(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Uvalde surviving teacher relates harrowing account, corroborating the worst details still covered up [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.', 'Backgroundurl Avatar_Large', 'Nickname', 'Joined', 'Created_At', 'Story Count', 'N_Stories', 'Comment Count', 'N_Comments', 'Popular Tags']

Date: 2022-07-11

Below the fold is where I place my most broad speculations and armchair detective work. At the end of this rambling essay I will reprint the DPS timeline from the “limited hangout” Tx Senate presentation that most took away from merely a desire to scapegoat Arredondo, the CISD police chief who was said to be “in command,” even though he himself didn't consider himself in that position. Some 20-60 plus LEOs were present, at least ten UPD entered before Arrendondo, etc. This to me was a failure of everyone present with the training, a weapon and the knowledge that an armed mass shooter was present. All were charged with the duty to press forward immediately and engage the mass shooter. None did so. Not one, for over an hour.

This DPS timeline is partial, obviously biased and possibly deliberately manipulative. But so far, it’s what we have to go on. I assume much if it is accurate in the basic sense of who was where, when and some things that will be confirmed to have been said, when and if we ever get full transparency (which I doubt.) It is however, useful for the purposes of this discussion.

Many things can be inferred from it, one of which is that LEOs were seemingly unsure that the killer was in a classroom or in an office, for example. There really does seem to be chaos, misinformation, miscommunication, lack of communication and near-panic on their parts coupled with an ongoing self-awareness that they were failing their duty massively much of the time. But for now I’d like to concentrate on the worst of the worst, IMO, this tragic blunder that led to a child’s execution and the NON-RESPONSE in real time.

Keep in mind that although the first LEOs were there quite quickly it’s likely the bulk of the shooting was in the first two minutes before any LEO was near, or even heard, possibly. The large body count could almost never have been prevented. But they can’t be allowed to dodge this cold-blooded execution incident, nor their clear complicity in it, and the passive response. I think a wall of silence surrounds this part, top to bottom and despite the inter-agency turf wars, they are currently sticking together on this one remaining buried. (And again, who knows what else, just as bad or worse?)

Difficulty here: One thing that confuses this whole thing is the lack of public video and audio evidence for us to place all these accounts into context, but the child survivor seems to conflate the execution he was privy to, to the final “breach” (the door was almost assuredly unlocked) by the ad-hoc “BORTAC” group of seven, three of who likely together ended the killer’s life and brought the inexplicable standoff to a conclusion. (Best to watch the video) But here in a reporters writing is the child’s words from his edited CBS news interview:

"I was hiding hard," the boy said. "And I was telling my friend not to talk because he is going to hear us." Soon after, police arrived at the scene. An officer told the kids to "Yell if you need help," the boy recalled. "One of the persons in my class said 'help.' The guy overheard and he came in and shot her," he said. "The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting."

If you see the video, (DO SEE THE VIDEO) without the child actually saying these two events were in quick succession, you can certainly get that impression. Even I do. One thing, and then the other — a call for help led to an executing shot and then the LEOs come to the final rescue quickly.

But other details we seem to have heard make that less likely what really happened. Look closer, especially now that we have the teacher corroborating in part possibly when a cry from the classroom took place — long, long before the breach, and nearer to the teacher being shot a second time, in the back.

That alone is tragic enough, a blunder met with a responding rescue too late for the one who was executed. But I think it was worse, that the execution was met with a LONG and horrific-to-contemplate non-response. Some 10 to 20 or more LEOs seemingly knew that they made a tragic mistake in calling to the room, and their response was to hunker down further in frozen uselessness. I really do think this is the sort of thing (and there may be worse) that the GOP wants us to never learn fully about, lest it bring up too many questions of the sort like, “why do cops exist at all, if this is how they do their jobs?” And not in a rhetorical fashion.

