Man claiming to be Uvalde shooter’s uncle begged authorities to let him talk him down during the shooting, 911 call reveals

CNN

By Paradise Afshar, Sarah Moon and Matthew J. Friedman, CNN

(CNN) — A man claiming to be the uncle of Uvalde school shooter Salvador Ramos called 911 during the May 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School and begged a dispatcher to connect him with his nephew in hopes that he could help end the situation.

“The thing that’s happening at Robb right now, he’s my nephew,” the 911 caller, who identified himself as Armando Ramos, said. “I was wondering, maybe he could listen to me because he does listen to me, everything I tell him, he does listen to me.”

The audio is part of a trove of bodycam and dashcam videos, audio recordings of 911 calls and radio communication, documents and text message the city released more than two years after the shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead in Uvalde, Texas.

Most of the material released was previously reported by CNN. The files – some of which were redacted – were released only after CNN and more than a dozen other major news organizations filed a lawsuit to obtain public records related to the massacre.

Ramos’ call came into dispatch at 12:57 p.m., just seven minutes after law enforcement used a janitor key to breach the locked classroom door, and shot and killed the suspect, CNN previously reported.

Unaware that his nephew was already dead, Ramos said if he could speak with him, “maybe he could stand down or do something to turn himself in.”

The conversation lasted just over six minutes, during which time Ramos could be heard saying, “why did you do this…Why?” and, “please don’t do nothing stupid.”

At one point Ramos told the dispatcher, “I think he’s shooting kids. He has the classroom hostage.”

Ramos said his nephew was with him the night before the shooting, along with other family members, and while he told the dispatcher he wasn’t aware of any changes in the shooter’s behavior prior to the incident, he did mention his nephew indicated his grandmother was “bugging” him.

Families continue to demand accountability

For families of the victims, the release was long overdue.

Law enforcement has been heavily criticized for their failed response to what became one of the deadliest shootings at a K-12 school in the United States.

While victims lay wounded, it took the 376 law enforcement officers on scene 77 minutes to confront and kill the gunman from the time he entered the school through an unlocked door. More than 90 Texas Department of Public Safety officers responded to the scene and were among the first to arrive.

In one of the 911 calls, first reported by CNN in the months after the shooting, a 10-year-old girl trapped in a classroom tells the police dispatcher to “hurry” as there are “a lot of dead bodies.”

Brett Cross’ nephew, Uziyah Garcia, 10, was killed in the massacre. Cross told The Associated Press families were not given advanced notice of the records being released Saturday but said it was long overdue.

“If we thought we could get anything we wanted, we’d ask for a time machine to go back in time and save our children, but we can’t, so all we are asking for is for justice, accountability and transparency, and they refuse to give this to us,” Cross said.

Jesse Rizo, the uncle of Jacklyn Cazares, 9, who was also killed in the shooting, said the document release reignites anger because the documents show just how long law enforcement waited. “Perhaps if they were to have breached earlier, they would have saved some lives, including my niece’s,” he told the AP.

Officers worried for their own safety

As criticism was mounting in the hours and days after the massacre, some officers were worried for their own safety, text messages released Saturday show.

Among the hundreds of pages of messages, a series of texts show a group of officers expressing fear for their safety. In the text messages, multiple officers ask for their photos to be removed from the department’s website after they felt like they were being blamed for the failed response.

One group chat mentions the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, saying, “the DPS director just through [sic] everyone under the bus..!!!”

“Is there a way to get our pictures off the PD website for our safety..?..take the website down,” one officer wrote.

In a news conference after the mass shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw said the on-scene commander made the wrong decision and did not attempt quickly enough to breach the classroom where the gunman was. He would later say the first few officers on scene, including local Uvalde Police Department who are seen communicating in the newly released texts, acted against active shooter training by initially retreating and never regaining momentum to take out the shooter.

CNN has reached out to the Texas Department of Public Safety for a response to the officers’ assertions Saturday.

In an interview this week, former Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo told CNN he felt he was “scapegoated from the very beginning.”

Arredondo was indicted in June by a grand jury and was booked on 10 counts of child endangerment and known criminal negligence for failing to recognize the incident as an active shooting and for failing to take proper action to intervene. Arredondo has said he never considered himself to be the incident commander.

He entered a plea of not guilty to these charges last month, CNN previously reported.

Former school police officer Adrian Gonzales was also indicted on criminal charges related to law enforcements failed response to the shooting. Gonzales entered a plea of not guilty on July 25.

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CNN’s Lauren Mascarenhas, Rachel Clarke, Camila Bernal and Amanda Musa contributed to this report.