Doctors say the cowardly actions of police officers in Uvalde, Texas resulted in injured children dying from their wounds due to delayed medical attention.
Other law enforcement officers slammed the “disgusting” actions of Uvalde police who tackled and tasered desperate parents who tried to rush inside Robb Elementary School to save their children on Tuesday morning.
Texas DPT Lt Chris Olivarez claimed the officers who arrived and heard gunshots inside the school stayed outside because they didn’t want to be shot.
Olivarez made the shocking statement during an appearance on CNN Thursday night.
CNN’s Wolf Blitzer challenged Olivarez’s statement.
“Don’t current best practices, Lieutenant, call for officers to disable a shooter as quickly as possible, regardless of how many officers are actually on site?” Blitzer asked.
The cop replied: “In the active shooter situation, you want to stop the killing, you want to preserve life. But also one thing that, of course, the American people need to understand is that officers are making entry into this building. They do not know where the gunman is. They are hearing gunshots. They are receiving gunshots.”
He then claimed credit for locking the killer inside the classroom with dead and injured children – a move Olivarez says saved more lives.
Police initially said the gunman barricaded himself inside the classroom.
“At that point, if they proceeded any further not knowing where the suspect was at, they could’ve been shot, they could’ve been killed, and at that point that gunman would have had an opportunity to kill other people inside that school,” Olivarez said.
“So they were able to contain that gunman inside that classroom so that he was not able to go to any other portions of the school to commit any other killings,” Lt. Olivarez said.
Medics remained outside the school for an hour while waiting for SWAT officers to arrive. They said they could hear gunshots and screams inside the school.
An elite Border Patrol agent who was driving by at the time, rushed into the school without waiting for backup and terminated the threat.
Doctors say the leading cause of death in gunshot wound victims is bleeding out if they do not receive medical attention.
“You can’t wait until patients go to a trauma center, you have to act quickly,” said Dr. Ronald Stewart, the senior trauma surgeon at the University Hospital in San Antonio.
Since the Columbine shooting in 1999, officers across the nation have been advised not to wait for backup and to rush into the school toward the sound of gunfire to save lives.
Instructions from the Texas Police Chiefs Association says: “The first two to five responding officers should form a single team and enter the structure.”
However, the Uvalde police didn’t get that memo.
