Source San Antonio Express-News
Minutes after a rifle-wielding teenager began shooting up Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, a girl who identified herself as a fourth-grader called 911 to report, "There is somebody dying at my school," newly released records show.
The girl was whispering and barely audible as she told a 911 dispatcher she was hiding in a closet, adding, "I'm so scared."
The dispatcher replied: "Stay barricaded inside the closet." She asked the girl her name, then repeated it back to her, and urged her to "just stay quiet."
More than 20 minutes later, the girl was still in the closet, unnerved and whispering as she told the dispatcher: "They're knocking on my door saying it's the police ... Is it the police?"
It was.
The 911 call is part of a storehouse of previously unreleased information about the shooting that was made public on Saturday by the city of Uvalde. The material includes police body camera video, radio communications and text messages. Journalists for the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle and ABC News collaborated in reviewing the records.
Based on a partial review, the newly released information does not alter the basic understanding of what happened on the morning of May 24, 2022, when an 18-year-old armed with an AR-15-style semiautomatic rifle walked into a pair of interconnected fourth-grade classrooms at Robb Elementary and began shooting.
At least 380 officers from local, state and federal law enforcement agencies responded to the scene, but they failed to confront and kill the shooter until 77 minutes after he began his rampage. By then, 19 children and two teachers were dead or dying.
Police have been widely condemned for not intervening earlier, and two have been criminally charged: Pedro "Pete" Arredondo, then chief of the Uvalde school district police, and Adrian Gonzales, then a school police officer. In June, a Uvalde County grand jury indicted them on charges of child abandonment or endangerment, a state jail felony punishable by up to two years behind bars. Both have pleaded not guilty.
The newly released material underscores the sluggish and disorganized police response.
At 11:54 a.m., 21 minutes after the shooter began firing, Sgt. Daniel Coronado of the Uvalde Police Department is heard on body camera video saying he believes Arredondo has made contact with the attacker.
"No, no one's made contact with him," another officer replies.
At 12:34 p.m., just over an hour after the incident began, an officer is heard saying, "We don't know if he has anyone in the room."
"Yes, we do... casualties," Coronado responded.
The newly disclosed records underscore the horror and disbelief that gripped Uvalde that morning. "Please hurry" was a constant refrain of witnesses who called 911 as the tragedy unfolded.
The attacker began his frenzy of violence at his grandmother's home, where he was living at the time. He shot his grandmother in the face, seriously injuring her. Then he stole her pickup and drove toward Robb Elementary. He crashed the truck into a drainage channel near the school at 11:28 a.m. Two employees of a funeral home across the street walked over to assist him. He shot at them and missed, then walked to the Robb campus, climbed over a fence and made his way into the fourth-grade building through an unlocked exit door.
One of the funeral home employees called 911 to beg for a rapid police response.
"There's kids out there. Please!" the man told a dispatcher as the shooter approached the school. "Oh my God, these kids. Oh my goodness ... Father, please, in the name of Jesus. Please, protect the children."
The dispatcher replied that police were on the way. They arrived within minutes.
'It's my nephew'
In another of the newly released calls, the shooter's uncle called 911 and said he might be able to talk the 18-year-old into surrendering. The uncle, Armando Ramos, appeared not to realize that his nephew had been shot dead by Border Patrol agents minutes earlier.
"This thing that's happening at Robb ... it's my nephew," the uncle told a 911 dispatcher. "I think he might listen to me. He does listen to me."
When the dispatcher put him on hold briefly, Ramos could be heard telling an unidentified person: "Patience ... patience. I think he's shooting kids. He has the classroom hostage."
The dispatcher got back on the line and asked whether the teenager had exhibited any sudden change in behavior recently. The uncle replied: "No, no, no, no. Nothing."
He then said that the teen "was mad that his grandma was bugging him too much ... I said, well, that's her job."
To no one in particular, the uncle can be heard saying: "Oh, my god, please. Don't do nothing stupid."
