New footage of Texas school attack shows delay in police response

A local Texas newspaper has published new footage of the fatal shooting at an elementary school in Uvalde on May 24. These are recordings from security cameras hung around the school. Footage shows police waiting in the school for 77 minutes before deciding to confront the shooter.

This information is not new, but the debate in Uvalde on police action has flared up again because of the new images. Townspeople accuse the police of moving too slowly. Nineteen young children and two teachers were killed in the attack.

In the images, published by the Texas newspaper Austin American Statesman, shows the eighteen-year-old shooter driving into the school parking lot in his truck and shooting two people. Then he enters the school, where the students hide in the classrooms. The culprit enters one of the classrooms and begins shooting. The newspaper edited the children’s screams from the video, but the gunshots can still be heard clearly.

The first police arrived three minutes after the shooter entered the school. Officers line up at the classroom door where the shooter is, but retreat after shots are fired again. The officers, armed and wearing bulletproof vests, wait for reinforcements in the hallway.

About twenty minutes later, heavily armed auxiliaries arrive. These also stay in the lobby, even if the shooter starts shooting again. In the end, it takes them almost an hour to burst into the classroom and kill the culprit.

See the images for yourself here. They can be experienced as shocking.

It is unclear how the newspaper managed to get their hands on the footage. The footage would not be shown until later, as evidence in an ongoing Texas Department of Public Order (TDPS) investigation into the events.

Relatives of the victims react angrily to the leaked material. “Who do they think they are to broadcast such images of the last moments of our children who can no longer express themselves?” says Angel Garza, who lost her ten-year-old daughter Amerie Jo in the attack CNN†

Kimberly Rubio, whose daughter Lexi was killed in the attack, told a news conference she understands the media wants to hold the government accountable ‘because they themselves weren’t transparent. “. But she would have preferred not to see the video itself, especially the sound of gunfire.

An editor of the Austin American-Statesman defends the decision in a statement: “We want to bring out the truth about the events. Relatives have been looking for him for a long time.”

A senior Texas Department of Security official also said in a statement. Press release regret the leaked video. But the images also provide “horrifying evidence that the security services’ response to the attack was a complete failure”, he said.

The department explains earlier all blame for the slow response to the local police commander in Uvalde. According to the senior official, the response has been “exactly the opposite of how we train officers”. The police commander says he acted on “the information he had at the time”.