The police made a "bad decision" by not entering the Uvalde school quickly to put an end to the massacre, a senior Texan official admitted on Friday, May 27, while a first testimony emerged from a surviving student.

"Looking back now, of course it wasn't the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period," Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, told a conference tense press.

"If I thought it could help, I would apologize," he said, very moved.

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Nineteen agents on the spot waited for the intervention of a specialized unit of the border police, about an hour after the shooter, Salvador Ramos, entered the building on Tuesday.

The 18-year-old teenager killed 19 children and two teachers.

Pressed by journalists to explain this highly criticized response time, the official said that the police thought "there may be no more survivors".

However, the police received numerous calls from several people in the two affected classrooms, including one from a child at 12:16 p.m., more than half an hour before the police intervention at 12:50 p.m., warning that " eight to nine students were alive," Steven McCraw said.

Unpublished testimony

In an unpublished testimony, an 11-year-old student survivor told CNN that she, with a friend, recovered the cell phone of a dead teacher to call the police and ask them to intervene.

This student, Miah Cerrillo, described off-camera to the American channel the irruption of the shooter into the class when her teacher was going to close the door.

According to her, Salvador Ramos looked at the teacher, said "good night" to her and then shot her, before shooting her colleague and then some students.

He then went to the other classroom.

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Miah said she then smeared herself with the blood of a deceased comrade and played dead for fear that the shooter would return.

At another press conference on Friday afternoon, Texas Governor Greg Abbott said he was "misled" into the police response by inaccurate initial information.

"It makes me furious," he said.

With AFP

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