The police response to the Uvalde (Texas) massacre has outraged relatives such as Junior Cazares, whose little cousin Jacklyn was murdered while the police waited more than an hour outside the classroom where the attacker barricaded himself.
“I hope they lose their license,” said Cazares, who spoke to Efe in front of the wooden crosses set up in Uvalde’s central plaza to remember the 19 children and two teachers brutally murdered in Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School.
The revelation, this Friday, that the Police made the decision not to enter the classroom and waited to receive a key to open the door, while a girl desperately called the emergency services surrounded by her dead classmates, has shocked the American town.
“I can’t even imagine those kids locked in that room, knowing there were cops out there. It’s disgusting,” said Cazares, 24.
The young man works in a hospital where some of the 17 wounded in the attack have been admitted and after learning that the Police had recognized his negligent behavior in the face of the shooting, he went to the central square accompanied by his wife Lisa and their four-year-old daughter .
“I just feel anger. It makes me want to quit my job and become a police officer, so I can … do things better. They swore to protect our community,” Cazares said.
Her cousin, Jacklyn, was a relative or friend of several of the girls who died, including Ellie Garcia, who used to play with Junior and Lisa Cazares’ daughter.
“We know each of these (murdered) children, it is a small community and we share our love with each one of them,” said the young man.
His wife, Lisa, was outraged as she recalled how many parents approached the school while the attacker was inside to try to rescue their children and implored the police to act.
“What they were quick to do is arrest the parents who tried to enter,” denounced Lisa Cazares, who believed that if the policemen’s children had been inside, “things would have been different.”
Cazares was apparently referring to the brief arrest of Angeli Rose Gomez, who, after driving 40 miles to the school upon learning there was an attacker inside, rebuked officers to enter the school and handcuffed her.
Then she convinced the agents to release her, jumped the school fence and entered the school to rescue her two children, who were not in the classroom affected by the shooting and who she managed to get out of the school, Gómez told the newspaper. The Wall Street Journal.
The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steven McCraw, has acknowledged that not breaking down the classroom door was a “wrong decision” and blamed it on the highest police officer who was at the school at the time.
Several media assured this Saturday that the person responsible was Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, the police chief of the Uvalde School District, who has not appeared in press conferences about the situation for several days.
According to McCraw, after hearing multiple shots in the classroom and considering that the bullets were only directed at the door when the agents tried to access, the aforementioned chief interpreted that there was no one left alive except the aggressor.
So they opted to wait, until finally a Border Patrol team entered the classroom behind a shield and the attacker, Salvador Ramos, emerged from a classroom locker and began shooting at them, at which point he was gunned down, according to details of the investigation leaked to The Washington Post.
On the floor of the classroom, the agents found the children united, many of them already deceased, but some still alive, including 11-year-old Miah Cerrillo, who smeared the blood of another student on his body to play dead.
Cerrillo, who is still recovering from the bullet fragments that hit his head and shoulders, told CNN that the attacker looked at one of the teachers, said “good night” and killed her, before shooting indiscriminately at the students of his class and those of another that was connected to it by an internal door.
The girl claimed that she and a friend got hold of the dead teacher’s phone and called the police, begging them to come, before lying down and playing dead for what seemed like an eternity.
The governor of Texas, the Republican Greg Abbott, who at first praised the agents and said that they had “ran” towards the attacker, now claims to be “furious” by the negligence of the police and has promised a thorough investigation of his performance.
In Uvalde, a Hispanic-majority population of just 16,000 inhabitants, where practically everyone knows someone affected by the shooting, the news has hit hard, but there are those who still do not dare to condemn the police too much.
“I don’t want to criticize them,” said Leti, who lives opposite the school and told Efe how children from various classes “ran” to her garden during the attack and spent a good time there, petting her cat and in many cases crying. .
Leti doesn’t like people talking badly about her neighbors, about the people who work in her city, but a part of her still doesn’t understand what happened.
“If the parents were willing to go in there, why not (the police)?” he asked.
Conforms to The Trust Project criteria
