There are many tears in Uvalde, Texas. The vigil that was held on Wednesday night was a collective embrace in search of the healing of a community that at all times is described as a family. However, not everything is pain. The outrage is also palpable and, a few hours after the death of the 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary, complaints are already emerging about the actions of the security forces.
The disappointment with the police is evident in a video that the parents themselves have posted on social networks, in which it is evident that they tried to enter before what they believed was a passive action by the agents. “They're out there, why don't they come in? Parents should come in. All parents must go ”, she is heard, in the middle of comments loaded with insults. "They are our children, they cannot defend themselves from the gunman," they lament.
"They could have done more," say some voices on the streets of this town of 16,000 inhabitants, predominantly Hispanics. The gunman spent an hour barricaded in the classroom where he caused the massacre.
Frustrated witnesses, residents of the area who saw how it all began, from the first shots outside the campus, urged the police to carry out a charge in the school to finish off the entrenched Salvador Ramos, 18, who entered with a rifle, pistol and a backpack full of ammunition.
"The parents were arriving and they were crazy," says neighbor Estrella, 23, who watched everything that was happening from the door of her house. Her little brother, ten years old, was inside the compound. Some parents, aware of what was happening, did not forget to bring their weapons. Texas is an armed state.
"Come in, come in," a woman shouted at the uniformed officers almost immediately after the attack began, witnesses such as Juan Carranza, 24, another resident in the school area, said. According to his version, they did not enter, they waited for special forces reinforcements. In the end, it was a border patrolman (quite a few live in the Uvalde area due to its proximity to the border) who managed to “neutralize” Ramos.
"There were parents who themselves wanted to enter, they even took children out by breaking a window," recalls Estrella.
Javier Cazares, whose fourth-grade daughter Jacky was killed in the attack, is one of those who ran to school upon learning of the shooting. Upon arrival he saw police officers gathered outside the building.
Disappointed because no one was moving there with the intention of liberating the school, he suggested that he was going to go in, that he would not wait helplessly. “Let's hurry inside because the cops aren't doing what they're supposed to be doing,” he said. "More could have been done, the agents were not prepared," he said once the tragedy was over. He remarked that the uniformed men should have entered much earlier.
It was necessary to wait for special border patrol operations to arrive to force entry.
Ramos began his deadly escalation in his own home. He shot his grandmother in the face. The woman gathered her strength and went out to raise the alarm. Carranza saw the gunman from the first moment. He watched as he shot two people with his AR-15 rifle, a military-style semi-automatic, outside the funeral home next to the school. The two ran away, unharmed.
This was also witnessed by Estrella. "They were yelling for us to get into the house, that was crazy, the bullets out there." Then, as the children climbed out the window, or however they could, "they hid in the funeral home," she recalls. Life and death, all at once.
