Uvalde Shooting: Door Ramos Accessed Did Not Lock After Teacher Shut It

Young adults stand looking at a memorial at Robb Elementary School following a mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, on May 26, 2022. Brandon Bell/Getty Images

A Robb Elementary teacher reportedly propped open an exterior door—and proceeded to shut it without locking it—which allowed Salvador Ramos to enter the school to kill 19 children and two adults.

New details on the Robb Elementary shooting suggest that an unnamed female teacher did not leave open the exterior door that Ramos used to access the school after propping it open using a rock, Don Flanary, the counsel representing the teacher, told San Antonio Express-News.

“She saw the wreck,” Flanary told the publication, referring to when Ramos crashed his grandmother’s truck before entering the school. “She ran back inside to get her phone to report the accident. She came back out while on the phone with 911. The men at the funeral home yelled, ‘He has a gun!’ She saw him jump the fence, and he had a gun, so she ran back inside.”

“She kicked the rock away when she went back in. She remembers pulling the door closed while telling 911 that he was shooting. She thought the door would lock because that door is always supposed to be locked,” Flanary said.

Flanary’s statement mostly agrees with the timeline authorities have established at this time.

However, one nuance contradicted a May 27 statement made by Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

“We know from video evidence, at 11:27 [a.m.], the exterior door … what we know the shooter entered … was propped open by a teacher,” McCraw told reporters at the May 27 press conference.

“At 11:28, the suspect’s vehicle crashes into a ditch, as previously described. The teacher runs to room 132 to retrieve a phone, and that same teacher walks back to the exit door,” the officer said. “And [the] door remains propped open.”

McCraw added that the door “wasn’t supposed to be propped open. It was supposed to be locked. And certainly, the teacher that went back for her cellphone propped it open again. So that was an access point that the subject used.”

The nuance, authorities confirmed on May 31, is that the teacher had shut the door. However, the door did not lock.

“We did verify she closed the door. The door did not lock. We know that much and now investigators are looking into why it did not lock,” Travis Considine, chief communications officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety, told AP News on Tuesday.

Authorities and the public have had difficulty reconstructing the timeline of the tragic events that transpired on May 24.

Combined Law Enforcement Association of Texas (CLEAT), the union representing Texan police officers, urged its member police officers to cooperate with government investigations in a May 31 statement while noting “a great deal” of false information coming from “the highest levels of government” after the incident.

“There has been a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy. Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement,” CLEAT said. “Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false.”