After Uvalde Police admitted they made the wrong decision when responding to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a police officer is speaking out.
As Mamas Uncut reported, 19 students and two teachers lost their lives after an 18-year-old gunman barricaded himself inside a classroom of the elementary school for roughly an hour.
Uvalde Texas Police Officer Speaks Out After Response Tactic for School Shooting Is Questioned
While the police have admitted the mistake, they did not say just how many lives their decision to wait for backup cost. While talking with People, the officer said, “There was almost a mutiny.”
“We were like, ‘There’s a f—ing gunman in the school, we hear gunshots, and we’re just going to stand here with our thumbs up our asses?’ We wanted to go in and save lives. It was the most frustrating situation of my entire career.”
The officer admitted that at the moment, they “felt like cowards.” He continued, telling People:
“It felt cowardly to stand off and let this punk, this kid, this 18-year-old a**hole just go in and do whatever he wanted to do. There was a lot of arguing, a lot of cussing, a lot of people who were saying that we should just say f— it and go in, but then what? We needed to have a plan, and the commander didn’t have a plan.”
In the initial statement made by Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Safety, admitting fault, he revealed children used their cell phones to make numerous calls to 911.
As The Wall Street Journal reports, “From 12:03 to 12:46, 911 dispatchers received numerous calls from within the classroom, including repeated calls from a child whispering that people were dead and begging “‘Please send the police now,’” McCraw revealed.
During this time, 19 law enforcement officers waiting in the hallway. The reason they waited, The Journal reports, was because “the commander on scene believed no lives were at risk.”
The commander believed “it was better to wait until a tactical team could get keys to the classroom before entering.” As McCraw continued, he said, “The on-scene commander at that time believed it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject. Obviously, based upon the information we have, children in that classroom were at risk and it was in fact still an active shooter… It was the wrong decision. Period.”
Several students, who survived, shared their accounts of what occurred in that classroom when the gunman barricaded himself. You can read about what they witnessed here and here. The motive as to why this gunman carried out this horrific attack has not been revealed.
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