Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia-4th Grade teachers at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde, who paid with their lives trying to defend their students.
Padmaja Challakere
“Do Something!” A bereaved parent. “We will” President Joe Biden
It is usually happy time for kids from 11:30 AM onwards in school because it is recess-time, 10-15 minutes of playtime in the sun, and then lunchtime. But on May 24, 2022, tragically, horrifically, for the 10-year-old children in Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas (a small town of 16,000 people, largely Hispanic, where one-third of the people live below the Federal poverty line) an 18-year-old shooter, Salvador Ramos, entered the school from the back door, walked into the hallway, got inside Room 111 and 112 (both connected), locked the classroom door from the inside and said to the children: “It’s time to die.” The SWAT team (Special Weapons and Tactics Cops) reached the school minutes after the shooter did, having been alerted by the shooter’s grandmother and by a teacher at school.
This one time, there was a chance that a potentially dangerous situation could be averted.
Did the police immediately—heroically–rush inside after breaking the door (which they do all-too-easily during a drug bust or in the case of an unarmed civilian suspect)? No!
Instead, the heavily armed police waited outside in their shiny uniforms and body-armor for more than an hour.
They had waited, they insist, for a key. For a key from the school janitor! The million-dollar upgrade to the school system should have ensured at the very least, a master key access to the schools, if nothing else. The police were waiting for back-up because Pete Arredondo, the Police Chief of the School District, had ordered them to. The stupefied parents gathered in the school and kept urging the police: ‘Do Something.’ When some of the parents rushed towards the school doors, the police handcuffed them. A Uvalde mom who managed to rescue her children was handcuffed by the police and warned against making statements to the media.
The terrorized children, trapped in a classroom with a shooter armed with an assault-rifle, kept making 911 calls. But they were allowed to remain trapped in there for 78 minutes while the police “stood down” right outside the window. The Chief Police-Superintendent, Pete Arredondo, of the School District, who ordered the police to stand down, turns out, had shown up on the site without his radio, and now claims that the 911 calls by the children were not relayed to him. Video footage reveals that it is not true. Now, this Police Chief of the School District, is in hiding from the investigators, but has somehow been elected as a member of the City Council.
It was not until 12:50 PM that the operation was concluded by a Border Control tactical team who breached the classroom door and shot the gunman, Salvador Ramos. By then, 19 children and 2 teachers had been murdered. As the burial of the children is underway in Uvalde and the politicians have left, parents are having to provide DNA samples to identify the bodies of their children.
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Are the police liable when they stand down in an active shooter situation? In a town in a poverty-stricken town in which 40% of the budget is allocated for the police? Robb Elementary School had doubled its spending since 2017 on a School Security System, a surveillance camera, a fence, and 4 Officers allotted to School-Safety. Maybe a Security System is no match for an assault rifle.
In contrast to the Uvalde Police, the two teachers, Eva Mireless and Irma Garcia, had- heroically- put their bodies in front of the kids. The husband of Irma Garcia died the next day from grief. The gun laws in Texas are so lax that a civilian can buy an automatic assault rifle-an Air 15- of the kind that Salvador Ramos purchased and as much ammunition as he wants illegally. Salvador Ramos purchased this on his 18th birthday from Daniel Defense, with the $5000 he saved by working at Wendys. A parent of one of the children is suing Daniel Defense, the gun manufacturer but it will be hard to win because Daniel Defense is a contractor for the Pentagon.
In contrast to the cowardice of the police, the actions of the dying children showed unimaginable courage. The first 911 call came at 11:58 AM but was a whisper, the second one from the same number came at 12:10 PM “He shot the door. Please send the police now.” Again at 12.19 PM, “I do not want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help.” The next 911 call at 12:21 PM., “There is lot of bodies.” Then another at 12:36 PM in which the kid was told to stay on the line and be very quiet.” Some children hid in the bathroom, one 10-year-old smeared blood on herself and pretended to be dead.
The ineptness, cowardice, and callous disregard for life of the children enabled maximum infliction of violence by the shooter who was given 78 minutes in a locked classroom because the police-superintendent decided to read the situation as “barricaded subject” rather than an “active-shooter” situation.
The police are some of the greatest liars, with the ability to lie strategically in depositions, affidavits, and interrogations, on TV and in court testimony. When the lies run out, their next move is to refuse to cooperate with the investigators. This is what the Police Chief, Peter Arrendendo, the on-scene commander, is now doing- refusing to cooperate with the investigators and hiding from the Justice Department. Somehow, he has been sworn in as a member of the City-Council Member of Uvalde in a secret ceremony.
