A teacher repeatedly shot during the Texas school massacre broke down this week as he insisted some of the 21 slain kids and faculty members could have survived had police not “forgot” them for more than an hour.
Arnulfo Reyes told CNN that he played dead in a pool of his own blood in Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School for 74 minutes — not even flinching when crazed gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, shot him again, in his back.
During the agonizing wait, he repeatedly heard police in the hallway outside — assuming they would burst in at any second.
“You always think when something bad happens that the cops get there so fast and they rush in and help you,” said Reyes, who even heard the nearby officers talking to Ramos.
“I was just waiting for that — I was waiting for anybody, anybody, to come save us,” he told CNN on Wednesday.
“I was thinking, ‘Come on — come in, come in. Like he’s in here. Just come in here, come save us.’”
During that time, Ramos “did a lot of things to make me flinch or react,” the teacher said, splashing blood in his face and even shooting him again.
Reyes paused for more than 10 seconds to control his emotions when asked what he thought about officers failing to come in to help.
Finally, he said that “they forgot us.”
“I mean, they probably thought that we were all dead or something — but if they would have gotten in before, some of them probably would have made it,” he said of the 19 kids and two teachers who died.
Later, images of heavily armed and protected officers in the hallways just made him “more upset,” he said.
“Just knowing you’re a few feet away from me and you’re not helping me. You’re not helping anybody,” he said of the cops.
“A lot of the law enforcement failed — they take that oath to protect,” he said. “I was in there to protect the kids, but I had no bulletproof vest or tactical gear… they had everything.”
It was only when Border Patrol officers finally disobeyed commands and stormed in, killing Ramos, that Reyes was faced with the unthinkable realization that he was the lone survivor in his classroom.
The officers called out for people to “get up” and go, he recalled.
“Nobody moved but me,” he said.
“And then somebody else said, ‘There’s children under here’ — the children were dead under the table,” he said of the 11 fourth-graders slain in his room.
“There was nothing I could do but …” he said, trailing off as he sobbed and wiped away tears.
“My children … I love those kids,” he told the network.
Reyes — who spent more than a month in a hospital getting 10 surgeries for bullet wounds to his arm and back — was initially crushed by survivor’s guilt.
Now, he is determined to be “as strong as I can” to make sure that his beloved pupils do not “die in vain,” he told CNN.
“I would try to do anything that I can, so we don’t forget them,” he said.
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