There’s only so much outrage left in the tank on a sunny Friday afternoon, but wow this is just insane in the membrane. An independent investigation into the school shooting at Robb Elementary school in Uvalde, Texas was commissioned by the city of Uvalde in 2022. Yesterday, the results of the investigation were released to the public during a city council meeting. The gist of the new report is that police on the scene did nothing wrong.
Former Austin Police Department detective Jesse Prado examined the actions of each Uvalde police officer as they responded to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history on May 24, 2022.
The report recommends that each police officer should be “exonerated,” stating in most of their cases: “No evidence of serious acts of misconduct in direct violation of Uvalde Police Department’s policies was found in his behavior in response to the incident. I find that (this officer) acted in good faith.”
The report was prepared by a former police detective name Jesse Prado to help defend the city from an influx of lawsuits. So it makes sense that it basically finds no real errors on the part of the police. It does contain a section of recommendations which suggests that, in future, police should attempt to kill a mass shooter: I haven’t read the report itself but I’m struggling to understand how this would not constitute a failure by the officers on hand given that they all received training in which they were specifically taught that this was a best practice for dealing with an active shooter.
“Officers responding to an active shooter incident must continually seek to eliminate the threat and enable victim response,” one recommendation read. “An active shooter with access to victims should never be considered and treated as a barricaded subject.”
Prado also concluded that he believed the assessment of Paul Guerrero, the acting commander of the Border Patrol tactical team, who said he thought the door of the classroom where the shooting took place was locked. The report detailed many attempts by officers to get keys to unlock doors inside the school, delaying efforts to get inside classrooms.
Both the previous Justice Department report and the investigation by state lawmakers have doubted the door was ever locked.
There are at least three reports that say the door where the gunman was hiding was not locked. So it’s true that police spent a long time waiting on keys that didn’t come but it’s also true that they didn’t need them. Police would have known that if they had ever tried to enter the room after a brief attempt in the first moments of the attack. As you can imagine, parents were disgusted with the new report.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Another person in the crowd screamed, “Cowards!”…
“My daughter was left for dead,” Ruben Zamorra said. “These police officers signed up to do a job. They didn’t do it.”
KXAN has more:
“There’s kids dead, teachers dead. Children who survived in the class bleeding, teachers who are never going to be the same. And you’re going to tell me nobody did anything wrong? Shame on you. Shame on you,” said Laura Garza, the aunt of young victim Amerie Jo.
Another part of the report that angered parents was criticism of the parents who tried to get inside the school when cops were twiddling their thumbs for more than an hour.
Prado also said families who rushed to the school that day compromised efforts to set up a chain of command, as officers had to conduct crowd control while parents desperately tried to get in the building or begged officers to go inside.
”At times they were difficult to control,” Prado said. ” They were wanting to break through police barriers.”
Gee, I wonder why parents concerned their kids were alone with a mass killer while police did nothing were hard to control? It’s a real mystery. The city would have been better off if police had handed their weapons to the parents. At least they would have done something besides stand around.
Here’s a local news report on the meeting.
There’s a recording of the entire meeting, including a kind of interview with Prado in which he explains why he would exonerate everyone involved. This is followed immediately by him walking out of the room. The first parent who got up to comment was Kimberly Mata-Rubio who demanded that Prado be brought back in to listen to parents. Once he returned, she made a pretty solid case that three specific officers needed to be fired based on their failure to act. This clip is more than 2 hours long. I have it cued up to just before Mata-Rubio’s statements but you can scroll back if you want to see Prado’s presentation.