“The kids started asking out loud, ‘Mr. Reyes, what is going on?'” Reyes told ABC’s Amy Robach in an interview aired Monday on “World News Tonight with David Muir.”
“And I said, ‘I don’t know what’s going on, but let’s go ahead and get under the table. Get under the table and act like you’re asleep.’
“As they were doing that, and I was gathering them under the table and told them to act like they’re going to sleep, is about the time when I turned around and saw him standing there.”
Reyes couldn’t move after being shot, he said, and the shooter then turned his gun on the students.
Officers could be heard outside the classroom, and a child in another classroom pleaded for police to help, Reyes said. But Reyes thinks by that time, officers had retreated down a hallway, he told ABC.
“One of the students from the next-door classroom was saying, ‘Officer, we’re in here. We’re in here,'” he said. “But they had already left.”
Officers had responded within minutes of the suspect entering the classroom yet were repelled by the gunman’s fire and then stationed in a hallway awaiting reinforcements, even as children inside called 911 and begged for police help, the timeline indicates.
Reyes played dead for 77 minutes until the Border Patrol team took Ramos down, he told ABC.
CNN’s Travis Caldwell contributed to this report.
