Texas massacre gunman 'walked into school unimpeded'

The amount of time that elapsed has stirred anger and questions among family members, who demanded to know why they did not storm the place and put a stop to the rampage more quickly.

Texas Department of Public Safety spokesperson Travis Considine said Ramos entered Robb Elementary School and began his rampage at 11.40am on Tuesday.

A Border Patrol tactical unit began trying to get inside an hour later, and at 12.58pm, the teenager was confirmed to be dead.

The school normally has an armed school safety officer but when Ramos arrived on Tuesday "there was not an officer, readily available, armed" and the gunman entered the building "unobstructed", Victor Escalon, a regional director at the Texas Department of Public Safety, said.

Many other details of the case and the police response remained murky. The motive for the massacre - the nation's deadliest school shooting since Newtown, Connecticut, a decade ago - remained under investigation, with authorities saying Ramos had no known criminal or mental health history.

During the siege, frustrated onlookers urged police officers to charge into the school, according to witnesses.

"Go in there! Go in there!" women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who watched the scene from outside a house across the street.

Mr Carranza said the officers should have entered the school sooner, adding "There were more of them. There was just one of him."

Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw said on Wednesday that 40 minutes to an hour elapsed from when Ramos opened fire on the school security officer to when the tactical team shot him.

"The bottom line is law enforcement was there," Mr McCraw said. "They did engage immediately. They did contain (Ramos) in the classroom."

But a department spokesman said on Thursday that authorities were still working to clarify the timeline of the attack, uncertain whether that period of 40 minutes to an hour began when the gunman reached the school, or earlier, when he shot his grandmother at home.

"Right now we do not have an accurate or confident timeline to provide to say the gunman was in the school for this period," Lt Christopher Olivarez told CNN.

Border Patrol chief Raul Ortiz did not give a timeline but said repeatedly that the tactical officers from his agency who arrived at the school did not hesitate. He said they moved rapidly to enter the building, lining up in a "stack" behind an agent holding up a shield.

"What we wanted to make sure is to act quickly, act swiftly, and that's exactly what those agents did," Mr Ortiz told Fox News.

But a law enforcement official said that once in the building, the Border Patrol agents had trouble breaching the classroom door and had to get a staff member to open the room with a key. T

Lt Olivarez said investigators were trying to establish whether the classroom was, in fact, locked or barricaded in some way.

Javier Cazares, whose fourth grade daughter, Jacklyn Cazares, was killed in the attack, said he raced to the school as the massacre unfolded.

When he arrived, he saw two officers outside the school and about five others escorting students out of the building. But 15 or 20 minutes passed before the arrival of officers with shields, equipped to confront the gunman, he said.

As more parents flocked to the school, he and others pressed police to act, Mr Cazares said. He heard about four gunshots before he and the others were ordered back to a car park.

"A lot of us were arguing with the police, 'You all need to go in there. You all need to do your jobs.' Their response was, 'We can't do our jobs because you guys are interfering,'" Mr Cazares said.

Ramos crashed his truck into a ditch outside the school, grabbed his AR-15-style semi-automatic rifle and shot at two people outside a funeral home, who ran away uninjured, according to authorities and witnesses.

As for the armed school officer, he was driving nearby but was not on campus when Ramos crashed his truck, according to a law enforcement official.

Investigators have concluded that the school officer was not positioned between the school and Ramos, leaving him unable to confront the gunman before he entered the building.

Meanwhile, two days after teacher Irma Garcia was shot dead alongside 19 of her students her grieving husband has died.

Ms Garcia's family was already reeling from her death in the Texas school shooting that targeted her fourth grade classroom when, a mere two days after the attack, her husband collapsed and died at home from a heart attack, a family member said.

Joe Garcia, 50, dropped off flowers at his wife's memorial on Thursday morning in Uvalde, Texas, and returned home, where he "pretty much just fell over" and died, his nephew John Martinez told The New York Times.

The couple had been married for 24 years and had four children together - including a son in the Marine Corps.

Mr Martinez told The Detroit Free Press that the family was struggling to grasp that while the couple's oldest son trained for combat, it was his mother who was shot to death.

"Stuff like this should not be happening in schools," he told the newspaper.

The Archdiocese of San Antonio and the Rushing-Estes-Knowles Mortuary confirmed Joe Garcia's death to The Associated Press. AP was unable to independently reach members of the Garcia family on Thursday.

The motive for the massacre - the nation's deadliest school shooting since the 2012 attack in Newtown, Connecticut - remained under investigation, with authorities saying the 18-year-old gunman had no known criminal or mental health history.

The rampage rocked a country already weary from gun violence and shattered the community of Uvalde, a largely Latino town of some 16,000 people about 75 miles from the Mexican border.

According to a letter written by Ms Garcia and posted online, her family loved having barbecues. The 48-year-old also enjoyed listening to music and travelling to Concan, a community along the Frio River about 25 miles north of Uvalde.

The couple's oldest child, Cristian, is a Marine. The couple's other son, Jose, attends Texas State University. Their eldest daughter, Lyliana, is a high school sophomore, while her younger sister is in the seventh grade.

The school year, scheduled to end on Thursday, was Ms Garcia's 23rd year of teaching - all of it at Robb Elementary School. She was previously named the school's teacher of the year and was a 2019 recipient of the Trinity Prize for Excellence in Education from Trinity University.

For five years, Ms Garcia co-taught with Eva Mireles, who also was killed.

The suspect, Salvador Ramos, was inside the classroom for more than an hour before he was killed in a shootout with law enforcement, authorities said.

"Mrs Irma Garcia was my mentor when I began teaching," her colleague Allison McCullough wrote when Ms Garcia was named teacher of the year.

"The wealth of knowledge and patience that she showed me was life changing."