By Aaron Miller-
Police made the “wrong decision” by failing to storm a classroom in Robb Elementary School as a gunman killed 19 children inside, the chief Texas safety official has said.
“If I thought it would help, I would apologise,” Steven McCraw said during a heated press conference on Friday.
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He criticised officers for delaying entering the room because they didn’t believe it was still an “active shooter” situation.
Terrified pupils trapped inside the later to be hellish scene of bloodbath, made multiple calls begging for police to come.
Mr McCraw(pictured) confirmed there was a 40 minute gap from the police unit’s arrival to the moment they decided to storm the classroom where the gunman had barricaded himself.
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The senior officer on the scene decided to wait until the school janitor arrived with the keys because they thought that either “no kids were at risk” by then or “no one was living anymore”.
The delayed police response, combined video footage showing frustrated parents being tackled and handcuffed by police while the gunman was still inside the school, has sparked growing public anger and scrutiny of how the police handled the situation.
Mr McCraw said the gun man crashed his car into the school at 11.30pm , he walked around the building firing “more than one hundred rounds” into classrooms as he looked to get inside.
McCraw said there were “plenty of officers” inside the school from the earliest minutes of the shootout, and as many as 19 officers from local and federal forces were in the hallway most of the time.
“From the benefit of hindsight, where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. Period. There was no excuse for that,” McCraw said.
An officer for the school district, who was not on campus at the time, drove immediately to the scene following a 911 call but “drove right by the suspect who was hunkered down behind a vehicle”, Mr McCraw said.
Additional anger has spread after it came to light that Police officers followed the gun man into the building minutes later but remained in the hallway.
An estimated 19 police officers gathered outside the classroom , but were too scared to go inside, so they allowed the gun man full rein in his shooting spree.
A tactical unit eventually entered the classroom and killed him over an hour and half after the attack began.
The commanding officer on scene – the Uvalde school district’s chief of police, who was not present at Friday’s news conference – believed the situation was no longer one involving an “active shooter”.
The description is at odds with the disclosure that at least four emergency 911 calls were made from within the school – some from children barricaded inside with the gunman – begging for police to come.
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