“It was the wrong decision, period,” McCraw said at a Friday news conference. Police waited in the hallway and on the campus for more than an hour, treating the situation as a barricaded suspect instead of an active shooter, according to the director of the state police, Steven McCraw. The 18-year-old shooter made his way into a pair of adjoining classrooms, where he fired more than 100 rounds and killed the victims, authorities said. The incident has been further marred by local authorities' conflicting and frustrating accounts of how police responded to the gunman, who was also killed in the attack. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the Uvalde shooting. “There’s a hollowness in your chest you feel like you’re being sucked into it and never going to be able to get out, suffocating.” “To lose a child, it’s like having a piece of your soul ripped away,” Biden said Tuesday in remarks from the White House immediately after the shooting. Biden’s first wife and 1-year-old daughter died in a 1972 car crash, and his son Beau died in 2015 from brain cancer. The president is no stranger to personal tragedies. President Biden and first lady Jill Biden pay their respects at the makeshift memorial outside of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
