Newspaper published video of police reaction during Uvalde’s shooting

() — The Austin American-Statesman newspaper published edited portions of surveillance video on Tuesday showing police officers retreating from gunfire in the hallway of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, during the deadly shooting there in May.

The edited video It lasts just over four minutes and first shows teachers screaming as the gunman crosses the Robb Elementary School parking lot after crashing his truck outside the building. Once the attacker is inside the building, hallway surveillance cameras show him walking down the hallway unopposed with a semi-automatic rifle.

Gunshots are heard as the attacker enters a classroom, and a boy is seen running across the hall.

The newspaper says it removed the sound of the children’s screams from the video.

The first shots, which appeared to be aimed at responding officers, were heard at 11:37 a.m., prompting officers to immediately run to the other end of the hallway, in retreat.

Several officers with their weapons drawn are seen in the corridor, but they are not seen approaching the classroom again until 12:21 p.m., after four more shots were heard from the attacker.

Officers don’t directly engage the shooter again until 12:50 pm, when authorities say he was killed by law enforcement.

The video and newspaper report come as the Texas House committee investigating the school shooting plans to release the surveillance footage of the hallwaymore than an hour long, to the families of the victims on Sunday and to the public shortly after, State Rep. Dustin Burrows said on Twitter.

“We will first meet with members of the community and give them the opportunity to view the hallway video and discuss our preliminary report. We will release both to the public very shortly thereafter.” said Burrows, the committee chairman. “We are convinced that members of the Uvalde community should have the opportunity to view the video and hear our opinion before making it public.”

The intention of the committee and its professional staff is to meet with the families of the 21 victims privately in Uvalde and provide them with a hard copy of the preliminary report and a link to the video, a source close to the committee said. The commission also plans to answer questions from families about the results, according to the source.

A source close to the commission tells that the plan has not changed after the edited video was posted online.

The video is expected to provide first-hand evidence of what police were doing when they responded when a gunman opened fire inside the primary school classroom on May 24, fatally shooting 19 young students and two female teachers. Police officers arrived at the scene within minutes, but waited in a nearby corridor for around 77 minutes before opening the door and killing the attacker.

What the officers were doing in those 77 minutes remains unclear, and some officials have questioned the reliability of the various investigations working to understand what went wrong that day.

The image, obtained by the Austin-American Statesman, shows at least three officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary School at 11:52 a.m., 19 minutes after the shooter entered the school. One of the officers has what appears to be a tactical shield, and two of the officers are holding rifles. Last month, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Col. Steven McCraw criticized that delay as a “total failure,” citing in part evidence from surveillance video of the hallway. Some images of the video were previously published by newspapers Texas Tribune Y American-Statesman.

Burrows has pushed for the video to be made public amid scrutiny of the police response.

“I can tell people all day what I saw, the committee can tell people all day what we saw, but it’s very different to see for yourself, and we think that’s very important,” Burrows said.

However, last week he said he was prohibited from doing so because he had signed a confidentiality agreement with DPS. She also released a letter in which DPS said it agrees the video will bring “clarity” to what happened, but explained that the Uvalde District Attorney “has objected to the release of the video.”

asked Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee for comment on Friday and Sunday on why she opposes releasing the video, but has not received a response.

The families of the victims react to the video

Berlina Irene Arreola, the grandmother of Uvalde school shooting victim Amerie Jo Garza, told her family has “mixed emotions” about whether they want to see surveillance video from the hallway.

“We do, I do, we want to see the video,” he said. “At the same time, I’m scared of how I’m going to feel because right now we have a lot of anger, we have a lot of mixed emotions. Pain more than anything, because of what happened. Then anger, because we’re not getting the answers that we need.”

“Watching this, I think it’s going to make everyone angrier, knowing that they were just standing there basically doing nothing for that long period of time. They can say they were waiting or they were getting ready. Seventy-seven minutes to prepare is too long,” he said.

Amerie Jo’s stepfather, Angel Garza, told he feels he knows more about the timeline of events from the Highland Park parade shooting last week than he does about the Uvalde shooting in May.

“And that’s wrong, it’s very wrong,” Garza said. “We’ve had multiple people tell us they’ve never seen anything like this, agencies arguing, fighting, pointing fingers at each other. No one wants to admit they were wrong, and our daughter is no longer here. We deserve to know what happened.” .

What the video and report will show

The video and preliminary report are expected to clarify what the police were actually doing while waiting in the hallway and to contradict previous public statements and official reports.

For example, a report last week from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) stated that an armed Uvalde police officer saw the shooter outside the school and asked permission to shoot.

However, the source close to the committee said that this story is not true and that it did not happen. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin also refuted the account as false.

And on Monday night, ALERRT Deputy Director John Curnutt said his conclusions were based on two statements by one officer that were later contradicted by a third statement.

“At the time we published our initial subsequent action, the information we had on this particular officer came from the officer’s previous two statements given to investigators,” he said in a statement. “We were not aware that just before we published our initial position, the agent gave a third statement to investigators that was different from the first two statements.”

— ‘s Eric Levenson contributed to this report.