What amendments are the victims of the massacre in Uvalde waiting for?
1:21
(CNN) --
Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco ran to Robb Elementary School when he received calls that a man was shooting after he crashed his truck on May 24.
Timeline of the massacre in Uvalde, Texas: two hours of violence
He was one of the 376 agents who went to help the children and teachers.
But unlike the vast majority, he had the rank to take charge easily, had vital information on the shooter and a call on the victims in a classroom, and was seen by others as a commander on the scene with up-to-date information.
Another girl also called 911 during the Uvalde massacre.
Listen here 7:32
But despite more than 30 years of law enforcement experience for the city and county, despite knowing not only his own staff but many in the command structures across the multiple agencies that came to Robb , Nolasco decided to stay at a different crime scene, already under control, while a much bigger disaster unfolded.
When he finally arrived, he did not take charge and ensure that the cries for help of some girls trapped with injured classmates and teachers were answered.
Mother of one of the victims of the Uvalde massacre sues the arms manufacturer, the arms store and the agents of the operation
In the days after the massacre that left 19 children and two teachers dead, as demands mounted for answers about why it took 77 minutes to stop the shooter once he entered the school, Nolasco was comforted by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and US Senator Ted Cruz, his political allies.
Sheriff Ruben Nolasco sat next to US Senator Ted Cruz of Texas at a prayer vigil the day after the massacre.
An elected leader answerable only to the voters, he has not been subjected to the same scrutiny as the now-fired school police chief;
the city's acting police chief, now retired before he could be fired, and members of the Texas Rangers and the Texas Department of Public Safety, who have faced official scrutiny, leading to suspensions and at least one layoff.
CNN has now detailed Nolasco's actions in our investigation into the leaderless swamp and deadly inaction in Uvalde.
Nolasco turned down interview requests for months.
CNN finally caught up with him in November, and while he declined to answer most questions, he responded when asked if he thought his answer was appropriate: "Yes," he said.
"I believe it".
advertising
What Nolasco did
The sheriff told an investigator who was at his desk when rounds from a semi-automatic weapon tore bodies and lives apart at Robb Elementary School, filling the hallways with smoke and prompting a massive response from law enforcement.
Nolasco left his office to join the operation, he said.
But then he got diverted to another crime scene.
“I have been informed that there is a woman who was shot in the head on Díaz street.
Woman shot in the head in front of Diaz street by (an) unknown subject,” Nolasco broadcast at 11:35 am on May 24 on the sheriff's office frequency, repeating the information seconds later on the department's channel. police officer who was already full of broadcasts about gunshots and a gunman jumping over a school fence.
Why Nolasco changed course to the woman's home, and whether he may have initiated a lockdown on the school earlier, has remained an unanswered question for state investigators.
He later said a resident alerted him to the attack on the woman and stopped him as he passed by.
At 11:38 am, Nolasco was with the victim who surprisingly was still conscious and able to speak despite the gunshot wound to her face.
Nolasco, seen on body camera footage, said he was stopped en route to Robb to assist at another crime scene.
"Who did this to you?" Nolasco can be heard asking in previously undisclosed recording of a body camera worn by one of his aides and obtained by CNN.
The images were uploaded to police servers within hours of the shooting and made available to Texas Rangers investigating the response, but have not been made public.
When the victim said her grandson had shot her, Nolasco asked and got the gunman's name.
CNN's analysis of radio traffic, as well as surveillance and body camera footage indicates that the name, which CNN is not repeating to avoid increasing its visibility, was not immediately shared with school agents, even as they searched for the name. that information by other means.
At 11:43 am, a request was made to check the license plates of the truck that the attacker was driving in order to have a clue about his identity.
Eleven minutes later the owner of the vehicle was identified, but he was not the author of the shots.
At 11:59 a.m., School Police Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo tried to start negotiations, but without a name, he could only address the shooter as “Individual in room 111 and 112.”
Any negotiations go against post-Columbine policies to immediately remove active attackers.
At 12:08 p.m., 30 minutes after Nolasco learned the gunman's name, a sheriff's deputy who was in the hallway with Arredondo shared that he had responded to Diaz Street "where (the suspect) shot his first person in face".
Another man said: "No one knows who this guy is."
It isn't until 12:37 pm that someone is heard in the hallway outside the classroom using the attacker's name to address him.
