Two active shooters in two elementary schools, both armed with assault rifles and both ready to kill. Police in both Uvalde, Texas, last May and Nashville just this week rushed to answer 911 calls of gunfire.
But while the Nashville shooter was stopped within minutes, with six innocents killed, it took well over an hour for the Uvalde siege to end. Nineteen children and two teachers died in Uvalde, though at least three of the victims had survived the initial gunfire.
Here are the key differences, and some similarities, reported from a CNN analysis of body camera footage from both instances and interviews given to investigators after the Uvalde massacre that have been obtained by CNN:
Entering the school. In Uvalde, Robb Elementary comprised separate buildings connected by breezeways. Officers coming from different directions could hear gunfire and used that to identify the right location, entering the westernmost building where the gunman was. They then tried to direct each other via radios.
In Nashville, a woman who appears to be a Covenant School staffer meets one of the first responders, Officer Rex Engelbert, and tells him: “The kids are all locked down. We have two kids that we don’t know where they are.” Engelbert is handed a key, opens the locked entry door, and with other officers already arriving, calls out to form a team.
Searching for the shooter. Sirens were blaring and emergency lights flashing as officers from the Metropolitan Nashville Police Department entered the Covenant School building. With no initial sound of gunfire, they started to search room by room.
It’s a marked difference from Uvalde: After being shot at through the door at 11:37 a.m., the officers in Uvalde retreated. One began to head back toward the key classrooms – 111 and 112 – but no one followed him. It appears that no one got close to the classroom doors again until 12:50 p.m. when a team led by Border Patrol agents burst in and killed the gunman. There was a forward surge after shots were fired in the classroom at 12:21 p.m., but no one went in. And with no effective communication with each other or school administrators, there was confusion about whether children and teachers were trapped.
Firepower. In Uvalde, responding officers realized the shooter had a high-powered assault rifle, given the bullet casings they saw and by how the shots were piercing sheetrock. That seemed to have cowed then-school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who called the city police dispatcher and said: “He has an AR-15. He shot a whole bunch of times … He’s in one room. I need a lot of firepower, I need this building surrounded, surrounded with as many AR-15s as possible.”
