Texas Gov. Greg Abbott says he was “misled” about the police response to the deadly school shooting in Uvalde on Tuesday.
During a news conference Friday, Abbott said he was repeating what he had been told. “The information that I was given turned out, in part, to be inaccurate,” he said.
Abbott said that he took detailed, written notes while talking to officials in the wake of the deadly attack on Robb Elementary School, and is “livid about what happened.”
He added that exactly what happened needs to be “thoroughly, exhaustively” investigated.
In the hours after Tuesday’s horrific shooting, the governor praised the actions of law enforcement, saying that they showed “amazing courage by running toward gunfire” and cited their “quick response.”
Since then, however, questions have swirled around the timeline of law enforcement’s response and their actions to stop the shooter, who authorities say killed 19 students and two teachers.
Videos have surfaced on social media showing officers holding back parents, some of whom were begging them to go into the school and rescue their children as the minutes ticked by.
Students trapped inside a classroom repeatedly called 911, including one who pleaded, “Please send the police now,” as officers waited in the hallway for more than 45 minutes, authorities said.
The commander at the scene in Uvalde — the school district’s police chief — believed that 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos was barricaded inside adjoining classrooms at Robb Elementary School and that children were no longer at risk, Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said at a contentious news conference earlier in the day Friday.
“It was the wrong decision,” he said.
Friday’s briefing came after authorities spent three days providing often conflicting and incomplete information about the 90 minutes that elapsed between the time they say 18-year-old Salvador Ramos entered the school and when U.S. Border Patrol agents unlocked the classroom door and killed him.
When the border agents were set to enter the room, there were as many as 19 officers in the hallway outside, McCraw said.
Inside the fourth grade classroom, Ramos, armed with an AR-15-style rifle killed 19 children and two teachers, authorities said. His motive remains unclear.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
