An Uvalde police officer was detained after trying to save his wife, a teacher, during last month’s mass shooting, WFAA reports.
Eva Mireles, one of the two teachers killed in the Robb Elementary School shooting, called her husband, Uvalde School District Police Officer Ruben Ruiz, after she was shot.
"We got an officer whose wife called him and said she'd been shot and she's dying," Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw told the Texas Senate on Tuesday. "He tried to move forward into the hallway. He was detained, and they took his gun away from him and escorted him off the scene."
Multiple parents previously reported that they were detained by police and some were even reportedly tackled, pepper-sprayed, and Tasered while trying to enter the school as police waited over an hour to engage the gunman.
“Abject failure”:
McCraw called the police response to the shooting an “abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”
“Three minutes after the subject entered the west building, there were sufficient numbers of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject,” McCraw said. “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 officers had weapons; the children had none. The officers had body armor; the children had none. The officers had training; the subject had none,” McCraw continued. “One hour, 14 minutes, and eight seconds — that’s how long the children waited and the teachers waited in Room 111 to be rescued.”
Door was unlocked:
Police previously claimed they were delayed because the classroom door was locked and they had to find a key. But McCraw said the door was unlocked the whole time and could not be locked from the inside.
“We’ve gone back and checked in our interviews [to ask], ‘Did anybody touch the door and try it? How about, Do you need a key?’” he said. “‘How about trying the door and seeing if it’s unlocked?’
“And of course," McCraw said, “no one had.”
