It was unveiled this week by the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety that the husband of one of the murdered teachers from Robb Elementary School, who was a police officer, was blocked, disarmed, and then detained when he attempted to enter the building to save his wife.
In the incident, an 18-year-old male stormed an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, and killed 19 students and two teachers on the 24th of May.
It was testified by Col. Steven McCraw that the now-deceased teacher Eva Mireles made a call to her husband, who has been identified as Uvalde CISD Police Officer Ruben Ruiz,” stated a report from KWTX.
“He tried to move forward into the hallway,” McCraw stated to legislators. “He was detained and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene.”
KWTX highlighted that the director did fail to reveal which group had actually disarmed and then forcibly removed Ruiz from the scene.
As part of the same testimony, McCraw called out the response from the police to the horrid event as an “abject failure,” going on to add that the shooter could have been quite easily apprehended within three minutes of making their way into the school because of the fact that officers were waiting for “a key that was not needed.”
“There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” he stated.
“Three minutes after the subject entered the West building, there was sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject,” McCraw went on. “The only thing stopping the hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children.”
The director went on to add that the officers were, at least partly, waiting on a “key that was not needed.” “I have great reasons to believe it was never secured,” he claimed. “How about trying the door and seeing if it’s locked?”
The response to this horrid event has been placed under extreme scrutiny. One mother has stated that she was put in handcuffs by U.S. Marshals before she was able to sprint into the school on her own to save her kids.
“The police were doing nothing,” accused Angeli Rose Gomez, the mother in question, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. “They were just standing outside the fence. They weren’t going in there or running anywhere.”
Gomez claimed “she was one of numerous parents waiting outside the school who began encouraging— first politely, and then with more urgency — police and other law enforcement to enter the school sooner,” the Journal report outlined. “After a few minutes, she said, U.S. Marshals put her in handcuffs, telling her she was being arrested for intervening in an active investigation.”
In her desperation to get her children, she convinced another local officer to remove her cuffs.
“Once freed from her cuffs, Ms. Gomez made her distance from the crowd, jumped the school fence, and ran inside to grab her two children,” the report stated. “She sprinted out of the school with them.”