Gun Violence 3: Thoughts and Prayers Continue to be Insufficient

[GreyhoundFan]

Dear Louie, fuck you very much:

 

Mary Gay Scanlon has words for Louie:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

25 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

This is so rage inducing that I'd better hold my tongue or a barrage of angry swear words will flow out.

 

One of my father's first cousins had a child die when she was 9 years old.  She would be 73 now.  Her mother is a 98, is mentally sharp, and still grieves for her daughter even though she has many children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren she adores and loves.  Those parents will never stop grieving.  He really is an asshole of the highest (lowest?) order. 

[fraurosena]

Why yes, Louie, that's precisely what we think.

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Dear Sarah, go fuck yourself:

 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

11 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Dear Louie, fuck you very much:

 

Mary Gay Scanlon has words for Louie:

 

"What you're trying to do to America......"  Make it safer?  Make it a place where people can go to a grocery store, go to a movie, go to a Waffle House, go to work, go to a hospital, go to a doctor's office, go to a church, go to an elementary school without being gunned down?  Keep guns capable of mass casualties - actual human lives- in a minutes if not seconds- from being sold to the general public?  Keep guns out of the hands of people who should not have them?  Fuck you Gohmert.  We're trying to fix the America you and your ilk have fucked up.  

[GreyhoundFan]

And a hearty fuck you to Billy too:

 

[47of74]

I just wish Palin, fuck face, Louis, and the rest of GQP would shut the fuck up.  Especially if they’re not going to do anything to fix the problem. 

[GreyhoundFan]

You couldn't make this up:

 

[Cartmann99]

2 hours ago, Alisamer said:

And no, a shooting involving Republicans themselves won't change anything, unless it takes out a large number of them. They had one at some congressional baseball game, didn't they? And the end result? Thoughts and prayers...

Yup. Back in 2017:

Congressman Steve Scalise, Three Others Shot at Alexandria, Virginia, Baseball Field

47 minutes ago, fraurosena said:

This is so rage inducing that I'd better hold my tongue or a barrage of angry swear words will flow out.

 

Then they will never "explain themselves to the parents" because the people of Uvalde will be grieving the loss of their children for the rest of their lives.

Edited to add: Should have read the last page before replying.

Edited June 2, 2022 by Cartmann99

[GreyhoundFan]

[Alisamer]

19 minutes ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Transformers has "My FIrst Blaster" - now watch for Playskool's new line of toddler pellet guns - infant-sized body armor coming soon!

Guns issued at birth, along with the baby's social security card!

New government funded preschool, including target shooting weekly! 

Ammunition included on the teacher's yearly supply lists!

Guns for everyone!

Or, you know, we could stop pandering to the NRA and the small portion of the population who are gun nuts, and follow other countries' examples on how to PREVENT some of these shootings, instead of turning schools into fortresses and expecting teachers to be Rambo.

[Cartmann99]

I'm fresh outta snark this afternoon.

“Recipe for an accident”: Alarm after Abbott orders “unannounced, random intruder audits” in schools

Quote

Gov. Greg Abbott on Wednesday instructed state school security and education officials to start conducting "in-person, unannounced, random intruder detection audits on school districts" to find weak access points and see how quickly staff can enter a school building without being stopped.

The mandate was one of several the governor laid out in a letter to school security authorities in an effort to ensure district emergency operations plans are solid and school buildings are protected in the wake of the Uvalde school massacre that left 19 children and two adults dead.

In his letter to Texas School Safety Center director Kathy Martinez-Prather on Wednesday, Abbott said the tragedy in Uvalde last week demands more action.

"The State must work beyond writing words on paper and ensuring that the laws are being followed; it must also ensure that a culture of constant vigilance is engrained in every campus and in every school district employee across the state," he said.

Education advocates and lawmakers swiftly condemned the idea of unannounced, fake intruders.

