The scene of a shooting is pictured behind police yellow tape after two people were killed and three more critically injured in a shooting at a flea market in Houston, Texas on May 15, 2022. (Photo by MARK FELIX/AFP /AFP via Getty Images)
Texas officials are clapping themselves on the back for what they’ve described as “heroic” and “courageous” actions by law enforcement who responded to an armed 18-year-old at an elementary school on Tuesday.Nineteen children and two teachers were killed. Seventeen more were injured.And despite Texas Gov. Greg Abbott’s insistence at a press conference Wednesday that things “could have been worse” if not for law enforcement’s actions, officials are being strangely opaque about what actually happened at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas.When asked how much time passed between the gunman arriving at the school and the gunman being killed, Texas’ Director of Public Safety Steve McCraw offered an indefinite response.“Forty minutes, an hour,” he said. “But I don’t want to give you a particular timeline.”“Bottom line, law enforcement was there, they did engage immediately, they did contain him in a classroom,” he added. “They put a tactical stack together, in a very orderly way, and breached and assaulted the individual.”It’s unclear how long the shooter was in that classroom until a tactical unit arrived on the scene. It’s also unclear how many children were in that classroom.Sometime late Tuesday morning, the gunman shot his grandmother in the face at the Uvalde home where he lived with her. (As of Wednesday, she remained hospitalized and in critical condition.) He then got into his truck, drove toward the elementary school a few miles away, and crashed into a ditch more than a hundred feet from the property. Advertisem*nt
Spokespersons from Texas Department of Public Safety said in several media interviews that Uvalde Police first received 911 calls at around 11:20 a.m. local time reporting the crash, and reporting a man wearing a backpack, some form of body armor, and holding a rifle, approaching Robb Elementary.At 11:43 a.m., the school announced that it was going on lockdown, according to KSAT, a local news station. That was the same time that the Uvalde Police Department wrote on Facebook that the school was the site of an active police scene and urged people to avoid the area. Advertisem*nt
At 1:06 p.m., more than an hour and a half after those first 911 calls were made, the Uvalde Police Department said that the shooter “was in police custody.”It isn’t necessarily unusual for timelines to shift in the immediate aftermath of a chaotic shooting like the one that happened in Uvalde. But the difference between some of the official accounts were striking.Consistent with what McCraw said, Texas DPS Sgt. Erick Estrada indicated in several media interviews that the gunman encountered law enforcement before he entered the school building. Estrada said a school resource officer assigned to Robb Elementary first tried and failed to stop him. The gunman then encountered two more officers from the Uvalde Police Department.“They weren’t able to stop him there, so they did ask for assistance,” Estrada told CNN. A tactical unit arrived “and eliminated the threat,”Estrada said. “Unfortunately, before that happened, the shooter did manage to make entry into the school.”Another spokesperson for DPS offered a different version of events. Lt. Chris Olivarez said that when law enforcement, including the school resource officer, responded to the scene, they could already hear gunshots coming from inside the school, according to multiple news outlets. Advertisem*nt
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