With the initial police response to the Uvalde, Texas, shooting already being criticized, a new claim has emerged that police sent away a civilian trying to intervene in the early moments of the atrocity.
Cody Briseno is an attendant at the funeral home across the street from Robb Elementary School, according to NBC.
On May 24, with no idea of what was to come, he said he became involved in the incident when he ran to help Salvador Ramos after the 18-year-old crashed his truck, according to NBC.
Briseno was outside with a co-worker when the incident began. They went to help the truck’s driver.
Ramos got out of the vehicle with evil in his eyes, Briseno told NBC.
Cody Briseno: “He looked right back at me with this evil look and I see this rifle”https://t.co/x9k1qzm1bQ
— Mr Producer (@RichSementa) June 5, 2022
“I see him crawling out from the passenger window,” he said. “I tell them, ‘Hey, man, are you OK? Are you all right?'”
“We locked eyes, and he gave me this vibe,” Briseno said. “At that moment, he looks right back to me … with that evil look, and what I see is this rifle.”
As Ramos grabbed his rifle, Briseno and his co-worker fled. Briseno fell as he ran.
“I get up, and as I’m running, I look back,” Briseno told NBC. “And he was aiming that barrel right at me and my co-worker.”
He said Ramos opened fire at them, but they were able to enter Hillcrest Memorial Funeral Home after other workers held open the front door for them.
Briseno then saw the gunman heading for the school.
He said he phoned his wife to bring him his gun and said she arrived around the same time as the police.
Meanwhile, the shooter was already firing into the windows of the school, he said.
After Briseno had his gun, he tried to intervene, but was stopped.
“Hey, what are you doing,” he said an officer asked him as he began to walk toward the school.
“I’m going to go in and try to stop them,” Briseno said he replied.
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“I told him that he’s already inside the school,” Briseno said.
Briseno said the officer told him to, as NBC phrased it, “stay back and shut up.” He did not indicate which department the officer was from, NBC reported.
“I feel guilty man, ’cause I couldn’t stop” Ramos, Briseno told NBC. “He was shooting at the windows, and I didn’t have my gun on me.”
He said the memory was refreshed with every grave he dug for a victim — one of them for his own cousin.
“It always plays in my head,” he told NBC.
The Department of Justice and Texas Department of Public Safety are already investigating the conduct of police that day.
This article appeared originally on The Western Journal.