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Texas Gunman Barricaded Himself in a Classroom; Text Messages from Gunman Before Shooting; Antoinette Tuff is Interviewed about Stopping a School Shooting in 2013. Aired 9:30-10a

Aired May 26, 2022 - 09:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

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[09:32:55]

JIM SCIUTTO, CNN ANCHOR: There are many unanswered questions about the law enforcement response to the shooting. One was, did the officer who first confronted the shooter fire back at the shooter or not? We don't have an answer. Why did it take so long to breach the room? Also, what exactly did the gunman do to barricade himself inside that classroom? How much of a barrier was it?

CNN's John Berman pressed on that question with Texas Department of Public Safety Spokesman Lieutenant Chris Olivarez this morning. Listen to his answer.

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JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR, "NEW DAY": When you say barricaded, it indicates that somehow he created a literal barrier to entry, a physical barrier, either by locking or putting something in the way of the door. How -- to what extent did that happen?

LT. CHRIS OLIVAREZ, SPOKESMAN, TEXAS DEPARTMENT OF PUBLIC SAFETY: Right. That's correct. Right. Correct. You're right on point with that. So, again, we're trying to establish --

BERMAN: So, yes, he put -- he put things up?

OLIVAREZ: Well, what I mean by barricaded is -- what I'm trying to -- what I'm referring to is that he barricaded himself in the classroom. That could have been by locking the classroom from the inside where no one could get -- make entry into the classroom.

We're trying to establish if that classroom was locked. And if it was locked, was there some type of a barricade, was there some type of locking mechanism that did not allow those officers to make entry.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

ERICA HILL, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us now to discuss, former deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe. So, let's just start on what we heard there, right. So Berman, again,

as Jim pointed out, pressing him for just a direct answer on what that barricade may have been. He says we're trying to establish that. Whether it was locked from the inside.

Walk us through, if this door -- let's say the door was locked from the inside, typically how long would it take to break down a door to get into a classroom?

ANDREW MCCABE, CNN SENIOR LAW ENFORCEMENT ANALYST: Well, that depends, Erica, entirely on the sort of equipment that the responding officers have with them. If they have door breaching equipment in their vehicles, which by the time the tactical team arrives you would assume they have that kind of gear, they can get -- they can get past the lock pretty quickly.

There's also always the option of getting someone from the facility to give you a key to the lock.

[09:35:02]

I find it very hard to believe that there's a classroom that can be locked from the inside that doesn't have some sort of external key access for the principal or for someone else who needs to get in, in a time of emergency. So, you know, getting someone from the school to answer the question, do you have a key to get in that door, and then getting into the school to get that key, that could take, obviously, a few minutes. But, you know, we're talking about 40 minutes to an hour?

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MCCABE: That's very hard to understand.

SCIUTTO: OK, let's get to that issue then, because that is key. Clearly caused a lot of frustration among parents outside that school. Forty to 60 minutes before breaching the classroom. Post Columbine, the training is go immediately, go in the direction of the fire, go quickly. Sandy Hook, the shooting took place over the span of about four minutes or so.

Are there any circumstances under which it would be the right decision to wait?

MCCABE: That's a tough question, Jim. I mean, like, you can always, you know -- you can always kind of back seat driver come up with circumstances that might call for some sort of a delay. So, in this case we have heard some theories that the responding officers who were there during that gap in time when the children were in the room with the gunman, and any period from, you know, 30 to 60 minutes elapsed before those officers who were on scene went in, they may have thought that they had him kind of, quote/unquote pinned down to one location, and that was better while they tried to evacuate the rest of the school. But -- but so to --

SCIUTTO: Pinned down in a room, though, with children.

MCCABE: Yes. I'm just telling you, you know, some of the conflicting information I've heard so far.

The bottom line is, you have a guy who's shooting people in a classroom, and you have law enforcement officers with guns on scene. The training, since Columbine, has been, get in front of that gunman and try to kill him as soon as you can. Because as we all know, the fatalities in mass shootings happen very quickly, and almost immediately. It's in the first few seconds, certainly the first few minutes that that gunman is on scene is when you sustain most of the death. So it's -- it's almost incomprehensible for me to come up with a rational explanation as to why you would wait 30 minutes to an hour to get in there. Again, the door breaching, no matter -- it's just a locked door, that doesn't take 30 minutes to get into.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

HILL: I think what's also incomprehensible for a lot of people is that at this point, 48 hours out, we don't have some of those answers. Now, I understand it's an ongoing investigation. We know that things are developing. But, I mean, how surprising is it to you that we are at this point two days out and we cannot get an answer on whether there were -- you know, whether there was fire exchange with the resource officer, when exactly those teams went in, how long they were in the school. It seems that that should be fairly easy information to put out at this point.