Clay Robison, a spokesperson for the Texas State Teachers Association, raised concerns about whether a person conducting unannounced drills puts themselves at risk to be attacked by someone on campus who sees them as a real threat.

"If it really does mean breaking into a school, it could be an accident waiting to happen," he said, adding that he thought Abbott's latest school proposals were "just another way to avoid addressing the issue of doing something about too many guns in the hands of the wrong people."

Shannon Holmes, executive director of Association of Texas Professional Educators, raised similar concerns.

"It's a recipe for an accident if there is not some coordination between the local campus or ISD and whoever's conducting the audit," Holmes said.

On Twitter, Texas Rep. Diego Bernal, D-San Antonio, a member of the House Education Committee, criticized the plan.

"So you want grown men to show up to schools unannounced and try as hard as they can to find a way in?" Bernal wrote on Twitter. "This is a terrible idea."

The Texas School Safety Center, located at Texas State University, was launched in 1999 in the wake of the Columbine school shooting and authorized by the Legislature in 2001. It was created to serve as a clearinghouse for school safety and security information, training, assistance and applied research for Texas' K-12 public schools, charter schools and community colleges. It receives funding annually within the state budget, as well as through state and federal grants to provide training and resources on everything from anti-tobacco campaigns to active-shooter threats.

It's unclear if the Texas School Safety Center has conducted such security audits before or whether the school districts will be notified they are being audited beforehand.

The center did not answer emailed questions. In a statement, a spokesperson said they received the letter and that the center "is designing a program and action items to specifically address the governor's directives within the prescribed timelines."

State leaders also did not answer clarifying questions as to whether districts would be alerted of the audits beforehand.

"This is a new, enhanced level of audits," Renae Eze, Abbott's spokesperson, said. "Until now, the [Texas School Safety Center] has been conducting reviews of school districts emergency operations plans, following the passage of SB 11 in 2019. This is an audit of the implementation of those plans, specifically targeted to access control procedures."

A spokesperson pointed The Texas Tribune to the safety center for more information.

The Texas Education Agency flagged that the Texas School Safety Center has a toolkit for districts to audit their own security practices, which state that facility staff should be unaware of the assessment and it should be unannounced.

"It is highly suggested that a member of the law enforcement jurisdiction and a district level administrator be notified of the assessment in the event someone calls in from the school, facility, district, or community in response to the intruder," the toolkit states. The TEA did not immediately answer questions about its role in these audits and whether the agency has conducted similar audits before.

In addition to the random security audits, Abbott requested that the center conduct school safety reviews of all Texas public schools.

He instructed the center to alert each school district that they must meet this summer to review their emergency operations plans, including each district's active threat plan, to ensure all staff and substitutes are trained on the plans and to conduct an assessment of building access points, including single-access-points protocols, locked instruction room door policies, visitor check-in rules, the effectiveness of exterior door locks and more by Sept. 1. The center will present findings to the governor by October.

Abbott also called on the center to make recommendations to the Texas Legislature to determine necessary funding or possible improvements to "continue the work of hardening our schools against outside threats."

Abbott and other state leaders adopted similar rhetoric on improving school security in the wake of the 2018 school shooting in Santa Fe, southeast of Houston, though experts say there is no indication that the security measures most often promoted by public officials — including locked doors to the outside and in classrooms, active-shooter plans and security cameras — have reduced gun violence in schools.

In 2019, state lawmakers passed a package of school security laws including a law that gave the school safety center the authority to audit the school district's emergency operations plans.

Under that law, if a school district does not satisfactorily submit an emergency operation plan, they must notify the community in a public meeting. If they do not hold such a meeting, the TEA can take over school leadership, according to Abbott's letter.

An audit conducted by the center in 2020 found only 67 school districts out of 1,022 had viable emergency operations plans. Meanwhile, just 200 districts had active-shooter policies, while an additional 196 school districts had policies that auditors deemed insufficient.

