News You Ought to Know
A dad’s anguish outside Texas school while shooting unfolded
By JAKE BLEIBERG and ELLIOT SPAGAT
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — Javier Cazares raced to his daughter’s school when he heard there was a shooting, leaving his truck running with the door open as he ran into the school yard. In his rush, he didn’t bring his gun.
He spent the next 35 to 45 agonizing minutes scanning the children fleeing Robb Elementary School for his 9-year-old “firecracker,” Jacklyn. All the while, he yearned to run in himself — and grew increasingly agitated, along with other parents, that the police weren’t doing more to stop the teenage gunman who holed up in a classroom, killing kids.
“A lot of us were arguing with the police, ‘You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs,’” said Cazares, an Army veteran. “We were ready to go to work and rush in.”
Nineteen children and two teachers were ultimately shot dead in the roughly 80 minutes the gunman spent inside the school in Uvalde, Texas, a small, predominantly Latino community that sits among vegetable fields halfway between San Antonio and the U.S.-Mexico border.
This account of the deadliest school shooting since Sandy Hook is based on law enforcement’s timeline, records and numerous interviews with Uvalde residents in the hours and days after the massacre.
Salvador Ramos was up early on May 24, sending ominous messages. The man authorities have identified as the gunman turned 18 the week before and promptly bought two AR-15-style rifles along with hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
In the pre-dawn hours in his grandparents’ shaded neighborhood just a half-mile from the site he would turn into a killing ground, Ramos wrote “I’m about to” to a woman over Instagram and sent someone a private Facebook message saying he was going to shoot his grandmother.
Within hours, he’d done it.
Sometime after 11 a.m., a neighbor who was in his yard heard a shot and looked up to see Ramos run out the front door of his grandparents’ home to a pickup truck parked along the narrow street. The 18-year-old seemed panicked and struggled to get the Ford out of park, Gilbert Gallegos, 82, said.
Ramos finally drove off, kicking a spray of gravel in the air. Moments later, his grandmother emerged from the single-story home covered in blood.
“This is what he did,” Gallegos recalled her yelling. “He shot me.”
Gallegos’ wife called 911 while he took the wounded woman into their backyard. As they hid and waited for the police, more gunshots rang out.
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By 11:28 a.m., Ramos had sped to Robb Elementary and crashed the pickup in a drainage ditch, authorities said. At that moment, video shows a teacher entering the school through a door that the teacher had emerged from and propped open a minute earlier.
That door was usually closed, and locked, per security protocol. But it stayed ajar.
Witnesses said Ramos jumped from the passenger side of the truck with a rifle and a backpack full of ammunition. After shooting at two men who emerged from a nearby funeral home, Ramos hopped a chain-link fence and headed toward the school — still shooting — as panicked people nearby called the police.
Authorities initially said Ramos exchanged fire with a school police officer before entering the building, but they later said the officer was not actually on campus and “sped” back upon hearing of the shooter.
But the officer initially headed for the wrong man, confronting someone who turned out to be a teacher — after passing within feet of Ramos, who was crouched behind a vehicle parked outside the school.
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From his hiding place, Ramos went for the propped-open door, slipped through it and into adjoining fourth-grade classrooms at 11:33 a.m., authorities said. He rapidly fired off more than 100 rounds.
In one of those rooms, Miah Cerrillo, 11, covered herself with a friend’s blood to look dead, she told CNN. After the shooter moved into the adjacent room, she could hear screams, more gunfire and music being blared by the gunman.
Two minutes after Ramos entered the school, three police officers followed him through the same door and were quickly joined by four more. Authorities said Ramos exchanged fire from the classroom with the officers in the hallway and two of them suffered “grazing wounds.”
The first police on the scene were outgunned by Ramos’ powerful, high-end rifle, according to a man who watched from a nearby home.
“After he started firing at the cops, the cops stopped shooting,” said Juan Carranza, 24. “You could tell the firepower that he had was more powerful than the cops’ weapons.”
After shots started ringing out, a cafeteria worker who had just finished serving chicken tacos to 75 third-graders said a woman shouted into the lunchroom: “Code black. This is not a drill!”
The employees didn’t know what “code black” meant but closed blinds, locked the doors and escorted students behind a stage, said the worker, who spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid publicity. Some staff then took refuge in the kitchen.
In the nearly half-hour after the first officers followed Ramos inside, as many as 19 piled into the hallway, authorities said.
In the meantime, students and teachers elsewhere in the building were trying to get out, some climbing out of windows with the help of police.
