Texas primary school shooting: Husband of hero teacher ‘dies of grief’, as parents begged for help
The husband of a fourth-grade teacher killed protecting her students died of a ‘broken heart’, as video shows parents pinned down by the police they begged to help.
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The husband of a heroic fourth grade teacher killed protecting her students during a massacre at a Texas elementary school has also died.
A GoFundMe page set up by Debra Austin, who said she was the cousin of teacher Irma Garcia, said that Irma’s husband Joe “has tragically passed away this morning as a result of a medical emergency.”
“I truly believe Joe died of a broken heart and losing the love of his life of more than 30 years was too much to bear,” she added.
John Martinez, who identified himself as Garcia’s nephew, also tweeted: “EXTREMELY heartbreaking and come with deep sorrow to say that my Tia (aunt) Irma’s husband Joe Garcia has passed away due to grief.” Ernie Zuniga, a news anchor for local station KABB FOX San Antonio, tweeted that Garcia had died from a heart attack.
The couple, who were married for 24 years, according to the website of the Robb Elementary school, leave behind four children.
Both Irma Garcia and her co-teacher Eva Mireles, who had connected classrooms, died in the mass shooting.
PARENTS BEGGED POLICE TO ACT
Disturbing video from the scene of the Texas school massacre shows parents pleading with police to act while 19 children and two teachers were being slaughtered.
As new details emerge, questions are being asked about the timeline of the police response and who was warned about the impending catastrophe - with another girl coming forward to reveal the last text message of 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos.
Footage from the scene on the day of the shooting shows police holding back parents who say they tried to smash windows to get inside the classroom and save their children themselves
One parent is pinned to the ground by an officer while another with a taser nearby stands guard.
“What are you doing!? Get inside the building!” parents can be heard begging.
“They’re trapped inside,” another screams.
*BREAKING* Robb Elementary School shooting. Uvalde Texas. This video shows the chaos outside of the school where parents were trying to find their children.#Uvalde#RobbElementary#SchoolShootingpic.twitter.com/yx97i6Bh9w
— TheFamily'sSoup TV (@FamilysSoupTV) May 25, 2022
While it is unclear at what point the videos were captured, the timeline of events has brought the shooting into sharper focus.
The gunman was killed at 1pm local Texas time, a full 1.5 hours after the first 911 call was made at 11.32am.
Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw told CNN Ramos was inside for about 40 minutes before police managed to shoot and kill him.
Elite teams from the Customs and Border Protection’s Bortac unit were said to have been hindered by the building’s concrete construction and steel door, leaving them outside taking fire for at least 30 minutes while they retrieved a master key from the school principal.
As teachers smashed windows to get kids out of other classrooms to safety, parents are questioning why police didn’t smash windows of the classroom to get inside to kill the shooter.
Javier Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter was killed, told The Washington Post that he and a group of men huddled near the school’s front door when they heard gunfire inside.
“There were five or six of [us] fathers, hearing the gunshots, and [police officers] were telling us to move back,” he told the newspaper. “We didn’t care about us. We wanted to storm the building. We were saying, ‘Let’s go’ because that is how worried we were, and we wanted to get our babies out.”
He added to ABC News that the community witnessed first-hand police doing nothing when they could have ended it sooner.
“There were at least 40 lawmen armed to the teeth but didn’t do a darn thing (until) it was far too late,” Cazares told ABC News Wednesday night.
He was joined by other grief-stricken parents saying they urged police to do something, anything, sooner instead of waiting for backup.
Daniel Myers and his wife Matilda -- both local pastors -- told AFP they were at the scene, and saw parents growing frantic as police appeared to wait on reinforcements before entering the school.
“Parents were desperate,” said Mr Myers, 72.
“They were ready to go in. One family member, he says: ‘I was in the military, just give me a gun, I’ll go in. I’m not going to hesitate. I’ll go in.’”
“So there was desperation there, there was time lapse.”
Two days after the shooting, more details emerged from inside the classroom. One child -- who lied on top of a dead classmate so the gunman wouldn’t fire at her -- was loaded into a school bus. Two members of a girls’ basketball team were killed and another injured. One man lost three relatives in the massacre.
A fourth-grade boy shared devastating details about what he witnessed with local CBS affiliate KENS5.
“He shot the next person’s door. We have a door in the middle. He opened it. He came in and he crouched a little bit and he said, he said, ‘It’s time to die.’”
He hid under a tablecloth with a friend, who he told to “hide under something so he won’t find us”, and “to not talk because he is going to hear us.”
“When the cops came, the cop said: ‘Yell if you need help!’ And one of the persons in my class said ‘help.’ The guy overheard and he came in and shot her,” he said. “The cop barged into that classroom. The guy shot at the cop. And the cops started shooting.”
SHOOTER’S FINAL TEXT MESSAGE REVEALED
More warning signs that Salvador Ramos was intent on a mass shooting emerged with a girl in Germany revealing a new online chat moments before the 18-year-old began his rampage.
The text exchange mentions his grandmother, the first person shot before Mr Ramos drove her pick-up truck to the school.
“Waiting for this bitch,” he wrote. “She’s on the phone with AT & T about my phone... it’s annoying.”
He also told the 15-year-old girl, who he met on a chat app and had reportedly spoken on Facetime, that he was waiting for his grandfather to leave before he could do anything.
He texts her that he “just shot my grandma in her head” and that “Ima go shoot up a elementary school rn”.
The text messages are similar to Facebook posts Mr Ramos made during the argument with his grandmother, which he posted between 30 and 15 minutes before the shooting began. He also sent Instagram messages to another girl earlier that morning saying he a secret that he was about to do something.
