The photo, obtained by the Austin American Statesman and KVUE on Monday, casts an even more damning shadow on the Uvalde police department’s response to the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Despite entering the school just nine minutes after Ramos, officers waited nearly an hour to advance despite their superior firepower and training. Eventually, at 12:50 p.m. a Border Patrol BORTAC agent ignored police orders and burst into the classroom, shooting and killing Ramos.
“There were 19 officers in there,” said Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, at a media briefing days after the shooting (per the NY Post), “In fact, there were plenty of officers to do whatever needed to be done, with one exception — the incident commander inside believed they needed more equipment and more officers to do a tactical breach at that point.”
The pictures are undoubtedly one of the reasons the City of Uvalde and the police department hired a private law firm to prevent the release of basically all records pertaining to the mass shooting.
According to VICE, Uvalde wants to suppress body camera footage, photos, 911 calls, emails, text messages, criminal records, and more.
“The City has not voluntarily released any information to a member of the public,” said city’s new lawyer, Cynthia Trevino, of the law firm Denton Navarro Rocha Bernal & Zech, in a letter to Texas AG Ken Paxton seeking a determination about what information they were required to release to the public.