(NEW YORK) — In a new twist in the Uvalde elementary school mass shooting, a source has confirmed to ABC News that as police waited for more than an hour in a hallway outside the classrooms where a gunman killed 19 students and two teachers, none of the officers checked to see if the doors to the classrooms were locked.

The new development in the investigation of the shooting came just days after Chief Pete Arredondo of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police, the incident commander during the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, defended his actions and claimed the delay in breaching connecting classrooms 111 and 112, where the gunman was holed up was because he was waiting for a janitor to get the key to the door.

But surveillance footage showed that neither Arredondo nor any other officers taking cover in the hallway outside the classrooms ever attempted to open the door before receiving the keys to the two connecting classrooms. That means there were 77 minutes between when the alleged 18-year-old gunman entered the school through an unlocked door and when police fatally shot him, a source with knowledge of the investigation told ABC News.

The San Antonio Express News was the first to report on Saturday that Arredondo and his team allegedly never check the classroom doors to determine if they were unlocked.

The sources confirmed to ABC News that investigators now believe the alleged gunman, Salvador Ramos, could not have locked the doors to the classrooms from inside as officials first suspected. In the surveillance footage, the sources said, it appears Ramos, 18, was able to open the door to classroom 111 from the outside, the source said. That classroom is connected to the adjacent classroom 112 by a short corridor where a restroom is located, officials have previously said.

Whether the doors to the classrooms where the slayings occurred were unlocked through the entire episode remains under investigation.

In a June 6 interview with ABC News’ Amy Robach, Robb Elementary School teacher Arnulfo Reyes, who was wounded in the shooting that killed 11 of his students, said that prior to the rampage he complained to the school’s principal that the door to his room, 111, did not latch properly during security checks. He said the door was supposed to remain shut and lock automatically.

“When that would happen, I would tell my principal, ‘Hey, I’m going to get in trouble again, they’re going to come and tell you that I left my door unlocked, which I didn’t,'” Reyes said in the interview. “But the latch was stuck. So, it was just an easy fix.”

In an interview with the Texas Tribune published June 9, Arredondo, who was recently sworn in as a Uvalde City Council member, said he spent more than an hour in the school hallway calling for tactical gear, a sniper and keys to get inside the classroom.

He claimed he and multiple officers with him in the hallway took cover away from the classroom doors for 40 minutes to avoid being struck by bullets the suspect, armed with an AR-15 style rifle and hundreds of rounds of ammunition, fired through the door.

The Texas Department of Public Safety said three Uvalde police officers who initially ran into the school to confront the gunman were fired on through the door and two suffered graze wounds.

Law enforcement officers from multiple agencies in the area converged on the school and began evacuating children from other classrooms and away from the two rooms where the gunman was holed up. Video and photos from the scene, showed children being pulled through broken windows and running out of harm’s way.

Arredondo claimed in the interview with the Texas Tribune that a custodian finally brought him a large key ring with dozens of the keys attached but none worked. Sources familiar with the investigation claimed that while searching for a master key, Arredondo tried the janitor’s keys on a door out of harm’s way on a nearby classroom.

While Arredondo waited for the keys and a tactical team to gear up and reach the scene, students and teachers trapped in the classrooms with the gunman made at least seven desperate 911 calls asking for help.

Arredondo told the Texas Tribune that he didn’t bring his radios with him to the scene, claiming time was of the essence and that he wanted to have his hands free.

“The only thing that was important to me at this time was to save as many teachers and children as possible,” Arredondo told the Texas Tribune.

Sources told ABC News that Arredondo is not cooperating with investigators probing the shooting. Arredondo has denied he has been uncooperative.

Arredondo and police involved in the response to the deadly emergency have come under intense scrutiny as the investigation has unfolded and video surfaced showing panicked parents being held back by police officers from entering the school to take matters into their own hands, including a father who officers deployed a stun gun on and a mother who was handcuffed.

Police investigators and elected leaders, including Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, have also been the subject of scorn over how the official narrative of the rampage has dramatically changed as the investigation has unfolded.

In the immediate aftermath of the Uvalde rampage, Abbott praised the “amazing courage” of law enforcement, saying the incident “could have been worse” if the officers hadn’t run toward the gunfire and eliminated the shooter. But one day later, Victor Escalon, the South Texas regional director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, contradicted Abbott’s statement, saying, no schools officer was at the campus when the gunman, who had already shot and wounded his grandmother, crashed a truck in front of the school and entered the school buildings unabated through an unlocked door after getting onto campus by climbing a fence.

Abbott later said he was misled on the police response.

Col. Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, initially said the door the gunman used to access the school building was left propped open by a teacher. But officials later said the investigation showed the teacher closed the door, but the door did not automatically lock as it was supposed to.

The timeline on how quickly police responded to the shooting has also changed several times, from a rapid response to about 40 minutes, to eventually 77 minutes before a SWAT team entered the classroom where the shooter was located and killed him, authorities said.

The New York Times reported on Friday that a Uvalde police officer responding to initial reports of a shooting was armed with an AR-15 style rifle and had an opportunity to shoot the gunman outside the school but hesitated out of concern he could have hit a student with an errant shot. Law enforcement sources have confirmed that scenario to ABC News.

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(NEW YORK) — Opal Lee, 95, has spent much of her life advocating for civil rights. When she was just 12, her family home was vandalized and set ablaze by white supremacists, none of whom were arrested.

It led her down a lifetime of trying to force the nation to pay respect to those impacted, oppressed or killed by racism throughout U.S. history. Each year on Juneteenth, she and her family in Texas go on a picnic and celebrate the day in 1865 when enslaved Black people in Galveston, Texas, learned they had been freed over two years after the Emancipation Proclamation took effect.

