Video posted online shows chaotic Uvalde scene, parents screaming for police to stop shooter

By Bethany Blankley | The Center Square

A video recording of the events that unfolded on Tuesday during the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, shows the chaotic interactions between parents and law enforcement as an 18-year-old man shot and killed 21 people.

After the shooter, 18-year-old Uvalde resident Salvador Ramos, entered the school, he fired at two arriving Uvalde police officers, injuring both.

No other law enforcement officers were on the scene to stop him from entering the school, authorities said. Once inside, he barricaded himself inside a classroom and eventually shot dead everyone inside the room.

Over the course of roughly an hour, parents and onlookers assembled outside of the school, screaming for the police who’d assembled outside to go inside.

In a video capturing part of the chaos, one person can be seen pinned to the ground by a police officer, as onlookers yell, “What the (expletive) are you doing to her?”

One officer told bystanders not to intervene.

Another said, “We’re taking care of it. We’re taking care of it.”

In response to parents and onlookers screaming and swearing, one officer, who was holding a taser, told them to stay back. Other officers can also be heard telling them to stay back.

The video was posted online and shared on multiple social media channels.

Steve McCraw, the director of Texas Department of Public Safety, told reporters that it took between 40 minutes to an hour from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when he was killed.

“The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” McCraw said. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”

But parents and residents disagree. And it wasn’t Uvalde police or state troopers who stopped the shooter. It was a special tactical agent of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection who got into the classroom and shot him.

One resident who lives across the street from the school, Juan Carranza, who witnessed Ramos going inside, told law enforcement officers standing outside, “Go in there! Go in there!” He said they should’ve entered the school sooner, saying, “There were more of them. There was just one of him,” the Associated Press reported.

A father of a fourth-grade student, Javier Cazares, raced to the school when he heard what happened. When he arrived, police were outside and not moving in, he told the Associated Press.

“Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to,” he said. “More could have been done.”

“They were unprepared,” he said of the law enforcement officers standing outside.

He would later find out that his daughter was among the 19 children who were killed.