It’s been 48 hours since a gunman opened fire inside a locked elementary school classroom, shooting and killing 19 students and 2 teachers. Now, many questions are arising after a video shows parents pleading with police to get inside the school as other parents are heard screaming for their children.
And a fourth-grader who saw it all happen is sharing his story. In a heartbreaking interview with KENS 5, the unnamed fourth-grader told reporters that he witnessed the gunman enter his classroom.
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“He shot the next person’s door. We have a door in the middle. He opened it. He came in and he crouched a little bit and he said, he said, ‘It’s time to die,'” the boy recalled.
This would be the classroom the gunman would end up barricading himself in. The same classroom where all the deceased victims were discovered.
“When I heard the shooting through the door, I told my friend to hide under something so he won’t find us,” he said. “I was hiding hard. And I was telling my friend to not talk because he is going to hear us.”
According to KENS 5, the table this boy and four of his friends were hiding under had a tablecloth over it, which is believed to have shielded them from the gunman’s point of view. That’s when the boy revealed more details from that day.
“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her. The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”
As the young boy continued, when the shooting stopped, he saw the armor and the shield and knew it was time to come out of hiding. “I just opened the curtain. And I just put my hand out,” he said. “I got out with my friend. I knew it was police. I saw the armor and the shield.”
The video, which shows parents and police officers yelling at each other, was originally posted on Twitter, by FamilysSoupTV. The video is very difficult to watch and listen to.
Now the Associated Press is reporting that what is being shown in the video was parents asking the police to follow the gunman into the school. When the police didn’t do that, one parent tried to run passed the officers in order to enter the school.
As the video shows, police stopped the man, pinning him to the ground. Now, Ernest “Chip” King, a Uvalde firefighter who was one of the first responders at the scene revealed that he believed the gunfire lasted for about 40 minutes.
“There was a lot of chaos,” he says. “Fathers smashed windows, and physically pulled their kids out of classrooms.”
Berlinda Arreola, the grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza, a child who lost her life inside the school that day, told the AP that “Everyone was just showing up and they weren’t doing anything.”
“The parents were being all crazy, like ‘why aren’t you all doing anything? Why aren’t you going in?’ But they were like, ‘until he opens gunfire, we can’t do anything. We’re holding on so that he doesn’t open gunfire.'”
However, Arreola later revealed to People, that what the parents didn’t know at the time is that it was already too late. “We didn’t know that he had already opened gunfire in there. We didn’t even know that he had already shot all the kids. It was already done.”
Despite this, parents told the AP that they believed the police “were unprepared.” In response to the backlash, Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw told the AP, “The bottom line is law enforcement was there,” McCraw said. “They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom.”
As the fourth-grader revealed, his teachers, the two teachers who died on May 24, Irma Garcia and Eva Mireles, did what they could to save their students. “They were nice teachers,” he said. “They went in front of my classmates to help. To save them.”
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