Abbott's letter comes the same day that he instructed the Texas Legislature to form special committees to make legislative recommendations in response to the Uvalde school shooting, stopping short of calling for a special Legislative session to consider possible legislation before the next session in 2023.

Senate Democrats and a few Republicans have called for a special session.

 

[Alisamer]

So... the Tulsa shooter basically ran out and picked up an assault rifle and then headed up to go practice using it... on people. In a hospital. After buying a handgun just a few days before and apparently deciding it wasn't enough? I hope they trace his actions on the day of buying the handgun. I wonder if he bought it and went somewhere planning to use it, then changed his mind.

Random, unannounced Intruder Audits into schools where teachers are encouraged to be armed to defend their classrooms, in a state where there are practically no hoops to jump through before buying a gun and carrying it around on you? 

That sounds safe. Hope they have really good body armor for the people conducting the audits. 

[AlmostSavedAtTacoBell]

1 hour ago, GreyhoundFan said:

Dear Sarah, go fuck yourself:

 

So says the woman who took every opportunity to shove her baby with Down's Syndrome in front of cameras; trotted out her son in uniform while keeping out the detail that he joined the military in exchange for not being jailed for cutting the brake lines on school buses (and, when he became violent with Hot Toddy and his own significant other, screamed about PTSD without bothering to mention that her son had been a driver for a high ranking military member and the closest he had come to combat was playing with his GI Joe doll); and when her teenage daughter's pregnancy became too obvious to hide tried to parlay it into some pro-life Harlequin romance until the wheels fell off because neither Bristol nor Levi were bright enough to keep the act up.  I get that politicians have their kids show up for events and photo ops but she used three of her kids as props while ignoring that the baby had very real needs just accounting for his age, much less for the needs of a child with Down's Syndrome; that her son clearly was in serious need of psychological help but instead was shuttled off to the military then was supposed to play the poster boy for her rah-rah go USA American Hero theme; and her daughter should have been allowed to handle her pregnancy and her relationship in private rather than be pushed into the spotlight as some kind of modern-day example of "don't have sex, girls, but if you do and get pregnant, you just go ahead and marry that guy no matter how bad the relationship".  She can fuck all the way off with her talk about loving children.  She wouldn't know anything about loving a child if Mother Mary came down from Heaven and gave her personal lessons. 

[47of74]

Jesus Fucking Christ families can't even bury their departed loved ones without the risk of a shootout.

Quote

Multiple shots were fired Thursday afternoon at a cemetery in Racine, Wisconsin, resulting in an unknown number of victims, according to police.

“At 2:26pm there were multiple shots fired at Graceland Cemetery,” Racine police tweeted. “There are victims but unknown how many at this time. The scene is still active and being investigated.”

The Racine Journal Times reports multiple people were shot and the nearby Ascension All Saints Hospital, which is treating an undisclosed number of victims, is on lockdown “out of an abundance of caution.”

The shooting reportedly occurred during the burial of Da’Shontay “Day Day” King, who died Friday, May 20.

 

[47of74]

Meanwhile a fucking idiot in Dubuque thought it’d be cool to “joke” about driving by a school with an assault rifle. 

Quote

Police say that 42-year-old David Joseph Hanson Jr. made a concerning post on a Facebook page that stated “Welp, time to drive by the school with my AR-15, full clip.” The post was made in a Facebook Page called “I Hate People.”

Police confronted Hanson at his residence. Hanson stated he posted it as a joke.

 

[Cartmann99]

 

[Ozlsn]

 

[GreyhoundFan]

Even more than strong words, we need action.

 

[Alisamer]

North Carolina has had more than 250 credible threats of planned school attacks. This year. It's June. 

Quote

Between Aug. 1, 2021 and May 31, 431 planned school attacks were reported on the Say Something Anonymous Reporting System, according to Karen Fairley, executive director of the North Carolina Center for Safer Schools. Fairley told state lawmakers on Wednesday that 254 of those rose to the level of being classified as “life safety tips” because a person had the means to carry out the threat.