The Uvalde police have been caught in at least 15 convoluted lies so far, lies about the timeline, lies about how the shooter was tackled by a School Resource Officer who apparently had to retreat, lies about how the gunman got in unobstructed because of the carelessness of a teacher who left a door propped open. The police-stories have been changing, and they have had to walk back on many of their initial “facts.”
It turns out there was no School Resource Officer present, leave alone a School Resource Officer tackling the shooter. The police had initially blamed a teacher who, allegedly, had left the door propped open and given the gunman unobstructed access to the school. But now evidence has emerged that the teacher had shut the door as soon as she heard the gunman’s vehicle-crash. She ran to shut the door and called 911. The door, which should have locked automatically, did not lock after being shut.
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In Robb Elementary School in a forgotten, small town in Texas, 19 children and 2 teachers were murdered, 17 others suffered bullet-wounds, and 568 lives changed forever. But the devastation goes much further. Since the Columbine High School shooting in Littleton, Colorado 22 years ago by Harris and Klebold who killed 12 students and one teacher, there have been far too many school shootings in America, whether they have made the headlines or not, a new ‘horrorism’ of unprecedented violence against children. The school-shootings become media-events of terror, as in the case of the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in 2012 in which20 children, and 6 staff-members were killed, and now in the case of the Robb Elementary School mass-shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
As James Woodrow Cox observes in his book Children Under Fire, our decision and media’s decision to focus on the high-profile school-shootings is based on the number of children and adults killed. The killer in school-shootings is typically a white male teenage gunman armed with an automatic assault-rifle, except in the case of the Virginia Tech Shooting where the killer was a Korean-American. But, Cox, by focusing on the school-shootings that do not get covered by media, shows that the devastation caused by mass-shootings reverberates far beyond the killing of innocent children or the destruction of the life of the survivors to millions of children. Even children who have not been directly on the scene or experienced gun-violence directly become locked in a private-war of their own, a losing war against uncontrollable fear, simmering rage, and trauma, children pulling their hair out, harming themselves, put on anti-depressants and anti-psychotic drugs.
As usual the media is adept at milking the grief and shock of parents for rating dollars while not offering much by way of analysis of underlying causes. After the rage and tears are cued up, politicians on both sides share their lamentations, send thoughts and prayers, make promises about school safety, and gun-regulation and ban on assault rifles. The same script is activated with the same efficient ruthlessness from the Columbine Shooting onwards, sociological explanations as in Why They Kill by Richard Rhodes who shares the interview-based conclusions of criminologist, Lonnie Athens. Athens observes that murderers “come from cultures of violence,” become “desensitized to pain their acts of violence inflict,” and “construct a violent self-image with more and more virulent acts of violence.”
For the Governor of Texas, Gregg Abbot, and Texas Senator Ted Cruz, keen to keep the NRA happy, “this shooting is not a gun-control issue” but is rather about the need for weaponizing schools and arming teachers. Shooting after shooting shows that the “good guys with gun” are not able to do anything to prevent the loss of lives in a mass-shooting. If a squad of armed police stood down in front of an 18-year-old teenager in body armor with an automatic assault rifle, what is the chance that teachers will be able to save the situation, even if that is an imaginable scenario for schools?
When President Biden and the First Lady travelled to Uvalde with a bouquet of white roses, he invoked the Lord and lamented: “When in God’s name will we stand up to the gun lobby?” Someone in the crowd shouted as they were leaving: “Do Something,” and Biden responded: “We will.” Not clear what this doing entails: ban on assault rifles or the politically convenient promise of “compulsory background checks” and gun-safety. We will see! TX Governor, Greg Abbot, was booed when he showed up in Uvalde for the condolence event.
Politicians care about being re-elected, and this shooting too will be forgotten, until the next one. Meanwhile, it is perfect opportunity for political football in which everyone wins, everyone except the survivors of this shooting. Everyone wins, the gun-lobby because gun-sales go up after every atrocity, also the gun-reform lobby of politicians who, with some toothless gun-reform, will position themselves for the mid-term elections, including the experts, who will reframe the same sociological narrative for better clarity: the known-and-unknown narrative about mental-health failure and social causes. But will there be accountability? Or will this mass-shooting go the way of the others before where, in Benjamin Kunkel’s words, “Every fresh atrocity must be recruited into everyone’s preferred single-factor sociological narrative.”
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Padma Challakere teaches high-school English in St.Paul, MN. She has taught literature and writing in liberal arts colleges in Minnesota for two decades. In the last few years, she has published essays in Counter Punch, The Hindu, The Deccan Herald, and The Wire on topics such as the Afghanistan war novel, Ustad Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Kishori Amonkar, V.S Naipaul, and Bret Easton Ellis.
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Padmaja Challakere in The Beacon
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