CNN's review of Nolasco's actions offers the latest evidence that top law enforcement officials failed to take command and follow protocols to apprehend active attackers and provide prompt treatment to victims.
At least three of the dead, two children and a teacher, were still alive when officers finally entered the classroom, more than an hour after the shooter entered.
School police chief Arredondo initially took much of the blame and was fired in August.
He said that he never considered himself in charge.
Uvalde's interim police chief, Lt. Mariano Pargas, who like Nolasco could have taken command, opted to resign after CNN reported that he knew the children needed rescue and failed to organize help.
CNN has also revealed the actions and inaction that have seen a Texas Ranger and state police captain placed under review, and a state police sergeant fired.
Another officer who resigned from the state force while under investigation and took a job with the Uvalde school district was fired by that district after CNN showed how he waited outside the school during the attack, but said it would have been different if his own son would have been inside
"Where is the subject?"
Although he had a suspect's name, knew the man had tried to kill his grandmother, and was less than half a mile from the school, Nolasco decided not to go and sent some of his deputies.
He stayed with her grandmother when the doctors arrived, loaded her onto a stretcher and took her to a hospital.
Nolasco, captured on an officer's body camera footage, asked about the shooter before going to school.
Still at her grandmother's house, she asked an agent: "Do they have it fenced off?"
It is not clear if Nolasco knew then that the 18-year-old who had shot his grandmother in the face was also the school shooter.
But when questioned by a Texas Ranger, he said it "wouldn't take a rocket scientist" to connect the two, according to a previously unreported interview log obtained by CNN.
Then he headed to school.
Faced with repeated questions about his response in a recent interview with CNN, Nolasco defended himself, insisting that he was not at school "for the first 35 minutes, at least the first 35 minutes" of the 77-minute matchup.
He told the investigator he "had good reason" for the delay, saying he stayed behind to arrange transport for emergency services, persuaded a neighbor to leave the street while the attacker was on the loose, and then made a few calls.
But CNN's analysis of the body cameras shows that Nolasco was on the scene of the school at 11:49 a.m., just 16 minutes after the shooter entered.
CNN contacted Nolasco again about the time of his arrival, as shown in the images, but has not heard back.
Once on the scene, Nolasco asked one of his assistants: "Where is the subject?"
The shocking call for help from a girl in the Uvalde massacre to 911 4:29
"In a classroom, sheriff," was the reply.
"I don't know which classroom, but he is in a classroom."
Nolasco then said state police reinforcements were coming from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“DPS is coming,” he said.
“I have the captain.
We need, we need to contain this and see what, you know, who's in charge."
A text message conversation between Nolasco and DPS Capt. Joel Betancourt, obtained by CNN, shows they were in contact.
At 11:38 a.m., Betancourt texted Nolasco: “Uvalde school shooting reports.
They are valid?".
“Yes,” Nolasco responded, adding that he was with a woman who was shot in the head.
Betancourt warned him: "On the way."
Some time later, Nolasco texted Betancourt: "Barricade at school."
The early and erroneous assessment that the threat was a lone entrenched attacker, rather than an active attacker with casualties all around him, was quickly superseded by events at the school.
Agents inside and outside the building soon realized that classes were going on, that a teacher had called her husband a police officer to tell her that he had been shot, and that there were children calling 911 for people to come. to help them.
There was even a burst of gunfire from inside the classroom as officers waited outside.
The sheriff stayed outside the school buildings for the most part once he got there.
But there was no effective communication that active attacker protocol must be followed, that the threat must be neutralized as quickly as possible, either on the scene or among the many teams, some under the leadership of DPS, that were headed there.
Betancourt told investigators that he still believed they were dealing with an "entrenched subject" when he arrived, well into the second hour of the response.
Betancourt also told investigators that he spoke with the sheriff for updates while driving approximately 60 miles from Eagle Pass, Texas, to the school, and was told by Nolasco that the shooter had an AK47.
Nolasco denied it, telling CNN: "I never said that."
The DPS captain himself is under investigation for his actions that day.
He told investigators that he asked Nolasco as he was driving if he had an established command post, and again when he arrived because he thought the sheriff was in charge.
“I assumed the sheriff was running the deal,” he said in an interview.
In a second interview with an investigator, he explained, "I know the sheriff has operational control there at the time, and we were reaching out to the sheriff to get first-hand information about the incident as it was occurring."