Bear with me while I get into the minutia a bit. We are forced to speculate due to the lack of video and audio. But I think it is quite possible the child is simply relating what he knows without specifically saying when each event took place. I tend to think the child has told the story more than once to his parents and at the time of the news crew interview is mostly trying to get through the experience of being interviewed as rapidly as possible. It is this reason that he gives the impression that the execution MAY have elicited a quick rescue response. But again, he doesn’t really say that. He doesn't say (killer) came in and shot her AND THEN the cops started shooting. He just says two things happened. And he also says (elsewhere) that he “was hiding HARD.” I tend to think for this child, things happened and things were in determined “shut-down mode” for him between incidents he relates. In other words, he experienced two types if things — utter horror and self-generated spaces of frozen time, movement and thinking.

Also try to parse the child’s account of the killer CROSSING from one classroom to another for this kill shot. The desperate doomed (female, it seems) child who called out may have felt since the room was empty, it was time for her to be brave and call out. It’s all so tragic. But the detail that matters in getting towards the truth is that one, the killer was mostly in the surviving teacher’s room, according to the teacher, and two, that when he was killed, DPS has elsewhere claimed multiple times that he was hiding in a closet at the time of the breech. I just don’t think the execution precipitated the breach. Neither does the timeline seem to say this directly. We don’t even now yet if the killer had a loaded weapon by the end. For all we know, he ran out of bullets 30 mins or so before his demise. THEY WON’T TELL US.

At the risk of repeating myself too much: So yes, two things have been related by at least two LEO press conferences — and one is that they claim the killer was hiding in a closet when the “breach” occurred. The other is that on the DPS selective timelines, there is no shot recorded / reported immediately preceding the breech. Couple that with the “crossing the classroom” for the execution-style slaying, and I think we can make an informed inference. I think, rather than A led to B, that the child is relating the things he witnessed and leaving out the time interval between the “Execution” style killing and the final breech.

If we are to trust the DPS partial and selective timeline, the LAST time the killer shot his weapon was here:

12:21:08 - Suspect gunfire (4 rounds)

The last entry on the DPS timeline is (deliberately?) vague

12:50:03 - Breach and termination gunfire

So that is 39 minutes before the breech, and the other times during the “standoff” period that shots were recoded by DPS are much earlier, here:

11:40:58 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round) 11:44:00 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round)

It seems likely to me that Reyes was shot a second time at 11:40:58 and that he may have missed the exact circumstances of the 11:40 shot by virtue of being in shock. It’s my working theory that the execution style slaying incident was either 11:40 or 11:44, and that the four shots later were wild paranoid defensive action shots as the killer feared the not so inevitable breach to come. Multiple shots were said to have been fired out the blinds of the window. Maybe this was the 4 at 12:50. Might be hard to ever pin that down. All of this is again, speculation based on incomplete and withheld data points.

And all of this is rambling, I realize and difficult to follow. Here is a short summary and if anyone cares to parse any of this I’d love to hear what your impression is.

The LOEs all ran in a few minutes behind the killer, who had, likely unbeknownst to them fully, shot bullets into around 19 or 21 plus people, at least, who expired eventually, if not instantly — there were two who didn’t die quickly — the teacher who managed to call her LEO husband and the doomed girl who was “executed” for answering an LEO’s blundering, tragic-mistake call. We can likely never know that exact number, but it’s more than 21 bullets into innocents by the end of the ordeal because that total number has to include not just there dead but also the wounded who survived, including the teacher Reyes, and possibly the little glrl who smeared herself with the blood of her dying friend. (was she also wounded? I don’t know for sure.)

This initial wave of relatively quick, seemingly unpreventable-by-LEOs deaths in itself is a terrible tragedy and had the LEOs been superhero cops that day, we would have had obviously still a horrific massacre on our hands. (He fired over 89 bullets in the initial attack, they claim, most likely three 30 round magazines.). Let’s all be optimists of a sort and assume some of the individuals shot could have been saved with quick medical help. (Not that our optimism leads to a good outcome. They merely suffered longer.) But some of these children were literally decapitated, including I think maybe the “green converse” girl who may have actually been the “LEO call-and-killer response” child, which is hard to contemplate. What is certain is the further you drill down into what happened in a real-time way, the worse all of this becomes to contemplate. But there are SLIGHT mitigating incidents to think about, too. It’s all too human, too commonly fallible.

