It shouldn’t have taken this long. And there’s still a lot of stuff we haven’t seen because it’s still tied up in the courts.
New Uvalde school district records released late Monday provide more details about campus safety concerns raised before the deadly 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting — and reveal in a few teachers’ own words how traumatized they remained after the massacre.
The documents also indicate that the 18-year-old shooter had exhibited inappropriate school behavior, struggled academically and was often absent when he was an Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District student.
The materials — more than 200 megabytes — are part of the latest document disclosure by a government agency involved in the flawed response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. The release was part of a settlement agreement in a yearslong lawsuit news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, brought against state and local governments.
The records include messages from school district officers who responded to the shooting, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. The documents reveal little new information about several law enforcement agencies’ failure to more quickly confront the gunman. ProPublica and The Tribune previously found that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and waited 77 minutes to confront him. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies.
None of the school district police officers were wearing body cameras that day because the district had not issued them the equipment, so no new video or audio was released Monday.
In one email released Monday, a fourth-grade Robb teacher wrote to the district superintendent about how terrified she was during the shooting, as she tried to keep her students safe while bullets ricocheted around her.
According to a Texas House committee’s investigation into the shooting, the teacher was in a classroom across the hall from the adjoining classrooms where the gunaman killed all of his victims and was barricaded.
“I fell on the floor and began knocking desks over onto my legs so I wouldn’t make noise, but I couldn’t block the students from bullets,” she emailed the former district superintendent, who retired after the shooting. “I told my students I loved them. I told them to stay quiet, and I told them to pray.”
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The Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office has also agreed to release body camera footage and other records, but had not done so by late Monday.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which dispatched more than 90 officers to the school, has appealed a judge’s order to release hundreds of videos and investigative files. Prather said the media coalition continues fighting for the release of the state law enforcement agency’s records.
“Three years is already too long to wait for truth and transparency that could prevent future tragedies,” [Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who represented the news organizations in the legal fight for records] said.
ProPublica and The Tribune previously published 911 calls that showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers’ fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentary, the newsrooms showed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the more than 300 officers who responded were not.
DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen wrote in an email Monday that the agency followed “its standard protocol in which it does not release records that will impact pending prosecutions.” Two former Uvalde schools police officers were indicted on child endangerment charges last summer over how they responded to the shooting. That includes Pete Arredondo, who was the district’s police chief during the shooting and has been widely faulted for the delay in confronting the gunman.
Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is leading the criminal investigation, did not return requests for comment. Spokespeople for the school district and county also did not immediately respond.
Former Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin, now a Republican member of the Texas House, called it “ludicrous” that the news organizations had to launch a legal fight to obtain records. He added that DPS should also release its information so that the victims’ families could get much-needed answers.
“Maybe there’s something in there that we can keep this from happening again,” he said. “This was a costly mistake, and so I believe everybody should just release their records and give these families not closure, but at least another piece of what went on that day.”
McLaughlin said he repeatedly asked DPS about releasing the information since starting his term in Austin this year.
“I basically was told it was up to the lawyers what they could and couldn’t do,” he said. “I don’t know what could be top secret in these reports that could hinder them being released.”
See here for the previous update. There’s a lot more to this article, and there’s also the Pro Publica version, so read it all. And screw DPS, the useless Steve McCraw, and Christina Mitchell for everything they have done to prolong the pain and suffering that these survivors feel.