Read more at: https://www.newsobserver.com/news/local/education/article262035167.html#storylink=cpy

There's a great comic in the cartoon thread with an indirect but excellent suggestion for the people who are all "but what about all the guns that are already out there!" Collect them up. Do a buyback on assault weapons, like Australia did. And what to do with them as they are collected? Ukraine could really use them right now. 

I'd suggest an "assault rifle donation drive" for Ukraine except apparently the majority of heavily armed Americans have forgotten the cold war and are Putin supporters. 

I still don't understand how the "keep the gubmint out of my gun cabinet" people are also the "the gubmint gets to force you to carry that baby you slut" people. Do you want the government to limit individual rights or not? You can't make it illegal to help someone get a potentially life saving medical procedure because a clump of cells will die, while making sure it's totally legal to carry around an assault rifle capable of wiping out a classroom in less than a minute. I mean they have, that's currently where things are, but that makes no sense.

Abortion "kills" a non-viable embryo, fetus or zygote (for plan B and such). This is being expanded to include just-fertilized eggs. This unwanted "pre-born" child cannot survive without being parasitically bound to an unwilling adult for most of a year and making permanent changes and even damage to that adult's body, and cannot be removed without great pain and physical effort and/or major abdominal surgery, both of which are potentially dangerous and traumatic. But it's OK for the government to force that on people. But apparently it's NOT OK for the government to say "if you aren't old enough to drink, you aren't old enough to buy a weapon designed solely for killing other humans" or "weapons capable of killing people at a distance should be licensed and registered just like cars". 

It's OK for the government to make laws withholding needed medical treatment to pregnant women, trans children, etc. The government can make laws restricting what teachers are allowed to teach. But keep the laws offa our kill-sticks!

Does this sound as nonsensical to everyone else as it does to me? 

[Ozlsn]

8 hours ago, Alisamer said:

But keep the laws offa our kill-sticks!

But the have an inalienable right that shall not be infringed!!! Seriously the number of times I've read that this week is hilarious. "Well regulated militia" they don't seem to quote but "SHALL NOT BE INFRINGED!!1!" gets capitals. Also a lot of quoting around misinformation about gun regulation in other countries, including my own, and how the evil government will immediately take over and force them to all be... something. I lost track there, but if you're quoting both Stalin and Hitler as proponents of gun control I'm not sure you have the entirely correct information.

Anyway. If they're so wedded to the second amendment sure, they can bear arms - As part of a well regulated militia, in this case the national guard or army. Proud Boys etc. doesn't count unless they are subject to regulation. I would really like them hoisted on their own constitutional bias.

[Cartmann99]

 

[Cartmann99]

Uvalde Mother Who Ran Into School Says Police Threatened to Violate Her Probation for Speaking to Media

Quote

Angeli Rose Gomez says she has been threatened by law enforcement after speaking to the media and describing being handcuffed by Uvalde, Texas police outside of Robb Elementary School before she ran into the building herself to retrieve her own children while a gunman was barricaded inside.

Gomez has been highly critical of the police response to the shooting late last month, which ended with more than 20 dead. In an interview with CBS News this week, she described yelling at police outside the building while they waited, begging them to go in or give her a vest so she could rush in herself. Gomez has said that she did eventually go in to retrieve her two young children. She also claimed to see police pepper spray and tackle other parents trying to do the same.

Gomez said when she arrived at the school, she was almost immediately butting heads with officials on the scene, specifically a U.S. Marshal who told her she needed to stay away from the scene.

“He said, ‘Well, we’re going to have to arrest you because you’re being very uncooperative,'” she said. “I said, well you’re going to have to arrest me because I’m going in there.”

Gomez’s account of events adds more confusion to the decisions made at the scene too as she says when she was inside the building searching for her children, she could hear gunshots going off. This would have likely been after the on-scene commander had made the determination that it was no longer an active shooter situation, adding to an already delayed response. Texas Department of Safety head Steve McCraw has since admitted this call on the scene was “wrong.”

