Chilling 911 Call Details from the Uvalde Police Press Conference

CLAY: This is maybe the most devastating part of a really devastating press conference that we began the show today with from Uvalde. It was Steven McCraw, who’s the Texas Department of Public Safety director. This is him speaking about 911 calls that were received from people inside of those classrooms while police were waiting outside to breach the doors. The failure to breach the doors has now been described as the wrong decision.

I’ll update you on all that to start the third hour if you haven’t already heard it. But this is chilling. They’re not playing the actual 911 call, but this a recitation of the calls that were received by police from those inside the classrooms where this killer was. How exactly that was going on, who exactly was calling, how that was occurring? These are all details we don’t know, but I just want you to hear this recitation which makes it all the more staggering that police didn’t go in immediately. Listen to this.

MCCRAW: The caller identified — I’ll not say her name, but she was in room 112 called 911 at 12:03 the length of the call was one minute 20 seconds she identified herself and whispered she’s in room 112. At 12:10 she called back in room 12, advised there are multiple dead. 12:13 again she called on the phone. Again at 12:16 she’s called back and said there were eight to nine students alive. At 12:19 the 911 call was made, and another person in room 111 called.

She hung up when another student told her to hang up. At 12:21 you can hear on the 911 call that three shots were fired. At 12:36, 911 call, it lasted for 21 seconds. The additional caller called back, student child called back, was told to stay on the line and be very quiet. She told 911 that he shot the door. At approximately 12:43 and 12:47 she asked 911 to “Please send the police now.”

CLAY: I just… For those of you out there listening, now, I would imagine that at some point these 911 calls are gonna get out, and I hope that everyone who made these 911 calls is still alive. But for those of you out there listening, these are the two rooms where the killer is sitting with his gun, room 112 and room 111 in these schools. They’re getting calls from both of them. One of those kids said, “Please send the police now.”

She said that at 12:47, guys. At that point in time that kid had already been in a locked room with this killer for an hour and 12 minutes. I want you to think about that for a minute. I want you to think about those kids and those teachers that were in there with a madman with a gun where he had been slaughtering these innocent kids, and at 12:47, an hour and 12 minutes into this, one of these little kids said, “Please send the police now.” Where the hell were the police?

At 12:16, one of these calls said there were eight to nine students who were still alive. Where were the police? They confronted this guy two minutes after he entered the school. And then they fell back and they let him lock the door, and they let him sit in there with those kids potentially killing more of them for 75 minutes. 12:03, 911 call. 12:10, 911 call. 12:13, 911 call. 12:16, 911 call. “There are still eight to nine students alive. We need you!”

12:19, other room — this is both rooms, room 112 and 111 — 12:21, you hear three shots fired. 911 call at 12:36 from a kid begging for help. 12:47, “Please send the police now.” What the hell were they doing? People say, “Oh, you can’t criticize. Why in the world are you saying this?” No. No. When people make bad decisions in positions of power, whoever the commanding officer was here, he failed.

He failed utterly, and there should be consequences when you fail utterly at the one job that matters the most, which is protecting the lives of kids. And, by the way, I guarantee you there were a ton of police officers there who wanted to go in. We know the Border Patrol guys who were a SWAT team that got there by 12:15. They didn’t let them go in for 35 minutes. You heard the officers calling in to this program and say, “If I can still move, I’m keeping going.

“I’d rather have that madman shooting at me than shooting at those kids.” The police were in the school two minutes after him. And then they allowed him to barricade himself in there with those kids despite all those 911 calls coming for 75 minutes? I’m sorry. Failure no matter your profession is unacceptable. We can’t allow something like this to ever happen again in terms of the response.

Now, the shooter is the most responsible. This awful, murderous… There’s so many words I want to use that I can’t say on radio about him. But we rely on our police and our responders to take these guys out, and they didn’t do it. They didn’t protect these kids like they could have. There are a lot of things that could be changed.