The 15-year-old German girl, who revealed the text messages in an anonymous interview with CNN, said she never met Mr Ramos in person but they had chatted and shared photos.
She said he seemed mostly normal but noticed how isolated he appeared leading up to the attack, becoming increasingly concerned when he told her he “threw dead cats at people’s houses.”
“Every time I talked to him, he never had plans with his friends,” she told the network.
GUNMAN HAD ‘MUM PROBLEM’
Cecilia Martinez Gonzalez was shot in the face but somehow ran to a neighbour’s house to raise the alarm over her gunman grandson Salvador Ramos. With Texas Rangers still unclear why the 18-year-old killed 19 children and two teachers at an elementary school, investigators believe Ms Gonzalez holds the key to what triggered the worst US school massacre since Sandy Hook in 2012.
The 66-year-old, who survived but is fighting for her life in a critical condition, worked as a teacher’s aide at the Robb Elementary School until 2020.
Police said she got into an argument with Mr Ramos at about 11am local Texas time on the morning of the shooting, reportedly over the “high school dropout” missing graduation.
During the fight, he posted to Facebook: “I’m going to shoot my grandmother”. Soon after, he posted again: “I shot my grandmother”. He followed it with a third and final post: “I’m going to shoot an elementary school”.
About 15 minutes after the last post, the shooting began at 11.32am.
Mr Ramos had moved in with his grandparents in March after having “problems” with his mother, according to his grandfather Rolando Reyes.
Mr Reyes said the teenager spent most of his time in his room playing video games and missed most of the school year, leaving him unable to graduate.
“He was very quiet … he didn’t talk very much,” Mr Reyes said.
Mr Ramos’s high school class visited the Robb Elementary School the day before the massacre as part of a community tradition, where the Uvalde High School seniors wear their graduating robes to high five the elementary students lined up in the hallway.
Mr Ramos did not take part.
Mr Reyes said his grandson never spoke about guns, never appeared upset or angry, and didn’t give any indication of what would happen.“ I didn’t know he had weapons, or nothing, or this or that,” Mr Reyes said. “If I’d have known, I would have reported it.”
On May 17, Mr Ramos bought an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle after turning 18-years-old. The next day he bought 375 rounds of 5.56 ammunition, and two days later, on May 20, he purchased a second rifle from the same store.
Between 5.43am and 9.16am on the day of the attack, he began messaging a woman on a since-deleted Instagram account and tagged the stranger in images of the rifles and ammunition.
After shooting his grandmother, the unlicensed driver took her pick-up truck and drove 4.6kms to the school.
He crashed the vehicle, left with one rifle and a backpack full of ammunition, and went to the backdoor of the school.
He was challenged by a school resource officer but no gunfire was immediately exchanged as he entered the school, went down a short hallway, turned right down another short hallway, and turned left into the fourth-grade classroom.
The classroom was adjoined to a second classroom through an internal connection.
The shooter “barricaded” himself inside before officers from the Border Patrol’s elite Bortac team responded.
They were unable to immediately enter the room because of a steel door and the building’s concrete block construction.
Teachers in other classes smashed windows to get children away from the shooting.
Officers took fire from the gunman through the door and walls.
The team were only able to enter after getting a master key to unlock the steel door and force their way in after about 30 minutes.
One agent received shrapnel, a second took fire to a shield, and a third agent shot and killed Mr Ramos. All three were injured but survived.
Once the shooting stopped, they found multiple groups of dead children and teachers in the classroom.
In total, 19 children and two teachers were killed. Another 17 victims were injured but are expected to survive.
All the deceased have been identified and their families notified, including a Sheriff’s deputy who lost a daughter, a police officer who lost a wife, and the parents of two sets of cousins.
Third-grader Annabelle Guadalupe Rodriguez, 10, had been visiting her fourth-grade cousin Jackie Jaylen Cazares, 10. Cousins Jailah Nicole Silguero, 10, and Jayce Carmelo Luevanos, 10, were also together.
The other children killed include Uziyah Garcia, 8, Eliana “Ellie” Lugo-Garcia, 9, Miranda Mathis, 11, and 10-year-olds Amerie Jo Garza, Makenna Lee Elrod, Xavier James Lopez, Jose Flores, Navaeh Bravo, Alithia Ramirez, Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio, Eliahana “Elijah” Cruz Torres, Tess Marie Mata, Rojelio Torres, Layla Salazar, and Maite Rodriguez.
Irma Garcia, 46, and Eva Mireles, 44, were the two teachers killed.
US president Joe Biden is scheduled to visit the school to address the shooting, which Texas Governor Greg Abbott said “could have been worse” if Mr Ramos had not been taken out.
“Anyone who shot his grandmother in his face has to have evil in his heart. But it is far more evil for someone to gun down little kids,” Mr Abbot said.
As Mr Abbott and law enforcement officers described how Mr Ramos had no criminal record or history of mental illness, their press conference erupted in chaos.
Democratic candidate for governor, Beto O’Rourke, began screaming that his political opponent was responsible for the shooting.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin shouted Mr O’Rourke down as out of line while security had him removed.
“I can’t believe that you’re a sick son of a bitch that would come to a place like this to make a political issue,” Mr McLaughlin said.
"It's on you."
— The Recount (@therecount) May 25, 2022
In a striking moment, Texas gubernatorial candidate @BetoORourke interrupts Gov. Greg Abbott's press conference about the Uvalde shooting. pic.twitter.com/jINIAave6Y
- Additional reporting by AFP
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