She also said there were no officers inside the school while she was there.

“There was not one officer inside the school while I ran to my second son’s class. There was not one officer,” she said.

She added police could have saved “many more lives” had they acted with more urgency.

“If anything, they were being more aggressive on us parents,” she said.

CBS reporter Lilia Luciano revealed after the interview that Gomez claimed to have received a call from a law enforcement officer saying her probation — which stems from a decade old charge — could be violated if she continued talking to the media. Gomez said after speaking with a judge who assured her this would not happen, she is not revealing more of her story.

The interview Gomez did with CBS on June 2nd:

 

[Cartmann99]

This article quotes from the 911 transcript where 10-year-old Khloie Torres kept calling and begging for help.

No Radio, Old Tactics: How the Police Response in Uvalde Broke Down

Quote

UVALDE, Texas — Two minutes after a gunman burst through an unlocked door at Robb Elementary School and began shooting inside a pair of connected classrooms, Pete Arredondo arrived outside, one of the first police officers to reach the scene.

The gunman could still be heard firing repeatedly, and Chief Arredondo, as leader of the small school district police force in Uvalde, took charge.

But there were problems from the start.

Chief Arredondo did not have a police radio with him, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the investigation, which may have impeded his immediate ability to communicate with police dispatchers. As two supervisors from the local police department were grazed by bullets fired by the gunman, he made a decision to fall back, the official said.

Using a cellphone, the chief called a police landline with a message that set the stage for what would prove to be a disastrous delay in interrupting the attack: The gunman has an AR-15, he told them, but he is contained; we need more firepower and we need the building surrounded.

A New York Times examination of the police response, based on dozens of interviews with law enforcement officials, children who survived, parents who were witnesses outside and experts on policing, found that breakdowns in communication and tactical decisions that were out of step with years of police preparations for school shootings may have contributed to additional deaths, and certainly delayed critical medical attention to the wounded.

A tactical team led by Border Patrol officers ultimately ignored orders not to breach the classroom, interviews revealed, after a 10-year-old girl inside the classroom warned 911 dispatchers that one of the two teachers in the room was in urgent need of medical attention.

The report that the incident commander at least initially had no police radio emerges as the latest important detail in what has been a shifting official account of the police response that has at times proved to be inaccurate on key points about the May 24 shooting.

Spokesmen for the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Justice Department, the two agencies now investigating the response, have said they would not be able to reach final conclusions until all interviews had been conducted and all available video and other evidence had been reviewed.

Officers who arrived at the scene, coming from at least 14 agencies, did not go into the classrooms as sporadic gunfire could be heard inside, nor after 911 calls began arriving from children inside.

“There is a lot of bodies,” a 10-year-old student, Khloie Torres, quietly told a 911 dispatcher at 12:10 p.m. — 37 minutes after the gunman began shooting inside the classrooms — according to a review of a transcript of the call. “I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”

She stayed on the line for about 17 minutes. Around 11 minutes into the call, the sound of gunfire could be heard.

The officers who finally breached the locked classrooms with a janitor’s key were not a formal tactical unit, according to a person briefed on the response. The officers, including specially trained Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents and a sheriff’s deputy, formed an ad hoc group on their own and gathered in the hallway outside the classroom, a tense space where they said there appeared to be no chain of command.

They were done waiting for permission, one of them said, according to the person, before they moved toward the classroom where the gunman waited. They continued even after one of them heard a command crackling in his earpiece: Do not breach.

They entered the room and killed the gunman.

The actions by Chief Arredondo and the array of officers he suddenly directed — which grew to number more than 140, from local, state and federal agencies, including state troopers, sheriff’s deputies, constables and game wardens — are now the subject of overlapping investigations by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department and the local district attorney’s office.

