A 10-year-old girl who was trapped in a classroom with the gunman during the Ulwade shooting made several calls to 911 for help and waited several minutes to be rescued.
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Chloe Torres, the shooter, was locked in room 112 with the bodies of the wounded, other children and several comrades.
The CNN network aired excerpts from the child’s 911 calls, with the consent of his family, which show the serious flaws in police intervention.
“I’m in class 112,” the girl whispered to the police dispatcher. “Hurry up, there’s a lot of corpses.”
Chloe Torres’ father, a former Marine, would have taught his daughter what to do in a situation like this.
CNN
She repeats it to the dispatcher who tells the other kids around her to calm down.
“I do, I do. I tell everyone to be quiet, but no one listens to me. I know how to handle these situations, my father taught me when I was a little girl. Send help. One of my teachers is still alive, but he was shot,” He said at 12:12 p.m.
The dispatcher relays the message to nearly a hundred police officers who burst into the school. However, they remain in the background and do not enter the classes where the shooter is.
More and more police arrive on the scene: by the end of the intervention there were almost 400 people.
At 12:17 p.m., little Chloe calls 911. “Are the police still far away?”
“They’re inside the building,” 911 replies.
However, the child still needs to be patient.
On the other side of the door, police intervention is chaotic and disorganized, with police officers showing body cameras.
The suspect had propped himself up and was not thought to be still active.
Yet the kid’s calling was clear: it was an active shooter.
Some police officers are not even aware of injuries and victims.
A rescuer from the “Border Patrol” called for reinforcements among the contingent of emergency forces at the scene, complaining and worrying: “We’re taking too long!”.
The police entered the classroom at around 12.50 pm.
The intervention of orderly powers was condemned almost from beginning to end.
Various police forces have been accused of changing their versions of events since the May 24 massacre.
Nineteen children and two female teachers were killed that day, but at least one adult and one child did not die immediately.
For Ruben Torres, Khloe’s father, the police at the scene didn’t really have the guts. His wife agrees. It still pains her to think of those children, helpless and left to fend for themselves.
“There’s no backup there for the kids. No one has armor,” Jamie Torres told CNN.
Little Chloe Torres survived. Officers entered the classroom as she hid under a desk and called 911 once more.
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