MCCABE: Yes, where were these two local officers who responded and both of whom supposedly exchanged gunfire with the subject and they were both shot in that exchange? Did that exchange happen inside or outside? Were both parties inside? There's all kinds of questions.

And I can tell you, Erica, I have responded, over the course of my career, to many, many crisis events, whether, you know, from the Boston Marathon bombing, to the Pulse nightclub shooting, one of the first responsibilities you have, you don't want this responsibility, nobody wants to have to do this, but one of the first responsibilities is to share that sort of information because the worst thing you can do is leave the public in a position of not knowing and then speculating and theorizing and talking in the way we are now.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MCCABE: It's not helpful to the victims. It's not helpful to the investigation. So you have to get out there. And I don't mean politicians. Like, hearing their thoughts and prayers, that's very nice. We want to hear from the law enforcement, from incident command, people who are on scene and have knowledge and have access to investigative information to give us the basics of what happened here. It's essential.

SCIUTTO: Just very quickly, Andrew, if that school resource officer, or any other officer, had fired his or her weapon, in those early moments, would police already know that?

MCCABE: Yes, there's forensic evidence.

SCIUTTO: OK. MCCABE: Those -- any responding officer, their guns should have been confiscated at the scene.

SCIUTTO: Yes.

MCCABE: You count the amount of ammunition that's in each one of those guns to determine if a round has been expended. You've clearly done forensics at the scene. Now you know where shots were, you know, where shots took place by the casings that are left on the ground, by the projectiles that are lodged in walls or what have you. So, yes, you would know that by now.

SCIUTTO: Yes, that's what I meant.

MCCABE: It's hard to imagine a gunman dropped a bag of ammunition for no reason.

SCIUTTO: That's why that non-answer -- yes, that's why that non-answer is inexplicable at this point on that question, among others.

[09:40:01]

MCCABE: That's right.

SCIUTTO: Andrew McCabe, thanks so much.

MCCABE: Yes.

SCIUTTO: Still to come, moments before his violent and deadly rampage began, the gunman shared his plans over text. Those chilling messages, coming up.

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SCIUTTO: We often ask after shootings like this, were there warning signs? And new this morning, CNN has obtained some chilling text messages the gunman in Texas sent minutes before he opened fire at Robb Elementary School, killing those 19 children and 2 teachers.

HILL: The messages were sent to a teenage girl in Germany.

CNN's Drew Griffin has more details now on how the messages are helping investigators piece together the timeline of this attack.

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DREW GRIFFIN, CNN SENIOR INVESTIGATIVE CORRESPONDENT (voice over): This is the text conversation captured just moments before the 18- year-old shooter would attempt to kill his grandmother, then, in his words, shoot up an elementary school.

You know what I'm going to do right now, he writes.

[09:45:01]

Tell me, is the response. I can't since my grandpa hasn't left. I'm waiting for this dude to

leave.

Shortly after 11:00 a.m. Texas time, the suspect then complains about his grandmother and his phone bill.

I'm waiting for this bitch. I'm going to do something to her right now. She's on with AT&T about my phone. It's annoying.

Five minutes pass.

Then, I just shot my grandmother in her head. I'm going to go shoot up an elementary school right now.

That last message sent at 6:21 p.m. German time, which would have been 11:21 a.m. in Uvalde, Texas.

Eleven minutes later, police received their first call of a shooting at Robb Elementary School.

The person on the receiving end of the text, a 15-year-old girl in Germany. She had never met him in person. They connected through a live streaming app called Yubo, t hen Facetimed, texted and he sent her videos of himself. She says the shooter told her he'd bought some ammo Monday, but she told CNN she had no idea what he was planning.

She's not the only person he was communicating with. The shooter's Instagram account showed a photo of two AR-style weapons and tagged another young woman, who he messaged the morning of the shooting saying, I'm about to, but didn't finish his sentence. And then, I got a little secret.

GRIFFIN (on camera): The teenage girl who spoke to CNN from Germany, with her mother's consent, tells us her only connection with the shooter had been through texting, which was somewhat innocuous conversations. But she did tell us about one conversation she had in which the shooter did alarm her when he said he liked to throw dead cats at people's houses. There was no explanation.

Drew Griffin, CNN, Atlanta.