Reasonably quickly, some officers advanced on the shooter and he fired thru the walls and the doors possibly, slightly wounding two with fragments of the door or wall, and driving them back to the ends of the hall. After that, the correct response would have been (according to training) for them to repeat this same action immediately, to “engage the shooter” ASAP, ignoring danger and the injured etc. (Be a good guy with a gun, as it were.) We all know that didn't happen and frankly, I see why. Not that this excuses the next hour, but the training response is to press forward and to engage the active shooter. Except in truth he ceased to be an “Active shooter” after they withdrew down the hall, arguably. He became a guy in what they assumed was a locked room with an AR-15 and an indeterminate number of dead, wounded and hostages. And he became a guy it was probably suicidal to approach not having more information and better armor.

And now we also know he soon closed the blinds, according to the teacher. So he’s basically a jack-in-the-box of death and a hailstorm of lead waiting to go off again, WHICH HE DID NOT for quite some time, not in the way he did previously. Imagine you were there. OKAY, YOU GO IN THERE. I hate to say it, but I doubt I would be the first volunteer. This is what we get in USA. We created this setup. An AR-15 is damn near a Martian death ray, “your puny earth weapons are useless against us.” There are just some things you can’t train for. This isn’t some corporate “trust fall” team-building exercise. This is, “are you ready to die today” for a marginally knowable outcome question. Al the arguments of “the kids had nothing” are valid, but those LEOs wanted to rationalize and survive. And their OTHER training and culture always points harder to, “the goal is for the LEO and his partners to come home safe at the end of the day.” Guess which repeated training bullet point (no pun intended) won out? The one without the bullets for the LEOs.

All of this gets us to here:

11:38:37 - Unknown Officer: "He's contained in this office." 11:40:23 - Chief Arredondo calls Uvalde PD landline 11:40:58 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round) 11:41:08 - Uvalde PD Officer: "We believe that he is barricaded in one of the offices, there's still shooting." 11:41:30 - Dispatch asks if door is locked, to which a Uvalde PD Officer replies, "I am not sure but we have a hooligan to break it." 11:41:55 - 4 First Responders enter from the east hallway: 2 Constables, Fire Marshal, UPD Officer 11:42:24 - 1 DPS Trooper and 2 UPD Officers enter from east hallway 11:44:00 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round) 11:44:28 - Uvalde PD Officer: "Have some officers that are available get everybody back." 11:48:18 - UCISD Officer Ruben Ruiz, husband of one of the teachers in the classroom, enters the west door and is heard telling officers, "She says she is shot."

So from 11:38 to 11:40, they kinda DON’T have an active shooter situation. But that’s of course open to many interpretations. But there was technically you might say, some sort of a lull in the action. (Probably the killer reloading and that is when they should have gone in, three abreast and guns blazing. ) But at least some of them seemingly think the shooter is in ONE office, not two classrooms filled with children. Confusion. Doubt. Hesitation. Lack of courage, lack of leadership. Conflicting training, conflicting instincts.

What this tells me is that none of these cops are flawless heroes and that they are all human, scared and fallible. The time to stop a suicidal maniac with a death wish and a battlefield weapon is before he gets the weapon and the wish, if possible.

The rest of what happens is always the same, in essence. BAD THINGS, and all the equipment and training in the world won't fix it. At best you can mitigate some of the BAD THINGS if miracles and luck and yeah good and correct training kicks in. Mostly the miracles and luck. I don’t think any more training or even more courage would have fixed this at this exact moment between initial “pressing forward to contact” and the instinctual reposes to get out of a field of fire you cannot return accurately in a zone of potential hostages or innocent lives. It would take amazingly convincing leadership. Because individual courage wasn't what was needed.

Sad to say, the husband LEO who was stopped, stripped of his gun and sent outside might have been the best chance for a slightly better outcome but acting alone he would have likely died for little.

I also don’t think “cops shot kids” and this is why they are enacting a coverup. I think LEOs made a tragic blunder and called out to kids at some point and it got recorded that the killer responded by executing the child who answered.

here is what the teacher Reyes says about vocal calls from kids to LEOs.

