Three weeks after an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 children and two teachers, injuring 17 others, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas last month, local law enforcement has been silent on his research. Despite daily requests for media comments and police records looking for information about what happened and what didn’t happen that day, officers have made a comeback last week. They refuse to share more details about their response, leaving community members confused, frustrated and angry without anyone taking responsibility.
“We’ve all seen that the initial response was failure at all levels: system failures, communication failures, and more,” Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat representing Uvalde, told Yahoo News. “For 45 minutes, we’ve seen the police not follow protocol and we deserve better.”
Gutierrez has been one of the most outspoken critics of the mass response to the mass shooting: calling on responding officers, state Republicans, Gov. Greg Abbott and the National Rifle Association. Nearly a month after the massacre, Gutiérrez says, the impact of the shooting has led to a lack of confidence in law enforcement among Uvalde residents.
State Senator Roland Gutierrez interrupts a press conference held by Texas Gov. Greg Abbott in Uvalde, Texas on May 27th. (Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
“This lack of confidence is based less on mistakes and omissions and more on the fact that no one speaks,” he added. “There is no transparency or truth. When you can’t accept your truths and say you’ve failed and let me know how you failed, then you’re in trouble. “
The UValde Police Department did not return Yahoo News’ comment request.
Abbott Press Secretary Renae Eze said in a statement: “Investigations by the Texas Rangers and the FBI are ongoing, and we hope that the full results will be shared with the families of the victims. and the public, which deserves the full truth of what happened that tragic day. “
Connie Rubio, bottom right, 10-year-old Alexandria Rubio’s grandmother, who died in the mass shooting in Uvalde, weeps with her family during a candlelight vigil. (Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
Sara Spector, a five-year-old former UValde prosecutor who last worked in the city in 2017, told Yahoo News that given her experience with local police, she doubts the public will ever know the truth about what happened that day.
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“After the second press conference I learned that there was a cover-up, that something was wrong,” he said. “I knew it eight years ago and it brought back so many memories that I had forgotten.”
Spector, who currently works as a criminal defense attorney in Midland, Texas, recalls a hostile environment that alleges that the local police in Uvalde created it during his stay there. Low wages and lack of education, she says, gave way to agents who produced incident reports that were barely readable to her or to potential jurors. Any criticism, he added, was met with “skepticism” and “misogyny”.
“If they ended up being right about something they might have criticized them for trying to correct, they would enter a whole world of denial or alternative facts,” Spector said. “It was just another world and at some point I realized I couldn’t improve much.”
Law enforcement officers outside the Civic Center in Uvalde, Texas, after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24th. (Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
In a tweet that has gone viral since then, Spector, just two days after the mass shooting, said that given his past interactions with agents in that city, “You’ll never know the truth about what happened in this school to every inch of videotape.
He later added: “The fact that there is no explanation for the silence of the radio by all officials and we are now in the district attorney’s office, why would anything change now?”
Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo has been heavily criticized by law enforcement for the school shooting. As head of a six-member team tasked with protecting Uvalde’s schools, it was Arredondo who decided that officers would not enter the classroom for nearly an hour where the gunman was shooting and killing children and teachers. , even when they were 10 years old. old man called the police and asked for help.
Arredondo said he intentionally left his police and campus radios out of school to free his hands in preparation for the active shooter, a decision that has been heavily scrutinized. In recent weeks, state officials and the general public have criticized his response as selfish and short-sighted, putting the safety of officers before that of children. Texas Department of Homeland Security director Steven McCraw later called it a “wrong decision” to wait so long to break down the door.
The head of the Uvalde schools police, Pete Arredondo, third from the left. (Dario Lopez-Mills / AP)
In an interview with the Texas Tribune last week, however, the boss defended his decision.
“Not a single responding agent hesitated, not even for a moment, to put himself at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the newspaper. “We responded to the information we had and had to adapt to everything we faced.”
The police chief added that he did not believe he was responsible for the scene that day. “I did not give any orders,” Arredondo said.
Arredondo’s response, along with other officials at the scene, including the Border Patrol and state and federal agencies, are now under collective investigation by the Texas Rangers, the Justice Department and the prosecutor’s office. local district, according to the New York Times. Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell said this week that she is not investigating the shooting and is waiting for the Rangers and the FBI to complete their own investigations so they can review them.
FBI and Secret Service agents at Robb d’Uvalde Elementary School, May 29. (Chandan Khanna / AFP via Getty Images)
To the displeasure of critics calling for greater transparency, the city of Uvalde and its police department are also working with a private law firm to prevent almost any record of the shooting from being disclosed to the public. This record includes images from the police corps camera, photos of the crime scene, 911 calls, emails and more.
“The city has not voluntarily disclosed any information to a member of the public,” wrote Cynthia Trevino, the city’s attorney, who works with Denton Navarro law firm Rocha Bernal & Zech, in a letter to Attorney General Texas, Ken Paxton. “The information requested is not information collected, collected or maintained under a law or ordinance or in connection with the transaction of official business by a government agency or for a government agency or which is exempt of disclosure “.
With each passing day, many in the community are left to pick up the pieces on their own, without the help of those who believed they were put on to protect and serve them.
Olivia Luna, 15, is comforted at a monument in front of Robb Elementary School on June 17, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. (Photo by Brandon Bell / Getty Images)
Arnulfo Reyes, a Robb Elementary School teacher who was shot during the attack, described officers who responded as “cowards” in an interview with ABC News earlier this month for not doing more that day. .
“They sat there and did nothing for our community,” Reyes said. “It took them a long time to get in … I’ll never forgive them.”
Others have chosen not to point a finger at anyone.
“I feel that no matter who came in, they would still have done their best,” said Anne Jacques, a longtime resident of Uvalde in the Texas Tribune. “And I feel like they did the best they could. So how can you blame them?”
“I have no hatred,” the now-retired Baptist pastor of Uvalde Julián Moreno told NPR. “God’s love reminds me that I’m not here to judge a person.”
A memorial service dedicated to the victims of the mass shooting in Uvalde. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
The composition of the city helps to illuminate the dynamics of power at stake constantly. Uvalde, a city in South Texas just over an hour’s drive from the Mexican border, has a population of 15,000 people, 80 percent Latinos and 14 percent whites, according to census data. . The median income in 2020 was just over $ 41,600 in a community where one in five residents lives in poverty. It is a deeply religious community where it is not uncommon for parishioners to attend church more than two or three times a week. And they have a great reverence for law enforcement in Uvalde, in part because of tradition, but also because many are friends or relatives, including cousins, brothers and sisters, as the Border Patrol is one of the main occupants in the region. . However, immigration advocates say the increase in the presence of agents and the Department of Homeland Security has hurt an unknown number of undocumented immigrants. Others do their best not to cause problems.
Regardless of their status, Gutierrez said members of the Uvalde community only want transparency and truth.
“I hope people are worried about the deaths of fourth graders,” he said. “What happened here should never happen to any community. It means we have to keep up the pressure for change, not just to keep a history.”
Gun control advocates guard the NRA headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia, after the mass shooting in Uvalde. (Kevin Dietsch / Getty Images)
He added that the alternative is unacceptable: “Imagine this: these parents have lost 19 beautiful babies and the only thing they have to wait for in 10 or 20 years is a more dull feeling of pain.”
With the backdrop of the governor’s career between current Republican candidate Abbott and Democratic candidate Beto O’Rourke less than five months away, the politics of Uvalde, and Texas in general, have become apparent. .