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During the 2022 Uvalde school massacre, Texas police received a flood of 911 calls — from trapped students and teachers, confused state officials and a family member of shooter Salvador Ramos — but nothing seemed to prompt officers to act, according to new evidence.
Although nearly 400 local, state and federal police officers arrived on the scene, it took more than 70 minutes for police to catch and shoot Ramos, by which time he had already killed 19 students and two teachers in one of the worst school massacres in U.S. history.
The calls, made public Saturday following a lawsuit by the Associated Press and other news organizations, shed new light on what police knew about the May 24 shooting and when.
One notable call came from Armando Ramos, Salvador Ramos’ uncle, begging police to put him in touch with one of his family members in the hope that he could persuade him to turn himself in.
“He listens to everything I tell him,” Ramos said in the emergency call.
“Maybe he could resign or do something to face up to it.”
By this time, however, the standoff was already over and the police had received numerous further requests urging them to intervene.
The calls came in before the shooting even started.
“Oh my God, they have a gun,” said one caller, describing how Ramos drove a pickup truck into a ditch in front of the school.
“Oh my God, I think there were kids in the gym,” she added. “Please hurry up!”
Ramos entered the school at 11:33 a.m. and the first police officers arrived on the scene a few minutes later. However, radio messages released as part of the lawsuit show that they mainly discussed setting up a cordon, directing traffic and keeping parents away from the scene of the accident.
Nearly 45 minutes later, an official from the state Department of Public Security called local police and asked if a command post had been set up. An official replied that they were not sure.
Meanwhile, the massacre at the school continued.
“Please, I don’t want to die,” 10-year-old student Khloie Torres called the police. “My teacher is dead. Oh, my God.”
“Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!” said an instructor in another emergency call, describing how he heard “a lot, a whole lot of gunshots.”
Family members were furious because it took two years for this additional information to come to light.
“If we thought we could get everything we wanted, we would ask for a time machine to go back … and save our children, but we can’t. So all we’re asking for is justice, accountability and transparency, and they refuse to give us that,” Brett Cross, whose nephew Uziyah Garcia was killed in the shooting, told AP.
The 911 audio provides the latest devastating picture of the police response to the shooting.
In January, the Justice Department found in a report that there had been a “series of cascading failures in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training” throughout the operation.
The Justice Department complained that it had failed to establish a clear chain of command and that officers had ignored training principles that require immediate action when faced with an active shooter until the threat has passed.
“If law enforcement had followed generally accepted procedures in an active shooting situation and immediately gone after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” said Attorney General Merrick Garland in releasing the report.
Earlier this year, former Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo was charged with child endangerment along with a colleague. The two men, the only ones charged for their roles in the operation, have both pleaded not guilty.
During the shooting, Arredondo initially left his radio in the car.
He said he did not see himself as the commander of operations and did not tell others not to enter the classroom where Ramos was hiding. State officials argue that it was Arrendondo who made the decision to treat the gunman as a “barricaded suspect” and to first try negotiations.
While Ramos shot children in a classroom, dozens of police officers stood outside, deciding what to do and waiting for riot shields to arrive.
Eventually, a Border Patrol unit, along with a sheriff’s officer from a neighboring county, entered the classroom and shot Ramos. They reportedly made this decision alone and without the direction of an operations officer.
Arredondo told CNN this week that he had been “scapegoated from the beginning.”
“If you look at the body camera footage, you can see there was no hesitation – neither I nor the first handful of police officers who went in there and walked right into the danger zone, as you might call it, and came under fire, hesitated,” Arredondo said, describing an initial brief encounter between Ramos and the first police officers to arrive on the scene.
“The manual says that the incident commander does not stand in the hallway and get shot at,” he added. “The incident commander is someone who is not in the danger zone.”
