Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in a massacre at an elementary school. It was the deadliest school shooting in the United States in a decade.
On May 24, an 18-year-old gunman wielding an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, a small city west of San Antonio. It was the deadliest school shooting since 20 children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut in 2012.
Here’s what to know about the attack.
What happened?
Around 11:30 a.m. on May 24, a gunman was reported outside the school, shortly after he crashed a pickup truck in a nearby ditch. The gunman, identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, had earlier shot his grandmother in the face at her nearby home.
After leaving the truck, Mr. Ramos entered the school, where he went into a pair of connected fourth-grade classrooms and started shooting.
The toll: 19 students and two teachers dead, and more than a dozen others wounded. (Read more about the victims.)
Scores of officers from multiple agencies responded to the scene, but hesitated to confront the gunman, to the frustration of parents who had also gathered outside.
More than an hour after Mr. Ramos entered the building, Border Patrol officers stormed the classrooms and fatally shot him. (Read a minute-by-minute timeline of the attack.)
Why did it take the authorities so long to respond?
That question has become the focus of at least three investigations, including one by a special Texas House committee, which released its findings on July 17.
The report, the first comprehensive assessment of the law enforcement response to the shooting, made a broad indictment of actions by the police.
It concluded that the order to confront the gunman could have been issued far earlier; that “some victims could have survived if they had not had to wait” for rescue; and that the school police chief, dozens of state police officers and scores of agents with the U.S. Border Patrol all exercised “egregious poor decision making.”
The decision to finally confront the gunman was made by a small group of officers, the report found.
Video Shows Delayed Police Response to Uvalde School Shooting
Surveillance footage from Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, shows officers retreating from gunfire and waiting for 77 minutes before confronting the gunman. The delayed police response has been widely criticized and is under investigation.CreditCredit…The New York Times
On Aug. 24, the school board in Uvalde fired its school police chief, Pete Arredondo, who directed the district’s response to the shooting. The unanimous vote, which Mr. Arredondo, through his lawyer, called “an unconstitutional public lynching,” was the first direct accountability over the widely derided police response
Gun control is back in the spotlight.
The shooting in Uvalde came less than two weeks after a racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, where a gunman killed 10 Black people. The back-to-back mass shootings prompted a flurry of negotiations in Congress, where years of efforts to enact gun restrictions have fallen short amid Republican opposition.
A month to the day after the Uvalde shooting, Congress gave final approval to a bipartisan compromise intended to stop dangerous people from accessing firearms, a measure that President Biden signed on June 25.
