uvalde, texas, community. there s no details here about the police response at robb elementary. police called and waited for back-up and tactical teams. those teams didn t arrive until an hour later. we re now hearing from the shooter s family. our correspondent spoke to the gunman s grandfather about the tragedy. [speaking foreign language] tragedy. [speaking foreign language the shooter s grandfather sending blessings to the family and facts. he also criticized the gun laws that allowed his grandson at 18 to get a gun. we re also hearing from survivors, including the lengths one little girl went to. she had a friend next to her that she was pretty sure was already dead and laying on the ground bleeding out. she put her hands in her friend s blood and then smeared it, she said, all over her body. she wanted to look like she was dead. she was scared the gunman was going to come back through that adjoining door back to the classroom and she wanted to be able to play dead.
of this attack and response and then how he spread it. a lot of this is coming out of the course of today. depending what you re up to, you may not have heard the gruesome details but he s using this as a time to take a platform within a crisis to lie about gun safety and gun control. we ll get into that. late today, the governor used a damage control press conference to repeatedly push false claims about public safety policy. here are the new details emerging about the failed police response to this shooter and some are absolutely gut wrenching. we are learning the timeline which is now updated because of the misinformation i mentioned. we re learning 19 police officers erroneously waited 45 minutes outside the close room without ever breaking in to confront the killer inside. we re learning that the killer was able to thus continue to repeatedly fire weapons again while the police were outside the door. these are facts that are terrible but they are also significant. they
weapons of war. i d like you to think about that because this whole conversation defies logic, and you know what, it s actually insulting. you know what, you know what, in fairness let s just take a moment to step back and think about each of their arguments and whether that is the environment that you want or that they want for their children. let s start with mental health. as far as we know there was no mental health issue with the individual who stole the futures of 19 children in uvalde, texas. governor greg abbott even said it himself before he contradicted himself. there was no known mental health history of the gunman. we would have a problem with mental health illness in this community. greg, you flipped it around. now you said mental health was the problem. okay. yet nbc news reports abbott slashed more than $200 million from the department overseeing mental health programs in a state that is already dead last in the country for access to mental health care. abb
captions by vitac www.vitac.com it is just after 9:00 p.m. eastern time, 8:00 here in uvalde, texas, outside robb elementary school. the community held a prayer vigil tonight. i want to play you video that occurred a moment ago as people there listened to amazing grace. [ crying ] a community in mourning. we ve spoken with parents of some of the young children killed here. most of them ten years old. and told some of their stories. there s so much we still don t know. we don t know the names of all the 19 children who were murdered here. we ll try to bring them to you as we learn them. there is still so much we don t know about what happened behind me inside this school and outside, as the shooter first got on the scene. we don t know, we re not going to speculate. so, we begin the hour with what we do know and cnn s ed lavandera. ed, so, there is, as i said, a lot we don t know. talk a little bit about where the investigation is. one of the key things we l
everyone. this morning, there are now hard questions for authorities about the timeline of events and the police response, specifically why did they wait so long to go into the school? officials say the gunman was on school grounds for up to an hour before police were able to breach the classroom, stop the killing and neutralize, kill, the gunman. according to the washington post, parents who rushed to the scene heard gunfire inside the school, they begged officers to charge into the building. there was families trying to get in here, they were getting in here, they were getting into the school. fathers breaking out windows, pulling kids out of the windows. this morning, we have new video that shows the gunman entering a door at the school. authorities say the suspect was confronted by an officer as he made his way into the building. they say he dropped a bag full of ammunition before he got inside. also cnn has exclusively obtained a series of chilling text message