Distressing videos show parents begging cops to stop Texas school shooting
Harrowing videos captured the heartbreaking wails of parents begging cops to “Go protect the kids!” during the Texas school shooting — with some suggesting they “just rush” the school themselves.
The livestreamed footage captured the unbearable anguish as parents rushed to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where deranged gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, was inside for up to an hour as he killed 19 kids and two teachers.
“You know that they are kids right?” one angry man yelled at officers in one clip obtained by the Washington Post.
“They’re little kids, they don’t know how to defend themselves… 6-year-old kids in there, they don’t know how to defend themselves from a shooter!”
“We’re parents! Take him the f—k out!” begged a mother to an officer, after the cop shoved a frustrated parent and tells the gathered crowd to back up.
Earlier in the same video, a frustrated dad declares “all the parents are gonna go in,” while the same woman yells “f—k that, like our kids are there” as cops tell them to take cover.
“What are you doing — get inside the building!” a person howled in separate video, as another screamed, “Go protect the kids!”
Ramos, 18, broke into the school despite being confronted outside by an officer who did not open fire, officials detailed Wednesday. He was inside for up to an hour as SWAT officers reportedly waited for a staff member to bring a key for the classroom he was barricaded in.
One of the disturbing clips, seen nearly 2 million times by Thursday, shows several parents trying to get past police lines. One woman appeared to be pinned on the ground by an officer, with an onlooker screaming, “What the f–k are you doing to her? Let her go!”
Another clip caught even more angry parents confronting officers standing around outside, with the livestreamer saying that it had “already been about an hour and they still can’t get the kids all out.”
“That’s f—ing crazy, bro — they’re standing all outside [and] there’s f—ing kids in there still, man,” he said.
One mom yelled at an officer, “You’re scared of getting shot? I’ll go in without a vest — I will!”
As an officer tells them to stand back, one mom wails, “You don’t understand!” Another shouts, “Are your kids in there? No!”
The person filming the livestream told one officer, “Half of these f—ing parents here, dude, they wanna go in there — without vests, without guns — to get their f—ing kids.”
Javier Cazares — whose daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was one of the 19 kids shot dead in her fourth-grade classroom — was one of the desperate parents at the scene. He blasted cops as “unprepared.”
He recalled hearing gunfire and suggesting to others at the scene, “Let’s just rush in because the cops aren’t doing anything like they are supposed to.”
He also told the Washington Post, “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building. We were saying, ‘Let’s go’ because that is how worried we were, and we wanted to get our babies out.”
One of the first responders, firefighter Ernest “Chip” King, said some of those parents actually made it past the cordons and “were getting in” to the school.
He told The Post there were fathers “breaking out windows, pulling their kids out of windows. It was a terrible, tragic scene.”
Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the whole thing unfold from his house across the street from Robb Elementary, also recalled hearing women screaming at cops, “Go in there! Go in there!”
He was outraged that they did not get the shooter sooner. “There were more of them. There was just one of him,” he said.
The first officer had confronted Ramos — who was carrying an AR-style rifle — after he crashed his grandmother’s truck outside the school and then ran toward the building around 11:30 a.m. Tuesday.
Gunfire was not exchanged and Ramos was able to get into the school. The officer “followed him right in immediately,” which is “when rounds were exchanged,” Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said Wednesday.
The deranged gunman ran down a hallway to two adjoining classrooms and barricaded himself in, the official revealed.
“And that’s where the carnage began,” McCraw said, with the 19 kids and two teachers who were shot dead all being in the same room.
McCraw on Wednesday refused to give an exact timeline, only saying that Ramos was inside the school between 40 minutes and an hour.
A law enforcement official familiar with the investigation told the Associated Press that the Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key.
Despite the criticism, McCraw defended the response Wednesday.
“The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” he said defensively. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott also insisted the school shooting — the deadliest since 20 kids and six adults were killed in Sandy Hook in 2012 — “could have been worse” without the officers’ response.
“They showed amazing courage by running toward gunfire for the singular purpose of trying to save lives,” the governor said.
“They were able to save lives,” he said — conceding, “Unfortunately, not enough.”
With Post wires
