“Someone tell me what to do” – By Lomi Kriel, Lexi Churchill and Jinitzail Hernandez (Texas Tribune and Propublica) / Dec 5, 2023
Across the country, states require more training to prepare students and teachers for mass shootings than for those expected to protect them. The differences were clear in Uvalde, where children and officers waited on opposite sides of the door.
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.
The children hid. They dropped to the floor, crouching under desks and countertops, far from the windows. They lined up against the walls, avoiding the elementary school doors that separated them from a mass shooter about a decade older than them. Some held up the blunted scissors that they often used to cut shapes as they prepared to fight. A few grabbed bloodied phones and dialed 911. And as students across the country have been instructed for years, they remained quiet, impossibly quiet. At times, they hushed classmates who screamed in agony from the bullets that tore through their small bodies.
Then, they waited. Waited for the adults, whom they could hear in the hallway. If they were just patient, those adults would save them.
Hundreds of law enforcement officers descended on Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, that day in May 2022. They, too, waited. They waited for someone, anyone, to tell them what to do. They waited for the right keys and specialized equipment to open doors. They waited out of fear that the lack of ballistic shields and flash-bangs would leave them vulnerable against the power of an AR-15-style rifle. Most astonishingly, they waited for the children’s cries to confirm that people were still alive inside the classrooms.
“I’m watching that door. No screams. No nothing. No nothing. You know. Things you would think you would hear if there had been kids in there,” Cpl. Gregory Villa, who had been with the Uvalde Police Department for 11 years, told an investigator days after the attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
CONTINUE > https://www.texastribune.org/2023/12/05/uvalde-officer-student-trainings-mass-shootings/
