Footage shows police officers stood back for 77 minutes as the gunman sprayed bullets into classrooms.
Leaked video footage from the Uvalde school mass shooting shows police officers stood back for more than an hour as the gunman sprayed bullets into classrooms filled with children.
The video obtained by the Austin-American Statesman on Tuesday afternoon starts with Salvador Ramos, 18, crashing his truck outside Robb Elementary School the morning of May 24, before walking into the building with an AR-15.
A teacher can be heard calling 911 and saying, ‘The kids are running. Oh my God’, and telling students to ‘get down, get in your rooms, get in your rooms’.
Then a young boy appears in the frame who sees Ramos and runs away. He was presumably unharmed.
The clip shows the gunman firing toward a classroom and then walking in. Screams can be heard from kids and teachers inside.
Three minutes after the gunman, the first armed police officers can be seen arriving in the hallway and running toward the classroom. The cops rush toward the classroom and crouch down.
A burst of gunfire is heard and one officer can be seen grabbing the back of his head. The officers quickly run back to the end of the hallway, just below a surveillance camera.
The footage shows 13 rifles in the hallway in the first half-hour of the massacre. The first shield arrives less than 20 minutes after the gunman opens fire. Dozens of cops are seen in the hallway, with equipment.
Officials had announced that the video would be released this coming Monday. On Tuesday, Rep Dustin Burrows, who is chairman of the Texas House panel investigating the massacre, said it would be released a day earlier, on Sunday, after being shown to the Uvalde community.
Burrows, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and many of the victims’ families had called for the video to be released.
The Statesman said it published an edited version of the 77-minute video before it was set to be released in order to show how the law enforcement response unfolded.
‘The video tells in real time the brutal story of how heavily armed officers failed to immediately launch a cohesive and aggressive response to stop the shooter and save more children if possible,’ the newspaper wrote.
‘And it reinforces the trauma of those parents, friends and bystanders who were outside the school and pleaded with police to do something, and for those survivors who quietly called 911 from inside the classroom to beg for help.’
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