'We Gotta Get in There': Officer Tried to Stop Uvalde Gunman but Told to Wait

By Michael Murney

Source Houston Chronicle

Recently released body camera footage shows Sgt. Eduardo Canales, head of the Uvalde Police Department's SWAT team, appealed to other officers to confront 18-year-old school shooter Salvador Ramos minutes after law enforcement arrived on the scene at Robb Elementary School on May 24.

The footage, first released Sunday by Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, shows Canales and other law enforcement officers seeking cover at 11:37 a.m. after taking fire from Ramos in the hallway outside the classroom where the attack was taking place.

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Canales exited the school to report shots fired and appeared to have been injured from the shots: the footage shows blood on Canales' hand as he asks "Am I bleeding? Am I bleeding?"

At 11:38 a.m., Canales addresses a Texas Department of Public Safety state trooper positioned at the school's entrance after reporting shots fired on his radio.

"Dude, we've got to get in there," Canales says to the trooper, who appears to be wielding a long gun.

"DPS is sending people," the trooper responds.

"We've got to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We've got to get in there," Canales repeats.

Another 72 minutes passed following Canales' exchange with the DPS trooper before a tactical unit of federal agents stormed the school and killed the gunman—after he'd already massacred 19 students and two teachers.

DPS spokespeople did not immediately respond to questions about the exchange between Canales and the trooper.

Mayor McLaughlin released the edited footage the same day that the Texas House of Representatives published a damning 77-page report detailing the House's investigation into "systemic failures" in law enforcement's response to the shooting. The investigation is the first so far to focus on state and federal officers' actions, the Texas Tribune reported.

Of the 376 officers on the scene, most were state and federal agents; DPS officers accounted for about a quarter of responders, investigators revealed in the report.

DPS Director Steve McCraw has focused blame for law enforcement's failures on Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, centering him as the primary cause of officers' "abject failure" in responding to the attack.

"The only thing stopping the hallway of dedicated officers from entering [classrooms]... was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children," McCraw said during testimony before a special committee of lawmakers last month.

Following releases of the body camera footage and the committee's interim report, DPS announced Monday that it had created an internal committee to determine if any of the 91 state troopers and Rangers on the scene during the shooting violated any laws or department policies.

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