talk. why this uvalde teacher now says he s angry at law enforcement who he heard in the hallway while 11 of his students were being killed. and office ultimatums. return to the office or lose urjob. the tough decision more workers are now facing. welcome to the lead. i m jake tapper. we start with our politics lead today. president biden now getting involved as a key democratic senator says negotiations with republicans on gun reform have reached a, quote, critical stage. that democrat, chris murphy of connecticut, visited the white house today to give president biden a rundown of where bipartisan negotiations stand. before murphy headed back to the hill for yet another meeting with his fellow lawmakers. they have expressed growing optimism a deal for a narrow targeted bill could potentially be reached as soon as the end of this week. so what remains on the table? well, incentivized states to pass red flag laws. potential waiting periods for 18 to 21-year-olds buying
means. but officers resisted as the massacre played out. meantime, vigils and memorials are giving families and the community a chance to grieve and of course, begin healing. but nothing will bring back the 21 people they ve lost. and we re now hearing for the first time from the mother of the gunman, salvador ramos. translator: i have no words. i have no words to say. i don t know what he was thinking. he had his reasons for doing what did he and please don t judge him. i only want the innocent children who died to forgive me. what do you tell their families? translator: forgive me. forgive my son. i know he had his reasons. what reasons could he have had in. translator: to get closer to those children instead of paying attention to the other bad things. i have no words. i don t know. cnn s ed lavandera begins our coverage. reporter: two days after the mass shooting at robb elementary, the story of what happened when the gunman arrived on the campus has fundame
again you can see senator ted cruz there at the memorial. you can hear the emotion in that room and, obviously, right there you can see family members wee weeping. when we come tonight, we come with broken hearts. we come in disbelief and we come with pain and anguish. reporter: the pain here in uvalde being felt all over the country. 21 people killed in this attack. 19 of them young children. 17 others injured and it comes ten days after the max shooting in buffalo. cnn has been oak here more than 24 hours reporting this story. adrian, this has been so emotional, each as we learn more information about what took place here. reporter: certainly, john, when words escape us, sometimes music soothes, almost like we saw yesterday at the vigil when that violin just filled the silence as those parents and members of the community wept. you talked about this, two additional funerals were held yesterday for the buffalo shooting victim itself on the same day we learned about t
good thursday morning to you. i am jim shooter. and i m erica hill. the nation mourns the census loss of 19 children and two teachers. new questions are emerging about the timeline of events and how police responded. cnn say the killer was on school grounds for up to an hour before officers breached the classroom and killed him. why did it take as long as it did for the tactical team to go in? we know that several officers were off duty. they still responded to the scene. again, trying to establish exactly the timeline, as far as the response time, we know that officers were on scene, as i mentioned earlier. we had the school resource officer that was on scene. still again, they tried to establish his role. we had secondary officers that arrived on scene with gunfire upon entering the school. we know that law enforcement was there. there was immediate presence from law enforcement. again, trying to establish a timeline. we need to gather all the facts. we are trying to