After the initial attack, Mr. Reyes said, he could hear them talking to one another in the hallway just outside.

Me, editorializing at this juncture: I thnk what he heard was the two groups of cops calling from one end of the hallway to the other after they both fell back.

At one point, he heard one of the officers yell at the gunman: “Come out, we want to talk to you!” The gunman did not answer, though the police have said that two officers suffered grazing wounds when he fired a burst at the classroom door. The chatter from the police went quiet. “You didn’t hear anything anymore,” Mr. Reyes said. Most of his students were probably beyond saving, Mr. Reyes said. But at least one surviving child in the classroom next door must have heard the officers too, he said, because he heard someone cry for help. “Officers, come in,” he heard a small voice say. “We are in here.”

What Reyes doesn't say is when this cry for help really happened, or what it was in response to. And I don’t think the reporter who interviewed him knows to ask the right questions based on what the CBS eyewitness has said. Reyes never heard that interview either, he was in ICU, a helicopter or surgery when it aired. And, lest we forget, Uvalde is a small town. Arredondo is, we learned from the NYT, related to Reyes. It’s possible Reyes knows who called out "Yell if you need help," and it’s possible it was his cousin. Or maybe he just wants to spare us all that part of the story. Nothing good for him or his students can come of it, he may think. Fog of war.

In conclusion, people love to speculate, DPS is withholding all the real evidence, and some things happened that we might never know about. But to me, one man’s opinion, the LEOs made a tragic blunder and it was recorded and is being covered up, and misdirected away from deliberately. The one consistent thing we do know is that each retelling is WORSE. Ans that we can’t know the whole story, ever but the people of Uvalde deserve transparency and the children deserved better.

here is the secretive. selective, incomplete timeline (roughly cribbed from DPS) and the internet, for reference purposes.

1:28:25 - Suspect crashes vehicle into ditch

11:29:02 - Two males from funeral home move toward crash

11:29:20 - Teacher calls 911 and reports and man with a gun

11:31:36 - Suspect shooting in between vehicle at school

11:31:43 - Patrol car accelerates into school parking lot, drives by shooter

11:32:08 - Multiple shots fired by suspect while outside the school

11:33:00 - Suspect Enters the school through the west door

11:33:24 - Suspect begins shooting into classroom 111/112 from hallway

11:33:32 - Suspect enters, exits, and re-enters room 111/112

11:35:55 - 3 Uvalde PD Officers enter west door (including 2 rifles)

11:36:00 - 2 UCISD officers (including Chief Arredondo) and 2 Uvalde PD officers enter through the south door

11:36:03 - 3 Uvalde PD officers and 1 UCISD officer enter through west door

11:37:00 - Suspect gunfire injuring officers approaching classroom doors

11:38:37 - Unknown Officer: "He's contained in this office."

11:40:23 - Chief Arredondo calls Uvalde PD landline

11:40:58 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round)

11:41:08 - Uvalde PD Officer: "We believe that he is barricaded in one of the offices, there's still shooting."

11:41:30 - Dispatch asks if door is locked, to which a Uvalde PD Officer replies, "I am not sure but we have a hooligan to break it."

11:41:55 - 4 First Responders enter from the east hallway: 2 Constables, Fire Marshal, UPD Officer

11:42:24 - 1 DPS Trooper and 2 UPD Officers enter from east hallway

11:44:00 - Suspect Gunfire (1 round)

11:44:28 - Uvalde PD Officer: "Have some officers that are available get everybody back."

11:48:18 - UCISD Officer Ruben Ruiz, husband of one of the teachers in the classroom, enters the west door and is heard telling officers, "She says she is shot."

11:50:53 - Unknown officer says, "They need to get out of the hallway," to which Uvalde PD Officer responds, "Chief is in there, Chief is in charge right now hold on."

11:51:13 - 7 Border Patrol Agents enter the west door

11:52:08 - FIRST ballistic shield enters the west door

11:52:49 - UPD Officer: "Units just showing up can you help with crowd control."

11:53:10 - Unknown officer informs a DPS Special Agent that all they need right now is perimeter.

