Police stand in front of a memorial in Uvalde, TX, where 19 children and two teachers were slaughtered in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary. (AP)

By Bethany Hamilton // Mass Shooting // EEW Magazine Online

Why did as many as 19 police officers at the scene in Uvalde, TX, wait in the school hallway for roughly an hour for specially trained officers from the Border Patrol to storm the classroom where the shooter was located?

This is the question that is fueling frustration and anger among parents, community residents, and Americans in the aftermath of a shooting at Robb Elementary that left 19 children and two teachers dead.

According to a New York Times report, Brian Higgins—a former SWAT team commander and police chief who teaches at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and runs a safety consulting firm—said, “Officers are trained to disable an active shooter as quickly as possible, before rescuing victims and without waiting for a tactical team or special equipment to arrive. That is true even if only two officers are available.”

A child writes a message on a cross at a memorial site for the victims killed in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, May 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Most mass shootings are over within minutes, policing experts said. This one, by comparison, lasted an eternity.

Police leaders, so far, have struggled to answer questions and give cogent explanations about what happened during that hour of terror when 18-year-old Salvador Ramos opened fire in the majority-Hispanic ranching community of just over 15,000 people.

The public is demanding accountability and asking, could more lives have been saved had law enforcement acted quicker?

According to a police spokesman, no school police officer ever confronted the gunman before he went into the school. “He walked in unobstructed initially,” Victor Escalon, a regional director for the state’s Department of Public Safety, said at a news conference. “He was not confronted by anybody.”

Rightfully, distraught parents had gathered at the school on Tuesday as gunfire erupted inside, begging police, who were seen on video restraining and holding them at bay, to go in and stop the slaughter.

Prianna Ayala weeps as she is embraced at a memorial site for the victims killed in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Thursday, May 26, 2022. (AP Photo/Dario Lopez-Mills)

Police officials said that with the gunman isolated in a classroom, the officers focused on evacuating students and staff members from other classrooms to prevent more fatalities.

In a Friday news conference, Steven C. McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said multiple people in the classrooms, including at least two students, called 911 imploring police to help. But McCraw said, since the suspect had barricaded himself in the classroom, officers believed “there were no kids at risk,” and the police did not enter the classroom until 12:50 p.m., a full 78 minutes after the shooter walked inside.

“From the benefit of hindsight where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision,” McCraw said. “It was the wrong decision. Period.”

By 12:15 p.m., agents from Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement had arrived with tactical shields, he explained, but local police would not allow them to go after the gunman who had shot students with an AR-15 style weapon.

Friday’s briefing came after authorities spent three days providing often conflicting and incomplete information about the 90 minutes that elapsed between the time Ramos entered the school and when U.S. Border Patrol agents unlocked the classroom door and killed him.

It was 11:28 a.m. Tuesday when Ramos’ Ford pickup slammed into a ditch behind the low-slung Texas school and the driver jumped out carrying a gun. Five minutes after that, authorities said, Ramos entered the school and found his way to the fourth-grade classroom where he killed the 21 victims.

But it was not until 12:58 p.m. that law enforcement radio chatter said Ramos had been killed and the siege was over.