Uvalde school shooting hallway video posted by Austin newspaper shows officers’ retreat

The edited video on the newspaper’s website is just more than four minutes long and first shows teachers screaming as the gunman crosses the parking lot of Robb Elementary School after crashing a truck just outside the property. Once the gunman enters the building at 11:33 a.m., hallway surveillance cameras show him walking down the hallway uncontested with a semi-automatic rifle.

Gunfire is heard as the gunman enters a classroom, and a child on the other end of the hallway is seen running. The newspaper says it removed the sound of children’s screams from the video.

The first shots that appeared to be directed at responding officers are heard at 11:37 a.m., sending the officers immediately running down to the other end of the hallway in retreat.

Multiple officers are seen with their guns drawn in the hallway, but are not seen approaching the classroom again until 12:21 p.m., after four more rounds are heard from the gunman.

The officers do not directly confront the gunman again until 12:50 p.m., when authorities say the gunman was killed by law enforcement.

The gunman fatally shot 19 young students and two teachers.

The surveillance video comes amid lingering outrage and questions over the police response to the shooting. What officers were doing in the 77 minutes after the shooting started had been largely unclear, and some officials have questioned the trustworthiness of the various investigations working to understand what went wrong that day.

The newspaper later published a second edited video. The second video, posted to the newspaper’s YouTube channel, lasts nearly an hour-and-a-half and the audio is also edited.

The head of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said he was “deeply disappointed” by the leaked video ahead of the planned public release this weekend.

“I am deeply disappointed this video was released before all of the families who were impacted that day and the community of Uvalde had the opportunity to view it as part of Chairman Dustin Burrows’ plan,” DPS Director Steven McCraw said in a written statement. “Those most affected should have been among the first to see it.”

Last month, McCraw criticized law enforcement’s delay in action as an “abject failure,” in part citing evidence from the hallway surveillance video.
The Texas House committee investigating the school shooting plans to release the more than an hourlong hallway surveillance footage to victims’ families on Sunday and to the public soon thereafter, state Rep. Dustin Burrows said on Twitter.
“We will meet with members of the community first, and provide them an opportunity to see the hallway video and discuss our preliminary report. Very soon thereafter, we will release both to the public,” said Burrows, the chairman of the committee. “We feel strongly that members of the Uvalde community should have the opportunity to see the video and hear from us before they are made public.”

The intention of the committee and its professional staff was to meet with the families of the 21 victims in private in Uvalde and provide them with a hard copy of the preliminary report and a link to the video, a source close to the committee said. The committee is also planning to answer questions from the families about the findings, the source said.

A source close to the committee tells CNN that plan has not changed after the edited video was posted online.

The image, obtained by the Austin-American Statesman, shows at least three officers in the hallway of Robb Elementary at 11:52 a.m, 19 minutes after the gunman entered the school. One officer has what appears to be a tactical shield, and two of the officers hold rifles.

Burrows has pushed for the release of the video to the public amid scrutiny of the police response.

“I can tell people all day long what it is I saw, the committee can tell people all day long what we saw, but it’s very different to see it for yourself, and we think that’s very important,” Burrows said.

However, he said last week he was prohibited from doing so because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with DPS. He also releassed a letter in which DPS said that it agrees that the video will bring “clarity” to what happened but explained that the Uvalde district attorney “has objected to releasing the video.”

CNN has requested comment from Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee on Friday and on Sunday about why she objects to the release of the video, but has not heard back.

Victims’ families react to coming video

Berlina Irene Arreola, the grandmother of Uvalde school shooting victim Amerie Jo Garza, told CNN her family has “mixed emotions” about whether they want to see the video.

“We do, I do” want to see the video,” she said. “At the same time, I’m afraid of how I’m going to feel because right now we have so much anger, we have so many mixed emotions. Hurt more than anything, because of what happened. Then anger, because we’re not getting the answers that we need.

“Seeing that, I think is just going to make everybody else more angry, knowing that they were just standing there, basically doing nothing for that long period of time. They may say they were waiting or they were getting prepared. Seventy seven minutes to get prepared is way too long,” she said.

Amerie Jo’s stepfather, Angel Garza, told CNN he feels like he knows more about the timeline of events for the Highland Park parade shooting last week than about the shooting in Uvalde in May.

“And that’s wrong, that is so wrong,” Garza said. “We’ve had multiple people tell us that they’ve never seen anything like this — agencies arguing, fighting, pointing the finger at each other. Nobody wants to admit that they were wrong, and our daughter isn’t here anymore. We deserve to know what happened.”

What the video and report will show

The video and preliminary report are expected to clarify what police were actually doing as they waited in the hallway and will contradict earlier public statements and official reports.

For example, a report just last week from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center stated that an armed Uvalde police officer spotted the gunman outside the school and asked for permission to shoot.

However, the source close to the committee said this account is not true and did not happen. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin also refuted the account as untrue.

And on Monday night, the assistant director of ALERRT, John Curnutt, said their findings were based on two statements from an officer that were then contradicted by a third statement.

Uvalde mayor blasts report that says officer sought permission to shoot gunman but didn't hear back in time

“At the time we released our initial after-action, the information we had on this particular officer came from the officer’s two previous statements given to investigators,” he said in a statement. “We were not aware that just prior to us releasing our initial after-action, the officer gave a third statement to investigators that was different from the first two statements.”

CNN’s Eric Levenson contributed to this report.