Someone comments about whether there are still kids inside to which the DPS Special Agent responds, "If there is they just need to go in."

11:54:14 - DPS Special Agent enters the west building and is directed on where the suspect focus is. He asks an unknown officer, "Are kids still in there?"

The unknown officer responds, "It is unknown at this time."

11:54:15 - Uvalde PD Officer: "He's in classroom 111 or 112 But Chief is making contact with him. No one has made contact with him."

11:56:49 - Unknown Officer: "Y'all don't know if there's kids in there?"

DPS SA: "If there's kids in there, we need to go in there."

Unknown Officer: "What's that?"

DPS SA: "If there's kids in there, we need to go in there."

Unknown Officer: "Whoever is in charge will determine that."

11:56:52 - PD Channel Recording: "Again it is critical for everybody to let PD take point on this."

11:58:12 - After an unknown officer asks where the shooter is, another unknown officer advises, "The school chief of police is in there with him."

11:58:24 - DPS SA says, "It sounds like a hostage rescue situation. Sounds like a (undercover) rescue, they should probably go in."

12:01:13 - DPS SA indicates he wants to go clear more rooms. An unknown Officer replies, "Don't you think we should have a supervisor approve that?" to which DPS SA replies,

"He's not my supervisor."

www.fox2detroit.com/...

12:03:50 - 911 call from student inside the classroom begins

12:03:51 - SECOND ballistic shield enters the west door

12:04:16 - THIRD ballistic shield enters the west door

12:09:24 - Uvalde PD Officer: "Go around and get the master key to the rooms"

12:10:21 - Elements of BORTAC begin arriving at elementary school

12:11:00 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo requests master key

12:14:45 - Uvalde ID Chief Arredondo gives instructions to officers to have a sniper on the east roof

12:15:27 - BORTAC Member arrives in west building

12:16:24 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "I just need a key.

12:17:22 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "Tell them to fucking wait. No one comes in."

12:20:46 - FOURTH ballistic shield enters west door

12:21:08 - Suspect gunfire (4 rounds)

12:21:30 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "Can you go get a breaching tool? Like for a trailer house?"

12:23:21 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "We've lost two kids. These walls are thin. If he starts shooting we're going to lose more kids. I hate to say we have to put those to the side right now."

12:24:00 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo attempts to communicate with the suspect in English and Spanish.

12:26:14 - Unknown officer. "There's a teacher shot in there," to which a Uvalde PD Officer replies, "I know."

12:27:08 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "People are going to ask why we're taking so long. We're trying to preserve the rest of the life."

12:27:29 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "Do we have a team ready to go? Do we have a team ready to go? Have at it."

12:28:21 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "There is a window over there obviously. The door is probably going to be locked. That is the nature of this place. l am going to get some more keys to test"

12:28:53 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "These master keys aren't working here, bro. We have master keys and they're not working.'

12:30:00 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "Okay. We've cleared out everything except for that room. We still have people down there just past the flag to the right. But, uh, we're ready to breach but that door is locked."

12:33:44 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "I say we breach through those windows and shoot his fucking head off through the windows."

12:35:39 - Hooligan breaching tool enters west door

12:38:20 - Uvalde ID Chief Arredondo attempts to communicate with the suspect in English and Spanish.

12:41:58 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "Just so you understand, we think there are some injuries in there. And so you know what we did, we cleared off the rest of the building so we wouldn't have anymore besides what's already in there, obviously."

12:42:11 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "We're having a fucking problem getting into the room because it is locked. He's got an AR-15 and he's shooting everywhere like crazy. So, he's stopped."

12:43:20 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "They gotta get that fucking door open, bro. They can't get that door open. We need more keys or something."

12:46:18 - Uvalde ISD Chief Arredondo: "If ya'll are ready to do it, you do it but you should distract him out that window."

12:47:57 - Sledge Hammer enters from east hallway

12:50:03 - Breach and termination gunfire

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/7/11/2109629/-Uvalde-surviving-teacher-relates-harrowing-account-corroborating-the-worst-details-still-covered-up

Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.

via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.