Chief Arredondo did not respond to requests for comment. Neither did the chief of the Uvalde Police Department, Daniel Rodriguez, or the county sheriff, Ruben Nolasco. The Texas Department of Public Safety, which is overseeing the Rangers’ investigation and had a large presence of state police at the scene, referred questions to the district attorney’s office, which did not comment.

“I think they’re unfair to accuse anybody until we know all the facts,” said Uvalde County’s top executive, Bill Mitchell. “We have agencies coming out and saying there were mistakes. How do we know, days after, what mistakes?”

The fact that control of such a complex and prolonged scene of violence fell to the head of a police force with six members who are employed by the local school board seemed unusual in the aftermath of the tragedy. But it was in keeping with the way such events are expected to be handled in their early stages, according to policing experts and the leaders of school district police departments around Texas.

In cases where a shooting drags on, and more experienced departments establish themselves at the scene, control may sometimes be handed over to a larger department. That did not happen in Uvalde, officials have said.

School district police departments have jurisdiction over school campuses — in Uvalde, there are eight — as well as anywhere that school buses travel.

“If we should have a situation like that, we would go in, handle the situation, stop the kill, and at that point we would probably look to the state or the feds to assist us with the forensics,” said Chief Solomon Cook of the Humble Independent School District Police Department, in the suburbs of Houston.

But while the presence of a school district police chief atop the hierarchy at Robb Elementary was not out of the ordinary, other elements of the response in Uvalde struck Chief Cook as concerning. One was the need to use a janitor’s keys to ultimately gain entry to the classrooms. “All my people carry keys,” said Chief Cook, who is president of the state’s association for school district police chiefs.

Another was the uncertainty about whether Chief Arredondo had been receiving messages from police dispatchers about the children still in the classrooms pleading for help.

“We have direct communication with the P.D. dispatch, and we’re about the size of Uvalde,” said Chief Bill Avera, who runs a force of four school district officers, including himself, that covers eight campuses in Jacksonville, Texas.

A review of the response in Uvalde shows that the school acted almost immediately after the gunman hopped a fence and approached Robb Elementary after crashing a pickup truck and firing shots outside.

Adam Pennington, an 8-year-old student, was in the front office when the school received what appeared to be the first alert. “A phone call came in and said a man jumped the fence holding a gun,” said Adam, who said he hurried to shelter under a table.

An employee on the campus used a cellphone to open a district security app, selecting a red “lockdown” button and a second button warning that there was an active shooter, according to David Rogers, the chief marketing officer for Raptor Technologies, the company that provides the security app.

That warning tool was part of an extensive effort to enhance security in the Uvalde school district, which also included two-way radios for “key staff,” two new school district police officers and requirements that all classroom doors remain locked.

But Chief Arredondo had no police radio when he arrived, according to the latest information gathered in the investigation, and the door to the classroom where most of the killing occurred, Room 112, was unlocked when the gunman arrived.

The lockdown alert was sent at 26 seconds past 11:32 a.m., about two minutes after the initial 911 call from outside the school. It triggered an immediate mass distribution of emails, text messages and notifications that included blaring alarms sent to the cellphones of other school employees, Mr. Rogers said.

Less than a minute later, the gunman was already inside the school.

Khloie Torres had been watching a movie with her fourth-grade classmates in Room 112 when her teacher, Irma Garcia, told the class to go into lockdown. Ms. Garcia turned off the movie, and then rushed toward the classroom door to lock it. But she struggled to find the right key for the door. Gunfire could be heard in the hallways.

Ms. Garcia finally got hold of the right key, but the gunman was already there. “He grabbed the door, and he opened it,” Khloie said. Ms. Garcia tried to protect her students. The gunman began firing.

Khloie hid under a table, listening to more gunshots. “You’ll die,” the gunman said to the room.

He shot one of Khloie’s best friends, Amerie Jo Garza, and the other teacher in the class, Eva Mireles. Then the gunman said “Good night,” Khloie said, and began firing at students across the classroom.