In 2016, Lee went to Washington, D.C., and led a 2.5-mile march to symbolize the 2.5 years it took for the Emancipation Proclamation to be enforced in Texas, and to free the final enslaved Black people.

The joyous day, filled with love and comradery in the Black community, was one she wanted to turn into a federal holiday.

Social activism can take many forms: protests, petitions, boycotts — but for some, joy can be also a revolutionary tool against systems of oppression. Black joy, as an act of resistance against white supremacy, takes center stage on Juneteenth.

Lee’s grandaughter, Dione Sims, who is also a civil rights advocate, has been helping her in the fight and says joy is key to bringing the movement forward.

“Folks usually think that to be an activist, you have to be negative in protesting and marching and, but when you come together and you celebrate and you commemorate Juneteenth, it is a form of social awareness,” Sims told ABC News.

“It is a show of support, not just for the African American community, but the fact that Juneteenth represents freedom for all,” she said.

In 2021, Lee and Sims stood with President Joe Biden when he officially made the commemorative day a federally recognized holiday.

“You know when you smile a lot and your cheekbones hurt? That’s how it was that day, because I’m just smiling, seeing her having a dream fulfilled,” Sims said. “A lot of times we have dreams, and we don’t get to see the culmination of it until maybe after a person has passed on.”

Shaonta’ Allen, a sociology professor at Dartmouth University, says that joy is the opposition to widespread anti-Blackness and racism seen in the U.S. It’s inherently resistant to oppressive forces, she says.

“When Black communities and Black individuals decide to identify for themselves and provide value in Blackness, when everything around them tells them that they should not value blackness – That’s where we see that opposition to this widespread racism and inequality,” Allen said.

She said Juneteenth, as well as June’s Pride month and other heritage month celebrations, are great examples of celebrating as a form of protest.

“We see other communities, intentionally drawing on self validation, self valuation, self definition, rather than more dominant notions of what their community is and how their communities should be viewed,” Allen said.

In celebrating the vibrancy and comradery of Juneteenth, Black communities refuse to accept suffering against oppression.

For Sims, joy has been a motivating factor in continuing Lee’s legacy. She said it’s what helps keep activists going.

“Black freedom and Black emancipation in America is definitely something that Black communities are excited about and have been, but we also celebrate with caution, because we know that there’s still a lot of work to do to,” Lee said.

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(NEW YORK) — While most Americans prepare to celebrate the country’s freedom on July 4, many Black people in the United States recognize June 19 as their Independence Day.

The day widely known as Juneteenth, and referred to as Jubilee Day or Black Independence Day, is a significant date in Black history. It marks the day when the last enslaved African Americans found out about their freedom.

The news was delivered to Black people in Galveston, Texas, on June 19, 1865, two years after President Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which lawfully marked the end of slavery for those of the Southern Confederate states.

ABC News caught up with prominent African Americans in the fields of film, music and media during the Bounce Trumpet Awards on April 23, 2022, and asked about how Juneteenth has played a role in their lives. The awards telecast will air on June 19.

“Our people are great and we started with nothing and came into something,” Emmy Award-winning actor Courtney B. Vance told ABC News. “Yes, things may be difficult now, but when you go past the first Google page and just look and see what our people had to deal with and still they rose. Everywhere they looked was a no. Everywhere they looked was darkness.”

The “61st Street” actor, who has also won a Tony Award, said he appreciates the opportunity to educate, especially young children, about his ancestors’ greatness and adversity. “It’s a message for us all that sometimes life is difficult and it’s going to be trial. But if we just press on, there will be a victory.”

With Vice President Kamala Harris, the first Black woman to hold the second-highest office in the executive branch, by his side, President Joe Biden signed the Juneteenth National Independence Day Act into law last year, on June 17, 2021. But the African American community had been celebrating long before Juneteenth was made a federal holiday.

Essence Magazine CEO Caroline Wanga, a woman of Kenyan descent, emphasized the creation of Juneteenth as a celebration borne out of the struggle Black people face. During the Bounce Trumpet Awards celebrating Black humanitarians, she posed a question of reflection to the Black community.

“If you think about how long it took for Juneteenth to happen, then what are the things that you currently aren’t celebrating that you should be that are already yours, that you don’t know about?”

In addition to the usual music and food festivals and gatherings, Wanga suggests a different way to celebrate.

“That’s what I would love people to spend Juneteenth doing, is recognizing that that holiday was about the last of us finding out that we were freer than we thought,” she said. “What I want us to do is never have to do Juneteenth again and celebrate all the things that are true about us that are already here right now that we just don’t know about. Go Google something and celebrate that on Juneteenth.”

The country’s delayed acknowledgement of what has long been an erased part of American history encourages Black people to research and educate themselves on unknown facts about their ancestry.

Naomi Raine, a member of the Grammy-winning gospel group Maverick City Music, plans to commemorate the holiday by opening up honest conversations with her children.

“I think everybody’s kind of evolving how they’re celebrating this holiday because some of it is just coming to light for many of us,” Raine told ABC News. “Now, it’s more about educating my children and letting them know the roots of our nation and talking about how freedom is for everybody.”

With the many in-person celebrations taking place all across the country this year, some artists do plan to go out and take part in traditional festivities. Rising soul singer Jordan Hawkins, a North Carolina native, says he looks forward to attending the Juneteenth music and arts festival in Los Angeles’ Leimert Park on June 18, which will feature more than 300 Black-owned businesses.

Juneteenth serves as a reminder of the decades-long fight for equity and equality of African Americans. And while the fight to fulfill America’s promise to all continues, Vance offers another message of hope: “I think we’re going to succeed. We’re going to push through.”

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