‘Please send the police’: Officers did not try to break down the classroom door sooner because the commander thought it was barricaded and was no longer an active shooting situation.
Vincent Salazar, right, father of Layla Salazar, weeps while kneeling in front of a cross with his daughter's name at a memorial site for the victims killed in this week's elementary school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, Friday, May 27, 2022. – Nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside of the classrooms during this week's attack on a Texas elementary school for more than 45 minutes before agents used a master key to open a door and confront a gunman, authorities said Friday.
Questions have mounted over the amount of time it took officers to enter the school to confront the gunman. Friday's update on the attack's timeline came only after authorities declined to explain why officers had not been able to stop the shooter sooner, with Victor Escalon, regional director for the Texas Department of Public Safety, telling reporters Thursday that he had “taken all those questions into consideration,” but was not ready to answer them.
Escalon said that during that time, the officers called for backup, negotiators and tactical teams, while evacuating students and teachers. “Go in there! Go in there!” women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside a house across the street.
But a law enforcement official said that once in the building, the agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key. The official spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to talk publicly about the investigation.Department of Public Safety spokesman Lt. Christopher Olivarez told CNN that investigators were trying to establish whether the classroom was, in fact, locked or barricaded in some way.
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