Clips circulating online from outside the Uvalde, Texas mass school shooting show a tense and chaotic scene as officers at times used force on distraught and angry parents and family members. Onlookers begged police to go inside. Some offered to go into the school themselves.
On Tuesday, a mass shooter killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.
Details that have emerged since then reveal that officers allowed the shooter, 18-year-old Ramos Salvador, to remain inside the school for upwards of an hour.
A viral video shows officers using force to contain the crowd.
“This video shows the chaos outside the school where parents were trying to find their children,” TheFamily’sSoupTV tweeted of the clip.
The clip shows a man on the ground with an officer standing over him. Someone, possibly the man on the ground, shouted, “Get your fucking hands off me! Let me go!” Another woman screamed that “he’s a parent” and someone else said something about a daughter.
It’s not known if the officer used force on the man.
In the two-minute video, people in the crowd screamed and cried and shouted at the cops. Their anguish was palpable.
That video has 3.5 million views as of this writing.
A longer video TheFamily’sSoupTV posted on their YouTube channel shows more of the scene. In the hourlong video, police repeatedly try to keep concerned parents and relatives away from the school.
Meanwhile, the shooter remained inside.
The video credited to Angel Ledezma is from a Facebook live he did that day. Its timeline aligns with the shooting.
In public comments on his Facebook page, Ledezma said that he arrived at Robb Elementary after a friend told him there was an active shooter on campus.
Roughly an hour into the video, he said that officer had gotten the shooter.
“There’s a fucking shooting at the school and these fucking cops are telling everybody to leave while everybody’s here to pick up their fucking kids,” Ledezma said at the beginning of the hourlong clip.
“They’re all just fucking parked and outside. They need to go in there. The cops ain’t doing shit,” he said.
He said his niece and nephew were inside. Their fate is unknown.
Ledezma didn’t respond to a request for comment sent via Facebook Messenger Thursday morning.
Shortly after he started filming, an unidentified woman told Ledezma that her son was inside.
She and Ledezma informed others gathered outside that parents were going to the front of the school.
“All the parents are going to the front,” she said. “Just shoot him already, shit.”
At one point an officer pushed a man speaking on a cell phone. The man said something unintelligible to him, to which the officer shouted, “Because I’m having to deal with you! Get across the street!”
Parents yelled at the officer, urging him to go inside and get their kids.
“You know that they are kids, right? They’re little kids. They don’t know how to defend themselves,” Ledezma shouted at the officer who just pushed the man.
“They’re six-year-old kids in there. They don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter.”
The woman who spoke to the man filming kept insisting that the officers go inside. “So much manpower,” she said. “Go in there and take him out.”
In the following minutes, a crowd of concerned onlookers and parents gathered. An officer told a local news outlet that some police went into the school to get their own children while others like Ledezma waited outside.
Forty-eight minutes into the video, Ledezma said that officers were sending a team inside. A couple minutes later, his video showed a person being wheeled out on a stretcher.
“Some people got shot bro. They’re just not going to tell nobody. That’s fucked up,” Ledezma said.
Several minutes later, he counted 10 police officers standing outside “doing nothing.” He said the ones inside were doing their job, but criticized police for not telling parents what was happening inside. He said he’d seen 20 or more parents crying, wondering where their children were.
Ten minutes after police sent the team in, Ledezma said that officers had gotten the shooter.
Police then turned their attention to getting the crowd to go behind nearby school buses. An officer kept repeating for them to “move back, move back, move back.”
A few people complied but most remained where they were.
The scene swiftly became chaotic when someone carried out a child wrapped in a white shroud. A man started screaming “mija” (a Spanish colloquialism for “my daughter”) and “that’s my daughter! I want my daughter!”
“There’s fucking kids shot. Full of blood. Holy shit,” Ledezma said as people surged towards the school in defiance of police orders. “Parents want their fucking kids.”
His video ended with the man who shouted for his daughter still arguing with an officer demanding to see her.
Even as criticisms mount, authorities have tried to frame their efforts as “heroic” and “courageous.”
“They did engage immediately. They did contain [the shooter] in the classroom,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said, per CBS.
Many people disagree with this characterization of events. “Imagine trying to spin this as a tactical win,” @nerdygrrl opined of McGraw’s statement.
“The cops literally stopped parents from helping their kids,” @paleofuture tweeted.
In the wake of the numerous videos, authorities said they would be examining the response of Uvalde police.