The dispatcher told Ramos someone would be in touch with him shortly, then ended the call.
'Hurry, hurry, hurry'
The 911 calls include one from an unidentified teacher at Robb Elementary, who told the dispatcher in a hushed voice that "an active shooter" was loose in the school. The woman said she couldn't see what was happening but could hear gunshots and had received a text saying someone was injured in a classroom nearby.
The dispatcher asked which classroom.
"I don't know," the teacher replied in a frantic tone. "I've got to go. I can't let him hear me.
"Hurry, hurry, hurry!" she pleaded before hanging up.
Relatives of the shooter called 911 to express concern that he might come after them, too. "The active shooter, he's my cousin, and I don't want him to come to my house," a family member told a dispatcher.
The shooter's uncle was also worried about what the teenager might do. He called back at least twice after his initial 911 call to ask police to pick him up or allow him to go to police headquarters.
"Please, ma'am, I don't want him to do anything more stupid," the uncle said in a call at 1:20 p.m. He appeared still unaware that his nephew was dead.
Outside the school, chaos reigned, the records show. There were rumors of a second shooter at Uvalde High School. One officer sent to the civic center was directed back to Robb Elementary to keep families behind the police tape. A Uvalde police sergeant gave the magazines from his AR-15 rifle to his corporal, who was in SWAT gear but had no ammunition for his own weapon.
Some officers hurried to the middle school to supervise pickup. Others headed to the shooter's home.
The 911 calls and other records were released at noon Saturday in response to a lawsuit by the San Antonio Express-News, the Houston Chronicle, ABC News and numerous other news organizations. The suit sought to compel the city, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff's Office to disclose records and documents related to the massacre.
In a July 8 ruling, Judge Sid Harle ordered the school district and the sheriff's office to release the records. Both are appealing the ruling.
The city of Uvalde, however, reached a settlement with the plaintiffs to disclose the requested information.
The newly released records show that in the hours and days after the shooting, then- Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin's email box was flooded with messages from around the world. Missives came from people in cities that had suffered mass shootings, such as Parkland, Fla., Newtown, Conn., and Aurora, Colo. Horrified onlookers offered condolences and asked for ways to help.
Mental health professionals volunteered their services. Mayors across the country provided information on how to handle the aftermath of the shooting.
But the emails quickly became more aggressive. The shift in tone began May 25, the morning after the massacre, when gubernatorial candidate Beto O'Rourke attacked Texas Gov. Greg Abbott during a news conference about the shooting.
O'Rourke accused the governor of not doing enough to prevent gun violence. McLaughlin, who was at the event, called O'Rourke a "sick son of a bitch" for politicizing the news conference.
McLaughlin was deluged with angry emails from those decrying his language, his attack on the candidate and his own lack of public fury over gun control. In the coming days, as details emerged about the slow police response, people emailed to berate the mayor about that.
'A VERY sensitive subject'
Uvalde City Council member Ernest W. "Chip" King III was already thinking about how to handle the memorials that had begun popping up. The town square and the Robb Elementary campus had become magnets for piles of flowers, stuffed animals and other mementos.
"We need to consider how we handle the dismantling of the memorials," King wrote the mayor and other city officials on Sunday, May 29, 2022. "It will be a VERY sensitive subject and needs to be handled correctly... Let's make sure the trash guys just don't go start loading this stuff up and that there is a plan."
Soon, the lawsuits were rolling in. On June 1, the city was notified by letter that the Thomas J. Henry law firm was representing two children injured in the attack. The firm demanded that the city immediately preserve or hand over evidence related to the shooting. The same day, a second law firm notified the city that it was representing an injured child, the records show.
The Texas Department of Public Safety possesses a much larger volume of information about the shooting than what the city released Saturday. Last year, a state district court judge ordered the department to release pertinent material to the same news organizations that sued the school district, the sheriff's office and the city. DPS is appealing the ruling.
Ninety-two DPS personnel responded to the shooting, more than any other law enforcement agency except U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which had 148 agents at the school.
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