Nolasco also disputed that to CNN.
“It is his impression, that is in him.
He is a captain.
And if that's what he assumed, then it was an assumption.
It was not validated."
Betancourt said he didn't know school police chief Arredondo was there until later.
He did not mention the city's interim police chief, Pargas.
DPS also had many of its own agents on the scene, including the now-fired Sgt. Juan Maldonado, who was one of the first to arrive.
The department has come under fire for failing to address what its own boss called "an abject failure."
DPS Director Col. Steven McCraw told CNN he would resign if his department was held accountable, but he told bereaved families in October that he did not believe DPS as an institution had failed.
children in classrooms
Last month, CNN showed that Pargas had direct knowledge that the children and teachers were trapped in classrooms with the gunman when he followed up on a 911 call from a student.
Nolasco complained to an investigator and to CNN about how poorly the radios in and around the school were working, and that the noise from the helicopters was also disruptive.
Body camera footage, however, shows that the radio dispatch of fourth grader Khloie Torres' call from room 112 can be clearly heard within earshot of Nolasco, who was outside on the college campus. school with a small group of law enforcement officers, including a Texas Ranger, talking about what to do.
A policeman from the city of Uvalde reiterated directly: "We have a child on the line, 911," he said.
Nolasco did not check to see if help was on the way for Khloie, who survived the massacre, and his classmates and teachers, instead focusing on evacuating classes that were not under immediate threat.
He told investigators that some classes were cleared.
“We found a classroom with some children and they were fine.
But then we realized that, hey, this is where the attacker was.
He had a clear shot at us.
So, we chose not to take the children out,” he said.
“We tell them, 'Everybody's going to be okay.
Just stay there.'”
asking for calm
Nolasco also spent time outside the school's fence as officers tried to keep parents off campus.
He told a relative of the woman he had been shot on Diaz Street that he had seen her and that she was being taken to a hospital in San Antonio.
The woman from the school yelled that the attacker was acting because of some problem with his mother.
She cried that her own son was a student at the school.
“Just get him out,” she yelled over the attacker.
"Kill him, kill him!"
Nolasco, in the corridor that leads to the classrooms where the attacker hid, gives instructions.
At the time, the school's police chief was trying to negotiate with the shooter but did not yet have his name.
A CNN analysis of footage from inside the school found no indication that Arredondo was told the shooter had family issues, even when his identity was known.
Nolasco entered the school building and headed toward the hallway where officers were poised to shoot the attacker if he came out.
He didn't speak to one of his deputies there, but told another nearby agent, a Texas Ranger, that there only had to be one person communicating from the hallway, and then he left.
The sheriff was with DPS Capt. Betancourt when Betancourt issued an unheeded order to stop entry into the classroom, ultimately killing the shooter at 12:50 p.m.
One of Nolasco's aides was on the raid team and fired his weapon at the attacker.
Another of his agents found out that his daughter was among the dead.
Immediately after the operation, Nolasco can be seen talking to a Texas Ranger, suggesting that information that there were children with the shooter would have slowed things down further.
“When you have hostages there, you really don't want to break down doors,” he said, in direct contradiction to active shooter training for law enforcement, which requires officers to first neutralize the suspect and “stop the killing,” even if it puts them in jeopardy. danger to officers or hostages.
A Texas House committee of inquiry into the Robb massacre said it received information that Nolasco learned of the Diaz Street shooting through means other than being stopped on his way to school, and perhaps before.
They requested her phone records to determine if a quicker report of the attack on the grandmother might have led to an earlier closing at the school or a quicker response.
When it issued its report in July, the commission had not received those phone records, though Nolasco told CNN that it has now submitted them.
In his post-event interview with investigators, Nolasco said he didn't know the exact times and told officers to review the records if they wanted to.
Those are the logs and camera records that CNN has now obtained, and that would also have been available to him.
Nolasco was also emotional and belligerent in his interview nine days after the horrific attack.
He called some of the routine questions “insulting” but added: “I know I didn't do anything wrong.
I do not have anything to hide".
After an hour of questions, near the end of the interview, he spoke about the suffering of his agents, saying, "It's been very traumatic for me, too."
Raising her voice, she cursed and said she needed to get it off her chest.
“I have had to deal with many things.
It sucks that they call us cowards."
uvalde