One child shouted, “I’m shot,” catching the attention of the gunman. He came back to the spot where the child was lying and shot the student again, killing him, Khloie said.

Chief Arredondo arrived at 11:35 a.m., as the first officers began moving into the hallway outside the classroom door. Two minutes later, a lieutenant and a sergeant from the Uvalde Police Department approached the door, and were grazed by bullets.

Shortly after that, Chief Arredondo placed a phone call from the scene, reaching a police department landline. He described the situation and requested a radio, a rifle and a contingent of heavily armed officers, according to the law enforcement official familiar with the initial response, who described it on condition of anonymity because the official was not authorized to publicly disclose the details.

The decision to establish a perimeter outside the classroom, a little over five minutes after the shooting began, shifted the police response from one in which every officer would try to confront the gunman as fast as possible to one where officers treated the gunman as barricaded and no longer killing. Instead of storming the classroom, a decision was made to deploy a negotiator and to muster a more heavily armed and shielded tactical entry force.

“They made a poor decision, defining that as a hostage-barricade situation,” said Bill Francis, a former F.B.I. agent who was a senior leader on the bureau’s hostage rescue team for 17 years. “The longer you delay in finding and eliminating that threat, the longer he has to continue to kill other victims.”

Inside, the gunman moved between the two adjoining classrooms. After he left her room, Khloie said, she called out quietly: “Is anybody OK? Is anybody hurt?”

“Yeah,” one classmate replied.

“Just be quiet, so he doesn’t come back in here,” Khloie remembered responding. Another child asked for help getting Ms. Garcia’s body off her.

A boy in her class, Khloie said, was worried that the gunman would find them. “He won’t find us,” she told him.

Shortly after noon, nearly half an hour after the first police officers had arrived, Khloie began dialing 911. She said she called over and over again.

By then, the first tactical teams had arrived, along with officers carrying long guns. Scores of other officers were outside the school, keeping frantic parents away and starting to remove children from other classrooms, pulling some through windows. In video taken outside the school, Border Patrol agents could be seen donning specialized equipment at around 12:15 p.m.

Six minutes later, several shots were heard, the sound coming from inside the classroom.

Mayor Don McLaughlin of Uvalde said in an interview with CNN on Thursday that the gunman did not answer his telephone when a negotiator tried to call him.

In the hallway outside the classrooms, a throng of heavily armed law enforcement officers anxiously awaited instructions. But frustrations were growing, particularly among members of a Border Patrol tactical unit, according to the person who was briefed on the team’s response.

“No one entity or individual seemed to have control of the scene,” the person said. “It was chaos.”

The sense of frustration among tactical team members was corroborated by two officials familiar with their debriefing.

After more than an hour, the ad hoc group of officers who had arrived ready to attack the gunman was growing impatient, and decided to move in.

One of the members — equipped with an earpiece and small microphone — quietly announced over the radio that the group was preparing to go into the classrooms. At that point a voice responded, telling them not to breach the doors.

They ignored the directive.

As the agents entered, the gunman appeared to be ready for them, the person said. He fired. They fired back, with at least one bullet striking him in the head. A bullet fragment also grazed the head of one of the Border Patrol agents.

As soon as the agents announced over the radio that the gunman had been killed, attention turned to treating the wounded. The agents helped set up a triage system, as more officers and emergency medical workers descended on the classrooms, trying to stabilize the children who had been shot but were still alive. At one point during the siege, one of the two children who called 911 had reported that at least eight or nine of the children in the two classrooms were still alive.

Khloie and her surviving classmates were rushed from the classroom. The bodies of 19 children were recovered, along with those of the two teachers. Seventeen people, including a third teacher, were wounded.

“I don’t understand why somebody did not go in,” said Khloie’s mother, Jamie Torres. Children and teachers would have still been shot, she said, “but it would have been way less than 21.”

 

[fraurosena]