- A teacher killed in the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting reportedly called her cop husband.
- He rushed over to the scene, but other officers prevented him from going inside, a county judge told The New York Times.
- "She's in the classroom and he's outside," said Uvalde County judge, Bill Mitchell.
A teacher killed in the Uvalde, Texas, elementary school shooting called her police officer husband during the massacre — but he was barred by other law enforcement from going inside after rushing to the scene of the mass shooting, according to a new report.
"She's in the classroom and he's outside. It's terrifying," Uvalde County judge, Bill Mitchell, told The New York Times on Wednesday after he was briefed by sheriff's deputies who responded to the May 24 shooting that left 19 children and two educators dead.
According to Mitchell, Robb Elementary School fourth-grade teacher Eva Mireles was on the phone with her husband, Ruben Ruiz, a school district police officer, before she died in the attack.
"I don't know what was said," Mitchell told the Times.
The 18-year-old gunman who carried out the massacre with an AR-15 rifle entered the school at 11:28 a.m., opening fire in two adjoining classrooms where teachers and students were.
But it wasn't until about 78 minutes later when a US Border Patrol tactical team finally opened a locked classroom door using a key, stormed inside, and shot and killed the gunman, authorities have said.
A growing police presence was at the school during the beginning of the rampage, but the on-scene commander — Pete Arredondo, the chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District — made the decision to hold off confronting the gunman even as students inside the classrooms called 911 for help, a top Texas law enforcement official has said.
Last week, Col. Steve McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, called it the "wrong" decision.
"The on-scene commander at that time believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject," McCraw said, adding, "He was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children."
It remains unclear whether the commander was aware of the several 911 calls by students that came in during a roughly 40-minute span, but the new details given by Mitchell, the county judge, show that at least one officer at the scene was speaking to someone inside a classroom.
"He could not go into the classroom where all the shooting victims were at," Mireles' aunt, Lydia Martinez Delgado, told the Times of Ruiz.
Mitchell told the news outlet that he did not know whether Ruiz told Arredondo, the chief of the small department, about the call with his wife.
"He was talking to his wife. Whether that was conveyed to Arredondo or anyone else, I don't know," Mitchell said.
It was not clear when the phone call took place or how long it lasted.
Texas DPS and the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District did not immediately respond to requests for comment by Insider on Thursday.
Arredondo has come under fire for the botched police response to the shooting and Texas authorities have been facing intense backlash for changing their story more than a dozen times about what happened before, during, and after the massacre, which was the deadliest school shooting in the US in a decade.