UVALDE, Texas — Families of the children and teachers killed in the Uvalde, Texas, school massacre are renewing demands for criminal charges after a damning Justice Department report again exposed numerous police failures in one of the deadliest shootings in U.S. History classrooms.
“I’m very surprised that no one has gone to jail,” said Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of two teachers killed in the May 24, 2002, shooting. “It’s kind of a slap in the face that we just to get a review… we deserve justice.”
The release of the nearly 600-page report Thursday — about 20 months after the shooting — leaves a criminal investigation by Uvalde County prosecutors as one of the last unfinished reviews by authorities into the attack at Robb Elementary School. Nineteen students and two teachers were killed in two fourth-grade classrooms as heavily armed police officers waited in the hallways for more than an hour before moving in to confront the gunman.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the police response “a failure that should not have happened.”
But the report is deliberately silent on the question still burning in the minds of many victims’ families: Will anyone responsible for the failures be charged with a crime?
President Joe Biden said Thursday that he had not yet read the full findings. “But I don’t know if there is any criminal liability,” he said.
At least five officers have lost their jobs since the shooting, including two from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the local commander, then-school district police chief Pete Arredondo. But no one has been charged in the criminal investigation led by the Texas Rangers. The Justice Department report says the FBI assisted the Rangers but is not conducting its own investigation.
The Rangers – part of the Texas DPS, which had more than 90 officers at the scene of the shooting – submitted their initial findings in early 2023. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell initially said she hoped to take the case to a grand jury. late last year. But she pushed back that timeline in December, saying Thursday that she will need time to review the Justice Department’s sweeping report.
“I am a working prosecutor with a small office,” Mitchell said in an email. “It will take some time for me to go through this report. I’m hopeful it was informative for the community.”
The pace of the criminal investigation has long frustrated the families of the victims: Uvalde’s former Republican mayor and a Democratic state senator representing the small South Texas town have called for the resignation of the state police chief of Texas.
“Twenty months later, there is no end in sight to what this local district attorney can do,” said Senator Roland Gutierrez. “We don’t know at all whether she is going to charge anyone at all. It’s really a shame where we are now.”
In the report, federal officials describe “casual failures” by police, from waiting more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman to repeatedly giving grieving families false information about what had happened.
The document, prepared by a Justice Department office that supports local police, is among the most comprehensive accounts yet of what went wrong. It said problems with training, communications, leadership and technology compounded the crisis, even as anguished parents begged officers to enter and terrified students called 911 from a classroom where the gunman had holed up.
Uvalde is a tight-knit city of 15,000 residents about 90 miles southwest of San Antonio. Parents of children killed in the shooting grew up and went to school with some of the officers they now blame, and they feel abandoned by local and state leaders who they say are planning to move past the massacre.
“We need our community,” said Brett Cross, who was raising his 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia, when the boy was killed in the shooting. “It’s hard enough to wake up every day and continue walking down this walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bled out.
Cross is among those who hope the Justice Department report will unite Uvalde around a common set of facts and spur criminal charges. At a news conference in the city, Garland did not say whether charges should be filed, leaving that up to Mitchell.
The Justice Department report accuses state and local officials of undermining public confidence in law enforcement by repeatedly releasing false and misleading information about police responses. That includes Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the bravery of the officers “who ran toward gunfire.”
Now that it has become clear what happened, Jesse Rizo is among those looking for more responsibility. Rizo, whose niece Jacklyn Cazares was among the shooting victims, still hopes Mitchell will press charges, but he has little faith in those in power.
“You hope for the best,” he said, “but the past will basically tell you what the outcome will be.”
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Bleiberg reported from Dallas. Associated Press writer Zeke Miller in Washington contributed.