Cazares isn’t sure exactly when he arrived on the scene, but when he did, he saw about five officers helping people escape. He kept a close watch to see if Jacklyn, who he later said loved gymnastics, singing and dancing, was among them.
About 15 to 20 minutes after he got to the school, he said he spotted officers arriving with heavy shields for the first time.
In the chaos, he felt that time was both “going so fast and it was was going so slow.”
But he added: “From what I saw, things could have been a lot different.”
Other parents felt the same. One onlooker recalled a woman yelling at officers, “Go in there! Go in there!”
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At 12:03, a student called 911 and whispered that she was inside the classroom with the gunman.
Minutes later, the Uvalde school district posted on Facebook that all campuses were going into lockdown but that “the students and staff are safe in the buildings. The buildings are secure.”
The student called 911 again, minutes after her first call, to say there were multiple dead, and then called back soon after that, saying eight or nine students were still alive.
Thirty-four minutes passed from the time of that last call to the moment a U.S. Border Patrol tactical team used a school employee’s key to unlock the classroom door and kill the gunman.
An open door had let him in. A locked door kept him in, and law enforcement out.
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Police didn’t breach the classroom faster because the commander inside the building — the school district’s police chief, Pete Arredondo — believed the situation had morphed from an active shooting to a hostage situation, said Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
Officers from other agencies urged the school police chief to let them move in because children were in danger, according to two law enforcement officials who spoke on condition of anonymity because they had not been authorized to discuss the investigation publicly. McCraw said gunfire was “sporadic” for much of the time that officers waited in the hallway and that investigators do not know if children died during that time.
“It was the wrong decision,” McCraw said.
Arredondo could not be reached for comment. No one answered the door at his home Friday, and he did not reply to a phone message left at the district’s police headquarters.
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The loss of so many young lives and the admission of errors by police have cast doubt, even for some Second Amendment-supporters in the Texas community, on a refrain the state’s Republican leaders have used after this and other mass shootings: “What stops armed bad guys is armed good guys.”
Cazares, a gun owner and supporter of the Second Amendment, said he shies away from politics — but added that he thinks there should be stricter gun laws, including better background checks. He called selling the type of gun the assailant used to an 18-year-old “kind of ridiculous.”
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Cazares left school before officers killed Ramos at 12:50 p.m. He rushed to the hospital because his niece said she’d seen Jacklyn in an ambulance.
The entire family soon gathered there, pressing hospital staff for information for nearly three hours. Finally, a pastor, police officer and a doctor met with them.
“My wife asked the question, ‘Is she alive or is she passed?’” Cazares said. “They were like, ‘No, she’s gone.’”
When he was finally able to see his daughter’s body, Cazares vowed that her death would not be in vain.
Later, he fought back tears as he pondered his daughter’s last moments.
“She could be feisty,” he said. “It kind of comforts our hearts that she would be one of the ones that was brave and tried to help as much as she could.”
California school kids sickened after eating cannabis candy
BAYSIDE, Calif. (AP) — Three third-grade students at a Northern California elementary school were hospitalized after inadvertently eating cannabis gummies, authorities said.
A student shared the gummies with four other kids during their snack recess on Thursday at Jacoby Creek Elementary in the Humboldt County community of Bayside, police and school officials said. The student who brought the edibles to school didn’t know they contained marijuana, they said.
Three children were taken to receive medical attention after they began to display signs of intoxication, Jacoby Creek superintendent and principal Melanie Nannizzi told parents in an email.
All three kids were released from the hospital and are doing well, Nannizzi told the Times-Standard newspaper in Eureka.
The classroom was initially evacuated over concerns the kids might have been reacting to carbon monoxide exposure, Nannizzi told parents.
“This was a frightening incident for our entire school community,” Nannizzi wrote in the email.
The Arcata Police Department is investigating, Officer Heidi Groszmann said.
Groszmann warned parents to keep cannabis products, especially those that look like candy, in a safe spot away from children.
Africans see inequity in monkeypox response elsewhere
By MARIA CHENG and CHINEDU ASADU
OSUN, Nigeria (AP) — As health authorities in Europe and elsewhere roll out vaccines and drugs to stamp out the biggest monkeypox outbreak beyond Africa, some doctors acknowledge an ugly reality: The resources to slow the disease’s spread have long been available, just not to the Africans who have dealt with it for decades.
Countries including Britain, Spain, Portugal, Italy, Switzerland, the United States, Israel and Australia have reported more than 500 monkeypox cases, many apparently tied to sexual activity at two recent raves in Europe. No deaths have been reported.
