More than an hour before law-enforcement officials finally confronted Salvador Ramos, a Texas SWAT team chief urged officers to storm the classroom he was in, newly released body-camera footage shows.
Uvalde officials published the footage on Sunday evening as part of a sweeping report detailing the police response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that killed 19 children and two teachers.
The footage came from a device on Sgt. Eduardo Canales, whose SWAT team walked down the school’s hallway just minutes after Ramos entered.
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According to the Austin-American Statesman, Canales entered the occupied fourth-grade classroom three minutes after Ramos himself, only to be briefly deterred by gunfire. The footage shows Canales warning his team to “Watch that door” before Ramos shoots four times, at which point the officer and others run from the gunfire. Canales touches his head and asks if he is bleeding; footage later shows that an ear wound bloodied his hands.
Less than one minute after Ramos shot at him, Canales implored the officers to face the gunman again, the footage shows.
“Dude, we’ve got to get in there,” he is heard saying. “We’ve got to get in there, he just keeps shooting. We’ve got to get in there.”
Canales’ urgency, however, went unheeded. Another officer said that the Texas Department of Public Safety “is sending their people” to deal with the deadly situation.
Law-enforcement officials waited an agonizing 73 minutes before eventually confronting Ramos, all while students were calling 911 from cellphones to report that their classmates were dying.
Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw later said that the on-site commander, Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo, mistakenly treated the situation as a barricade incident that required back-up rather than an active shooting.
City officials originally hesitated to release the bodycam footage of seven Uvalde police officers, though Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin advocated for its publication given Sunday’s report, which included video from the hallway outside the classroom.
“With the release of the school district’s hallway video, we believe these body-camera videos provide further, necessary context,” McLaughlin wrote in a statement.
The 82 minutes of hallway footage showed dozens of officers, many heavily armed and donning body armor, loitering in the hallway as Ramos remained barricaded inside the classroom. Some officers fist-bumped. Another ambled over to a hand sanitizer dispenser, biding his time by cleaning his fingers.
Sunday’s report found that law enforcement’s tactical response was deeply flawed and defined by “multiple systemic failures.” Though the report concluded that a different police response—perhaps one that more closely mirrored Canales’ early suggestions—would not have saved most of the victims, “it is plausible that some victims would have survived if they had not had to wait.”
