Warning: The following video and audio footage and descriptions of the Uvalde school shooting are disturbing. Discretion is advised.
The frantic, desperate 911 calls poured into the Uvalde emergency dispatch center as a shooter entered Uvalde's Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.
At 11:33 a.m., a man screamed to an operator: "He's inside the school! Oh my God in the name of Jesus, he's inside the school shooting at the kids."
Three minutes later, a teacher inside Robb Elementary, who remained on the line with a 911 operator for 28 minutes, remained silent for most of the call but occasionally whispered.At one point her voice cracked, and she cried: "I'm scared. They are banging at my door."
The city of Uvalde on Saturday released a trove of records from the state's deadliest school shooting in history, marking the largest and most substantial disclosure of documents since that day. The records include body camera footage, some dashcam video, 911 and nonemergency calls, text messages and other redacted documents.
The release does not shift the public narrative of what is known about that day, much of which has been disclosed to journalists in the more than two years since the shooting: A gunman walked into the school, went to two classrooms and started shooting, while law enforcement waited more than an hour to breach the classroom. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed.
But the records release comes as part of the resolution to a legal case brought by a coalition of media outlets, including the American-Statesman and its parent company, Gannett.
"We're thankful the city of Uvalde is taking this step toward transparency," said attorney Laura Prather, who represented the coalition. "Transparency is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow us to all understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies."
The coalition of news organizations still have pending lawsuits against the Texas Department of Public Safety, Uvalde County and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District for their records.
Body cameras worn by officers show the chaos at Robb Elementary as the shooting scene unfolded. One piece of footage showed several officers cautiously approaching the school.
"Watch windows! Watch windows," one officer says. When notified that the gunman was armed with an "AR," short for the military-style AR-15, the officer responds with a single expletive.
One officer says of the shooter: "I hope he rots in hell."
More:How a false tale of police heroism in Uvalde spread and unraveled
The 911 calls also came from a man who identified himself as the shooter's uncle.
He called at 12:57 p.m. — just minutes after a SWAT team breached the classroom and killed the gunman — expressing a desire to speak to his nephew. He explained to the operator that sometimes the man will listen to him.
"Oh my god, please don't do nothing stupid," he said out loud.
"I think he is shooting kids," the uncle said. "Why did you do this? Why?"
Emails to then-Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin also paint a picture of frustration, sadness and anger that continued to fester days after the shooting.
One of them, dated May 31, 2022, a week after the deadly attack, vented at McLaughlin for perceived inaction in holding law enforcement officers accountable for the botched response to the massacre.
"Come on Don, you have to do something," the sender (the sender line in the email was redacted) wrote in the message sprinkled with expletives. "You can't just sit back and do nothing like you are used to doing. You need to fire the cops involved and you know it. But you won't because you are caught up in politics. You would rather take a donation from the NRA than protect your citizens."
The chief of staff to the mayor of Orlando, Fla., sent McLaughlin an email expressing condolences and offering support. It included a PDF attachment called "Mass Shooting Protocol: Checklist," which provides guidance for communicating with residents and media.
"Keep messages simple, credible and consistent," it said. "Correct misinformation."
The Texas Department of Public Safety is still facing a lawsuit from 14 news organizations, including the Statesman, that requests records from the shooting including footage from the scene and internal investigations. The DPS has not released these records despite a judge ruling in the news organizations’ favor in March, with the department citing objections from Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell.
In June, a state District Court judge in Uvalde County ordered the Uvalde school district and sheriff's office to release records related to the shooting to news outlets, but those records have not yet been made available while the matter is under appeal.
More:'Failure': DOJ's scathing Uvalde school shooting report criticizes law enforcement response
Law enforcement agencies that converged upon Robb Elementary after the shooting began have been under withering criticism for waiting 77 minutes to confront the gunman. Surveillance video footage first obtained by the Statesman and Austin ABC affiliate KVUE nearly seven months after the massacre shows in excruciating detail dozens of heavily armed officers from local, state and federal agencies in helmets and body armor walking back and forth in a school hallway.
Some left the camera's frame and then reappeared. Others are seen training their weapons toward the classroom, talking, making cellphone calls, sending text messages and looking at floor plans, but not trying to enter the classrooms.
Even after hearing at least four additional shots from the classrooms 45 minutes after police first arrived on the scene, the officers waited.
'We’re here to help'
Two Uvalde school police officers, including former Police Chief Pete Arredondo, have been charged in the botched response to the shooting.
In a 10-count indictment made public in June, prosecutors accuse Arredondo of 10 missteps. According to the documents, Arredondo is charged with failing to act to protect survivors of the attack, including then-10-year-old Khloie Torres, who called 911 during the attack and begged for help. The documents also name Samuel Salinas, who was also 10 at the time, who said in interviews that he "played dead" to survive the attack.
The indictment states that Arredondo "failed to respond as trained to an active shooter incident ... thereby delaying the response by law enforcement officers to an active shooter who was hunting and shooting a child or children in Room 112 at Robb Elementary School."
On Friday, Arredondo’s attorney Paul Looney said during a news conference in Houston that the former police chief isn’t to blame for the flawed response and instead laid responsibility on police protocols. He said the responsibility to set up a command post was not Arredondo's as he was one of the first officers to respond to the shooting and was working to save lives.
“Every single law enforcement officer that shows up is competent and trained to set up a command post,” Looney said. “The people that are on the point that are in the level of connectivity to where they're potentially in the gunfight, it's not their job to set up a command post.The protocols say that somebody outside of the door, outside of the fire zone is the best person to."
Looney said that despite the school shooting policy requiring Arredondo to serve as incident commander, the former chief was under the impression that another officer had set up command to lead those on the ground because "when you're in the hot zone, you are not an incident commander," he said.
In body camera footage released by the city on Saturday, however, Arredondo can be seen giving instructions from inside the school over the phone, telling others to "tape this once we’re all done. We need to do the whole school. The whole grounds. So nobody comes in anywhere.”
About a minute later, officers from another agency introduce themselves to Arredondo, saying: “Hey Chief! Have you met our captain? We’re here to help.”“Thank you brother,” Arredondo responds.
Looney said of the delayed response: "The situation has to be studied. It has to be worked with, and we have to get a handle on how to do these things. ... This has to be better developed in terms of protocols. This has to be better put together so that's there's more of an automatic nature. Apparently, there wasn't enough training in this stuff, because it didn't happen as second nature.”
The other officer charged in the case, Adrian Gonzales,faces a 29-count indictment for child abandonment/endangerment. Prosecutors accuse him of havingtime to respond to the shooter but instead opting to not“engage, distract and delay the shooter and failed to act in a way to otherwise impede the shooter until after the shooter entered Rooms 111 and 112 of Robb Elementary School,"accordingto the indictment.
