The Uvalde (Texas) police were criticized this Thursday for taking too long to go to the school where an 18-year-old boy killed 19 children and two teachers. US President Joe Biden will visit the school on Sunday to “share the pain of the community” of this small town in South Texas, shaken by one of the worst massacres with firearms in the country’s history.
Uvalde police were criticized Thursday in Texas for taking too long to go to the school in the town in the south of the state where an 18-year-old boy killed 19 children and two teachers on Tuesday.
At a press conference, a law enforcement official, accused of passivity, faced a barrage of questions from the press, many without answering about the exact course of the murder.
The White House announced that President Joe Biden and his wife will travel to the scene on Sunday to “share the pain of the community” of this small Texas town shaken by one of the worst massacres with firearms in recent years. in the country.
According to a video and numerous eyewitness accounts, the parents waited outside the school, for what they said was an eternity, without the police intervening, while the young perpetrator of the massacre, Salvador Ramos, carried out his massacre in a classroom .
“About an hour” after he entered the school, units of the United States Border Patrol arrived, “they entered the school and killed the suspect,” Víctor Escalón, regional director of the Department of Security, said at the press conference. Texas State.
Before a large number of journalists and the pain of the families, he reiterated that there was “a lot of information, a lot of changing points” in the investigation. “It takes days, it takes hours, it takes time,” she added.
Before entering, Víctor Escalón said, he fired at the school. “Four minutes later,” the first local police officers arrived at the scene. “They hear the shots, they take the bullets, they retreat and take cover,” the police official said Thursday.
It was 11:40 a.m. (local time) on Tuesday at the time, and Salvador Ramos was inside Robb Elementary School.
Indignation mixed with anger
That’s when parents started arriving at the school gate. In a video posted on social media and obtained by ‘Storyful’, frustrated parents can be seen urging police to enter the school at the time of the incident. The images also show a police officer unceremoniously pushing one of the people leaving the school.
Daniel Myers, a 72-year-old pastor, had arrived with his wife, Matilda, outside the school about 30 minutes after the shooter entered the school. The parents who were at the scene “were ready to go home.” One of the relatives said: “I was a soldier, give me a weapon and I’ll go.” I will not hesitate. I’m going,” he told AFP.
“So during this time,” Víctor Escalón said at a press conference, the policemen, hit by gunfire, “are evacuating staff, students, teachers… A lot of things are happening, it’s complex.” Then, an hour later, the specialized police arrived and killed the young man who had started the massacre.
The aggressor could be “aggressive”, according to his mother
In addition to the 21 dead, 17 people were injured, including three police officers. Eulalio Díaz, a local official, was in charge of identifying the bodies until late at night, according to the newspaper ‘El Paso Times’. “Some of the kids were in bad shape,” he said.
The tragedy shocked Uvalde, a predominantly Hispanic city of 16,000 located halfway between San Antonio and the Mexican border. The shooter’s mother, Adriana Reyes, told the same station that her son was not “a monster”, but that he could be “aggressive” at times.
At a news conference on Tuesday, Texas Governor Greg Abbott revealed that the killer shot his 66-year-old grandmother in the face before going to Robb Elementary School with an ‘AR-15’ semi-automatic rifle.
On Thursday, the gun maker announced that it would not attend a major convention in Texas this weekend organized by the National Rifle Association, the nation’s leading gun lobby.
Student Training
One of the center’s teachers, who was at the school at the time, told the American channel ‘ABC’ that her students were watching a Disney movie to celebrate the upcoming end of the year when the shots rang out.
His students had rehearsed for just such a situation, gathering quietly under his table. These drills have become the norm in schools in the United States, where deadly shootings are repeated year after year.
The sounds of gunshots “were very loud,” Madison Saiz, an eight-year-old student at the school, told AFP. “When it happened, our teacher told us to stand in a corner, and our whole class did.”
In the United States, school shootings are a recurring scourge that successive governments have so far been powerless to stop. The debate on the regulation of weapons in the country is practically exhausted, given the lack of hope that Congress will approve an ambitious national law on the subject.
The “March for our Lives” movement, formed in the aftermath of the Parkland shooting, has called for a large rally on June 11 in Washington to call for stricter gun regulation.
*With AFP; adapted from its French version
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