Authorities in numerous European countries and the U.S. are offering to immunize people and considering the use of antivirals. On Thursday, the World Health Organization will convene a special meeting to discuss monkeypox research priorities and related issues.
Meanwhile, the African continent has reported about three times as many cases this year.
There have been more than 1,400 monkeypox cases and 63 deaths in four countries where the disease is endemic — Cameroon, Central African Republic, Congo and Nigeria — according to the Africa Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So far, sequencing has not yet shown any direct link to the outbreak outside Africa, health officials say.
Monkeypox is in the same family of viruses as smallpox, and smallpox vaccines are estimated to be about 85% effective against monkeypox, according to WHO.
Since identifying cases earlier this month, Britain has vaccinated more than 1,000 people at risk of contracting the virus and bought 20,000 more doses. European Union officials are in talks to buy more smallpox vaccine from Bavarian Nordic, the maker of the only such vaccine licensed in Europe.
U.S. government officials have released about 700 doses of vaccine to states where cases were reported.
Such measures aren’t routinely employed in Africa.
Dr. Adesola Yinka-Ogunleye, who leads Nigeria’s monkeypox working group, said there are currently no vaccines or antivirals being used against monkeypox in her country. People suspected of having monkeypox are isolated and treated conservatively, while their contacts are monitored, she said.
Generally, Africa has only had “small stockpiles” of smallpox vaccine to offer health workers when monkeypox outbreaks happen, said Ahmed Ogwell, acting director of the Africa CDC.
Limited vaccine supply and competing health priorities have meant that immunization against monkeypox hasn’t been widely pursued in Africa, said Dr. Jimmy Whitworth, a professor of international public health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
“It’s a bit uncomfortable that we have a different attitude to the kinds of resources we deploy depending on where cases are,” he said. “It exposes a moral failing when those interventions aren’t available for the millions of people in Africa who need them.”
WHO has 31 million doses of smallpox vaccines, mostly kept in donor countries and intended as a rapid response to any re-emergence of the disease, which was declared eradicated in 1980. Doses from the U.N. health agency’s stockpile have never been released for any monkeypox outbreaks in central or western Africa.
Dr. Mike Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said the agency was considering allowing rich countries to use the smallpox vaccines to try to limit the spread of monkeypox. WHO manages similar mechanisms to help poor countries get vaccines for diseases like yellow fever and meningitis, but such efforts have not been previously used for countries that can otherwise afford shots.
Oyewale Tomori, a Nigerian virologist who sits on several WHO advisory boards, said releasing smallpox vaccines from the agency’s stockpile to stop monkeypox from becoming endemic in richer countries might be warranted, but he noted a discrepancy in WHO’s strategy.
“A similar approach should have been adopted a long time ago to deal with the situation in Africa,” he said. “This is another example of where some countries are more equal than others.”
Some doctors pointed out that stalled efforts to understand monkeypox were now complicating efforts to treat patients. Most people experience symptoms including fever, chills and fatigue. But those with more serious disease often develop a rash on their face or hands that spreads elsewhere.
Dr. Hugh Adler and colleagues recently published a paper suggesting the antiviral drug tecovirimat could help fight monkeypox. The drug, approved in the U.S. to treat smallpox, was used in seven people infected with monkeypox in the U.K. from 2018 to 2021, but more details are needed for regulatory approval.
“If we had thought about getting this data before, we wouldn’t be in this situation now where we have a potential treatment without enough evidence,” said Adler, a research fellow at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine.
Many diseases only attracted significant money after infecting people from rich countries, he noted.
For example, it was only after the catastrophic Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014-2016 — when several Americans were sickened by the disease among the more than 28,000 cases in Africa — that authorities finally sped up the research and protocols to license an Ebola vaccine, capping a decades-long effort.
At a press briefing on Wednesday, WHO’s Ryan said the agency was worried about the continued spread of monkeypox in rich countries and was evaluating how it could help stem the disease’s transmission there.
“I certainly didn’t hear that same level of concern over the last five or ten years,” he said, referring to the repeated epidemics of monkeypox in Africa, when thousands of people in the continent’s central and western parts were sickened by the disease.
Jay Chudi, a development expert who lives in the Nigerian state of Enugu, which has reported monkeypox cases since 2017, hopes the increased attention might finally help address the problem. But he nevertheless lamented that it took infections in rich countries for it to seem possible.
“You would think the new cases are deadlier and more dangerous than what we have in Africa,” he said. “We are now seeing it can end once and for all, but because it is no longer just in Africa. It’s now everybody is worried.”
