there s active shooter. how an 18-year-old can get this militarized weaponry anywhere is beyond me. please stay engaged. don t forget them, please. i beg you. show them to the world. when he died, i died with him. we cannot outlaw tragedy but can he can make america safer. we can finally do what we have to do to protect the lives of our people and of our children. i m pamela brown in washington. you are in the cnn newsroom. it is member aerial day wee memorial day weekend, a time to honor and men and women who have served the military. and there is grief and shock over two horrific shootings over the last two weeks. tomorrow president biden will travel to uvalde, texas to mourn with a community heartbroken by two state school massacres. look at your screen, these 19 children, mere fourth graders, slaughtered along with their two teachers. tonight, long lines of people are enduring near 100-degree heat to place flowers and other remembrances at the memorial outsi
hi, thank you for joining me. i m jessica dean in for fredricka whitfield. i m joined by dana bash in uvalde, texas. president biden there to meet with the grieving community. dana, tell us what you re seeing there. reporter: well, president biden and first lady jill biden are here today. he s playing a role that he has played so many times before, comforting families following an unspeakable tragedy. right now the president and first lady are meeting with families at a community center in uvalde. this morning the bidens visited a memorial site at robb elementary that, of course, is the site of the shootings on tuesday. and then they attended a catholic mass service where he was greeted by an archibishop here. these events taking on an even more solemn tone as questions continue to grow over apparent failures of law enforcement s response to tuesday s mass shooting. the visit also comes less than two weeks after they both visited a site of a different kind of massacre, a ra
wanting to offer some type of solace, some type of comfort to the families who lost so many loved ones in that horrific massacre here at robb elementary school behind me earlier this week. now the president right now is privately meeting with survivors and the family members of victims. he s been meeting with them for almost two and a half hours. the white house really blocking off a significant amount of his time here on the ground in uvalde to hear directly from those family members who lost loved ones. but first president biden stopped here at the memorial site at robb elementary. he and first lady jill biden took about 20 minutes reading each of the names, seeing and taking in the life-sized photos of these 19 children and two teachers who were gunned down during the school day on tuesday. the president, while he s also been here in uvalde, has also been hearing really from the local community members issuing calls to action both here at the elementary school and as he wa
911 call and the moment that shooter was killed. cnn s shimon prokupecz pushed for straight answers during a press conference on friday. reporter: you say there were 19 officers gathered in the hallway or somewhere. what efforts were made to try and break through that door you say was locked? what efforts were the officers making to try and break through either that door or another door, to get inside that classroom? none at that time. reporter: why? the on-scene commander at the time believed it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject. reporter: you have people who are alive, children who are calling 911 saying, please send the police. they are alive in that classroom. there are lives that are at risk. that s not protocol, is it? we re well aware that. reporter: right. why was this decision made not to go in and rescue these children? again, the on-scene commander considered a barricaded subject and that there was time and there were n