If authorities had gone straight after the 18-year-old gunman who killed 21 people at a school in a remote area of southwest Texas in May 2022, children’s lives might have been spared. The US Department of Justice released a damning review that supports this.
The report discovered that deficiencies in “leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training” resulted in a disorganized reaction to Salvador Ramos, the gunman, on May 24 at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
The 18-year-old gunman should have been confronted by officers as soon as they broke into the classroom, but instead they treated him like a “barricaded subject” and left him there for 77 minutes with 33 students.
“The resulting delay provided an opportunity for the active shooter to have additional time to reassess and reengage his deadly actions inside the classroom,” the report stated.
“It also contributed to a delay in medical interventions with the potential to impact survivability.”
Over the course of an hour, there were at least ten “stimulus events” that could have prompted police to “immediately stop the killing” in accordance with active shooter protocols.
Approximately “45 rounds in law enforcement officer presence” and “at least six separate instances of gunfire” were reported during these incidents.
Film of the gunman entering the school and police waiting outside the fourth-grade (Year 5) classrooms where he opened fire has surfaced in the 20 months since the review was announced.