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HILL: Up next, the mounting burden on teachers. How do educators keep their students safe when face to face with a gunman? I'll speak with a woman who managed to talk down a would-be school shooter in 2013. She joins us next.

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[09:51:35]

HILL: As we follow this tragedy, the massacre in Texas, the question of a teacher's role in a crisis event returns. As you know, two teachers were killed in Uvalde on Tuesday. Eva Mireles and Irma Garcia. They were co-teachers to a fourth grade class. They died along with 19 students after that gunman barricaded himself inside their classroom. We have heard from parents that they believed they were doing everything in their power to protect their fourth grade students.

My next guest had her own terrifying encounter in 2013 with a gunman at an Atlanta area elementary school.

Listen to her 911 call as she also engaged with the shooter.

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TUFF: He says he should have just went to the mental hospital instead of doing this because he's not on his medication.

Do you want me to try? I can help you. Do you want to try? Do you want me to -- we -- you want to talk to them? Want me to talk to them and try to --

OK, well, let me talk to them and let -- let's see if we can work it out so you don't have to go away with them for a long time.

It's going to be all right, sweetie. I just want you to know that I love you, though, OK, and I'm proud of you. That's a good thing that you're just giving up and don't worry about it. We all go through something in life.

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HILL: The lives saved in that moment.

Antoinette Tuff, the heroic staffer who talked down that gunman in 2013 joins us now.

It's good to have you with us today. Obviously, these are never the circumstances that we want to be speaking in. But when we look at your experience, your calm, your empathy in that moment, saved lives.

And now I know you're working to spread that, right? And you talk about compassion and confidence and control in these situations. When you look at what happened in Texas, I'm just curious, what are your thoughts this morning?

ANTOINETTE TUFF, STOPPED SCHOOL SHOOTING IN DEKALB CO., GEORGIA, IN 2013: That it's just beginning for them. No one knows the actual aftermath when you're not actually in it and it didn't affect you. We can all pray, we can all say words of encouragement, but until it's your name, and until it's your child, and until you're held hostage, you can never, ever understand the full effect that it causes on you, years later. That was one of the things that I realized in all was that, how you go back and how was I able to survive.

And, you're right, I used what I call Tuff tactics, compassion, confidence and control, in the midst of a diverse environment, in the midst of trying to make sure that the gunman felt safe, he felt heard, and how you create a safe environment. And today I go back to make sure that our school districts, our organizations know what it looks like and how to make a safe environment for their educators, for their actual schools, and also for their organizations so that their students can feel safe.

HILL: Do you think there is enough focus on that aspect of feeling safe, beyond barricading the doors, beyond being told to hide under a desk or in a closets?

TUFF: No, it's not. We're not looking at the bullying that takes effect. We're not looking at teachers feeling like they're safe. Are they getting it from their administrative team? You know, do you have a diverse, you know, and inclusion all the way around? You know, are you creating a psychologically and safe environment for you? I call it (INAUDIBLE). And are you doing affective communications within your organizations? We don't look at all those things. What we do is we say, OK, here's a drill, this is what you need to do.

[09:55:01]

But if you don't have effective communication in it, how does organization in school districts know how to function outside of saying that was a drill time? We need affective communication in our organizations and in our schools to be able to show our teachers that we care for you, that we feel for you, and that we're here to support you and show some empathy in the midst of it all.

HILL: You're trying to -- you know, you're leading that charge.

TUFF: Yes.

HILL: You're doing that work. And you're trying to bring other people over to see the importance of it.

Have you noticed a shift, especially -- not only since 2013, but in light of everything that we've seen in the last several years?

TUFF: Well, I go and I speak in front of organizations and school districts. We're going to speak in front of our 4000 next month. So, have I seen a shift I it? Yes. But s that enough of a shift? We don't have enough people coming in to be able to come back and say, what does this look like? We don't have enough people bringing in people like me to be able to have a conversation. If you're not having a conversation, then you're just still sitting there allowing your employees and your staff to feel like they're ineffective. You've got to have the hard conversations of how do we create a safe environment and our workplaces and in our school districts. How do we come back and allow our teachers and administrators to be able to feel that they're supported? And this is not saying enough. Or do we have enough other conversation.

HILL: Yes.

Antoinette Tuff, appreciate you joining us this morning and the work that you are doing, and I hope to see it grow.

Thank you.

TUFF: Thank you.

HILL: New details this morning on how the Uvalde gunman was able to get inside that school despite being confronted by an armed officer outside. CNN's special live coverage continues next.

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