News Desk: US President Joe Biden will visit Uvalde on Sunday to console residents mourning 19 children and two teachers who were gunned down at an elementary school in the small Texas town.
Harrowing accounts are emerging of the ordeal faced by survivors of the Tuesday attack, as Biden calls for action to prevent future massacres in a country where efforts to tighten firearms regulations have repeatedly failed.
“We cannot outlaw tragedy, I know, but we can make America safer. We can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of the people and of our children,” Biden said Saturday in a speech at the University of Delaware.
“So I call on all Americans this hour to join hands and make your voices heard and work together to make this nation what it can and should be,” the president said.
As residents gathered in a central square in Uvalde to pay homage to the victims, haunting stories told by young students who played dead while a gunman killed their classmates and teachers were underscored by accounts of the slow reaction by police.
Ten-year-old Samuel Salinas was sitting in his fourth-grade classroom when the shooter, later identified as Salvador Ramos, 18, barged in with a chilling announcement: “You're all going to die.”
Then “he just started shooting,” Salinas told ABC News.
Texas authorities admitted Friday that as many as 19 police officers were in the school hallway for nearly an hour without breaching the room where the shooter was, thinking he had ended his killing. Officials called this delay
the “wrong decision.”
Ramos was finally killed by police.
Survivors of the attack have described making desperate, whispered pleas for help in 911 phone calls during his assault. Some played dead to avoid drawing the shooter's attention.
