible turnaround time," said Bill Francis, a former FBI agent who led the bureau's elite hostage rescue team for 17 years.
"What happens next is where things go wrong."
At least three officers, two with rifles, immediately headed for the classroom door, ducking for cover.
Rather than force their way through the door, which would have been the widely accepted next step in an active shooter situation and where officers would almost certainly have fired, they stood outside the door until additional shots were heard.
On video alone, the direction of the shots from the classroom is unclear, though officials have previously said officers fired as they first approached the door.
“They're right there,” Francis said of the three officers seen near the classroom.
“They are getting shot.
At that point you just have to win the fight.
You have to go into that room and you have to eliminate the threat and that's established doctrine."
Instead, the officers retreated down the hallway to a spot just below the surveillance camera.
An agent grabbed the back of his head.
"The security priorities that we teach ... are overcoming that kind of primal instinct of self-preservation and pushing it to address the threat, to meet the threat," said Thor Eells, executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers, referring to the Missed initial opportunity to engage the attacker.
“It required that we had to get into danger to do that and that was the opportunity between two, three, four (officers) there to start attacking that suspect with gunshots.”
Active shooter training generally holds that delays in confronting a gunman can cost civilians their lives and officers should move into the gunfire, alone if necessary, to stop the killing, experts say.
A quick confrontation can save lives.
“They lose the possibility that the children who are injured, bleeding in there, maybe they will be saved and more children will be shot at that time.
To me, that's the biggest failure," Francis said of the officers' decision to back away from the shooting.
The withdrawal came at a crucial moment in the siege and raises questions about the training of the officers, according to experts who viewed the video.
"The officers turn their backs on the door and run down the hallway and the attacker, if he wanted to, could easily have opened that door and killed all those officers," Francis said.
“They just turn around and run away from the gunshots.
It's unfortunate because at that point they lose all momentum."
The husband of the murdered teacher was among the first to respond.
Massacre in Texas: Summary of the beginning of the funerals of the children and teachers of Uvalde 9:06
Officers in bulletproof vests, some with ballistic shields, are seen wandering the school hallway as the attacker occupied adjoining classrooms.
Police body camera video, included in the footage, showed two officers bumping fists at one point.
An agent is seen in another clip using a wall-mounted hand sanitizer dispenser.
Early in the siege, an agent is seen going through his phone, drawing criticism in some quarters until a local politician provided important context.
State Rep. Joe Moody, one of three members of the House Commission of Inquiry investigating the law enforcement response, tweeted that the officer is Ruben Ruiz of the Uvalde School District Police, the teacher's husband. Eva Mireles, who was shot to death.
Eva Mireles, teacher at Robb Elementary School (Courtesy of family)
The teacher contacted her husband by phone as he was standing with a gun in his hand in the hallway to tell him that he was dying, according to Moody.
Mireles was a fourth grade teacher.
She had been an educator for 17 years, her family said.
Seconds after being seen on the phone, the video shows Ruiz walking out of camera view.
He returns moments later and talks to other agents.
Ruiz was eventually removed from the building after trying to intervene, according to Moody.
"He tried to attack, but they took him out of the building and disarmed him," Moody said.
His attempt to engage the attacker and his expulsion from the building are not visible.
The Uvalde County coroner's office has not released information on deaths that day and public officials have not commented on how many children may have died as officers waited outside and inside the building.
During the siege, the children made several phone calls to the police while the officers waited in the hallway.
An 11-year-old girl who survived said she smeared herself with the blood of a dead classmate and played dead.
Steve Ijames, who led a SWAT unit in Missouri and is now a consultant on police tactics, said video of the shooting does not reveal whether any officers tried to attack the attacker on their own.
“I have to believe that some people turn to others and say, 'What do we exist for?
What are we doing?'” Ijames said.
“The overriding question when you watch the video is, 'Why aren't you doing your job?'
There are a lot of cops pointing guns down the hallway like they expect this guy to run.
The idea that we stand there with bunkers, shields, rifles and helmets and do nothing is just incomprehensible."
Ijames is surprised that one of the officers in the video "didn't just say, fuck this, we're going in."
The video of the shooting does not shed light on the role of the agencies in the scene
Learn about the testimony of a child survivor of the massacre in Uvalde 5:17
It's not clear from the video alone which agencies the officers belonged to or who was in charge, though an investigative report due out this weekend could provide answers.
The Texas Department of Public Safety has said the officer in charge was school district police chief Pedro "Pete" Arredondo, who was criticized by the parents of the slain children, local leaders and law enforcement officials. the law.
DPS has said that Arredondo wrongly classified the siege as a barricade situation that, unlike an active attacker report, requires a more measured response.
Arredondo has said he did not consider himself the incident commander nor did he instruct officers to refrain from breaking into classrooms.
He resigned from the Uvalde Municipal Council seat that he assumed just a week after the attack.
At least three federal, two state and three local agencies responded to the carnage at Robb Elementary.
The video sheds no light on the role of range officers from other agencies.
"We don't know what other leadership people came in after the initial boss came in, what their interaction was with that boss, but there are a lot of people who could have stepped in and taken over who were actually in the hallway," Francis explained.
Many of at least eight agencies whose officials responded to the school that day have not responded to CNN's requests for comment.
Others have declined to comment on his role in the response.
The mayor of Uvalde says he fears that the investigation of the school massacre will be covered up and asks for the intervention of the governor of Texas, Abbott
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee said in a statement last month that the FBI and the Texas Rangers were investigating the shooting.
She said that "any release of records from that incident at this time would interfere with said ongoing investigation and prevent a thorough and complete investigation."
Busbee has also objected to the release of the video of the shooting, according to the Texas DPS.
The district attorney has not responded to CNN requests for comment.
DPS Director Col. Steven McCraw last month criticized the delayed police response as an “abject failure,” citing evidence from surveillance video of the hallway, in part.
"This certainly was a disaster," Francis said, referring to the law enforcement response.
"There's a lot of blame to dish out."
The video of the shooting does not reveal what was happening with the police response outside the school.
"What's going on outside of that classroom and other breakpoints and windows and things like that?" Francis asked.
“A lot of times we would accommodate to engage subjects from windows… If the subject could be approached from any of those points, at least the video obviously doesn't address that.”
Other videos of officers both inside and outside the building have not been released.
"We haven't seen any of that and that's why I think there is a lot of information that could explain why there isn't as much activity inside if there is something that (the agents inside) were being briefed or advised about what was going on outside." said Eells, executive director of the National Association of Tactical Officers.
"I'm not sure, without having the benefit of interviewing and talking to the officers that were on scene, what they were thinking and why they were so focused on staying inside and trying to get the suspect from that perspective, versus using the outside." , which would have been much easier to do and potentially even faster to do."
At 12:21 pm, a group of agents, including US Border Patrol agents in tactical gear, moved down the hallway in formation.
They waited again—this time until 12:50 pm—to break into the classroom and kill the attacker.
A volley of gunfire marked the end of one of the deadliest school shootings in US history, just two days before summer break.
The confrontation with the attacker is not shown.
Moments later, the video of the shooting ends.
“One of the biggest things that is likely to change here is recognizing the need for leadership and command or supervisory level personnel to be better trained, better equipped to make decisions in critical incidents,” Eells said.
“You don't have minutes to make decisions.
You have seconds."
CNN's Rosa Flores, Rosalina Nieves and Elizabeth Wolfe contributed to this report.