DALLAS– As police officers waited outside Khloie Torres’ fourth-grade classroom in Uvalde, Texas, she begged for help in a series of 911 calls, whispering into the phone that there were “a lot” of bodies and telling the operator: “Please, I don’t want to die. My teacher is dead. Oh my God.”
At one point, the dispatcher asks Khloie if there are many people in the room with her.
“No, it’s just me and some friends. A lot of people are,” she says, pausing briefly, “gone.”
Calls from Khloie and others, along with body camera footage and surveillance video from the May 24, 2022 shooting at Robb Elementary School, were included in a massive trove of audio and video recordings released by Uvalde city officials on Saturday, after a prolonged legal fight. .
The Associated Press and other news organizations took legal action after authorities initially refused to publicly release the information. The massacre, which left 19 students and two teachers dead, was one of the worst school shootings in US history.
The delay in the authorities’ response to the shooting was widely condemned as a huge failure: almost 400 officers waited more than 70 minutes before confronting the shooter in a classroom full of dead and injured children and teachers. Victims’ families have long sought accountability for the slow police response in the South Texas city of about 15,000 people, 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Brett Cross’s 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia, was among those killed. Cross, who was raising the boy as a child, was furious that relatives were not informed that the records were being released and that it took so long for them to become public.
“If we thought we could get everything we wanted, we would ask for a time machine to go back… and save our children, but we can’t, so all we ask for is justice, accountability and transparency, and they refuse to give us that,” he said.
Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece Jacklyn Cazares was killed in the shooting, said Saturday’s release of the information reignited festering anger because it shows “the waiting and waiting and waiting” of law enforcement.
“Maybe if they had violated it sooner, they would have saved some lives, including my niece’s,” he said.
The police response included about 150 U.S. Border Patrol agents and 91 state troopers, as well as school and city police. As terrified students and teachers called 911 from inside classrooms, dozens of police officers stood in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. Desperate parents who gathered outside the building begged them to enter.
The shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, entered the school at 11:33 a.m., first opening fire in the hallway and then entering two adjacent fourth-grade classrooms. The first responding officers arrived at the school minutes later. They approached the classrooms but retreated when Ramos opened fire.
At 12:06 p.m., much of the Uvalde Police Department’s radio traffic was still focused on creating a perimeter around the school and controlling traffic in the area, as well as the logistics of tracking who evacuated the building safely. They had trouble setting up a command post, one officer tells his colleagues, “because we need the bodies to keep the parents away.”
“They’re trying to move forward,” he says.
At 12:16 p.m., someone from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the state law enforcement agency, called police to say a SWAT team was coming from Austin, about 60 miles away. She asked for any information police could provide about the shooting, the suspect and the police response.
“Do you have a command post? Or where do you need our officers to go?” the caller asks.
The police representative responds that the police know that there are several dead students inside the elementary school and others are still hiding. Some of the survivors were evacuated to a nearby building. She does not know if a command post has been set up.
At 12:50 p.m., a tactical team entered one of the classrooms and fatally shot Ramos.
Among the criticisms included in a US Department of Justice report released earlier this year was that there was “no urgency” in establishing a command center, creating confusion among police about who was in charge.
Federal multiples and state investigations revealed cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology, and questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of children and teachers.
Some of the 911 calls released were from terrified instructors. One described “many, many gunshots,” while another sobbed on the phone as a dispatcher asked her to be quiet. “Hurry, hurry, hurry, hurry!” the first teacher cried before hanging up.
Shortly before arriving at school, Ramos shot and injured his grandmother in her home. He then took a pickup truck from home and drove to the school.
Ramos’ distraught uncle made several calls to 911 begging to be answered so he could try to get his nephew to stop shooting.
“Everything I say to him, he listens to me,” said Armando Ramos. “Maybe he could withdraw or do something to turn himself in,” he added, his voice breaking.
He said his nephew, who was with him at his house the night before, stayed with him in his room all night and said he was upset because his grandmother was “bothering” him.
“Oh my God, please, please don’t do anything stupid,” the man says on the call. “I think he’s shooting kids.”
But the offer came too late, precisely when the shooting ended and law enforcement officers killed Salvador Ramos.
Two of the responding officers now face criminal charges. Former Uvalde High School Police Chief Pete Arredondo and ex school official Adrian Gonzales Pleaded innocent to multiple counts of child abandonment and child endangerment. A Texas state trooper in Uvalde who had been suspended was reinstated to his job earlier this month.
In an interview this week with CNN, Arredondo said he thinks he was “scapegoated” as the culprit for the failed law enforcement response.
Some families asked more police officers will be charged and filed federal and state lawsuits against law enforcement, social media, online gaming companiesand the gun manufacturer who made the rifle used by the shooter.
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Associated Press journalists Rebecca Boone in Boise, Idaho; Anthony Izaguirre in Albany, New York; Jim Vertuno in Austin; David Fischer in Miami; Gabe Stern in Reno, Nevada; and Michael Balsamo and Julie Walker in New York contributed to this report.
This story originally appeared on ABCNews.go.com read the full story
