Texas prosecutor convenes grand jury to investigate Uvalde shooting after scathing report details police failures
UVALDE, Texas — A Texas prosecutor has convened a grand jury to investigate the Uvalde school shooting that killed 21 people, multiple media reported Friday.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the San Antonio Express-News that a grand jury will review evidence related to the Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022 that left 19 children and two teachers dead. She did not disclose what the grand jury will focus on, the newspaper reported.
Mitchell did not immediately respond to emailed questions and calls to her office. The empaneling of the grand jury was first reported by the Uvalde Leader-News.
Eric Gay, Associated Press
Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-Texas, center, sits with family members of shooting victims as they listen to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta during a news conference were they shared the findings of a federal report into the law enforcement response to a school shooting at Robb Elementary, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, in Uvalde, Texas.
Families of the children and teachers killed in the attacked renewed demands for criminal charges after a scathing Justice Department report released Thursday again laid bare numerous failures by police during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
“I’m very surprised that no one has ended up in prison,” said Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister Irma Garcia was one of the two teachers killed in the May 24, 2022, shooting. “It’s sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review … we deserve justice.”
The release of the nearly 600-page report — roughly 20 months after the shooting — leaves a criminal investigation by Uvalde County prosecutors as one the last unfinished reviews by authorities into the attack at Robb Elementary School.
Jae C. Hong, Associated Press
Two family members of one of the victims killed in Tuesday's shooting at Robb Elementary School comfort each other May 25, 2022, during a prayer vigil in Uvalde, Texas.
Nineteen students and two teachers were killed inside two fourth-grade classrooms, while highly armed police officers waited in the hallways for more than hour before going inside 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 that still burns 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 that there’s any criminal liability,” he said.
Since the shooting, at least five officers have lost their jobs, including two from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the on-site commander, then-school district police chief, Pete Arredondo. But no one has been charged in the criminal investigation that was led by the Texas Rangers. The Justice Department report says the FBI has assisted the Rangers but is not doing its own investigation.
The Rangers — part of the Texas DPS, which had more than 90 officers on the scene of the shooting — submitted their initial findings at the start of 2023. Mitchell initially said she hoped to bring the case to a grand jury by the end of last year. But she pushed back that timeline in December and said Thursday that she will need time to review the voluminous Justice Department report.
“I am a working DA with a small office,” Mitchell said in an email Thursday. “It is going to take me awhile to go through this report. I am hopeful that it was informative for the community.”
The pace of the criminal investigation has long frustrated families of the victims, Uvalde’s former Republican mayor and a Democratic state senator who represents the small South Texas town and has called for the head of the Texas state police to be fired.
“Twenty months later, there’s no end in sight for this local district attorney to be able to do anything,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said. “We don’t know if she’s going to indict anybody at all. It’s really a shame where we are now.”
In the report, federal officials detailed “cascading failures” by police, from waiting for more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman to repeatedly giving false information to grieving families about what had happened.
Wong Maye-E, Associated Press
Raquel Martinez comforts her two daughters May 26, 2022, while her husband, Daniel Martinez, comforts their sons outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police officials who responded to the deadly school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.
Produced by a Justice Department office that supports local police, the document is among the most comprehensive accountings to date of what went wrong. It says training, communication, leadership and technology problems extended the crisis, even as agonized parents begged officers to go in and terrified students called 911 from inside a classroom where the gunman had holed up.
Uvalde is a close-knit city of 15,000 about 85 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 see as intent on moving 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 is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out.”
Cross is among those who hope the Justice Department report will unify Uvalde around a common set of facts and spur criminal charges. During a news conference in the city, Garland stopped short of saying if charges should be filed, leaving that to Mitchell.
The Department of Justice report faults state and local officials with undercutting the public’s trust in law enforcement by repeatedly releasing false and misleading information about the police response. That includes Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the officers’ courage “running toward gunfire.”
As what happened has become clear, Jesse Rizo has been among those left looking for more accountability. Rizo, whose niece Jacklyn Cazares was among the shooting victims, still hopes Mitchell will bring charges, but he has little faith in those in power.
“You hope for the best,” he said, “but the past will tell you basically what your outcome is going to be.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
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Texas prosecutor convenes grand jury to investigate Uvalde shooting after scathing report details police failuresJoe Raedle/Getty Images
This story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
On Oct. 25, 2023, a gunman opened fire in Lewiston, Maine, ultimately killing 18 people and injuring 13 more at a bowling alley and a nearby bar. He was found dead after a two-day manhunt. Maine, which has one of the lowest homicide rates in the nation, remains in shock.
If it feels like U.S. mass shootings have become more frequent, that intuition remains correct, according to data analysis by The Marshall Project.
Under even one of the most conservative definitions of "mass shootings," in which a gunman slaughters four or more strangers in a public place, the number of these crimes has indeed been climbing in the last few years — and they have higher death tolls, as well.
Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the U.S., where about 132 people died every day in acts of gun violence in 2022.
Our analysis is based on data through 2022 from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers.
Joe Raedle/Getty ImagesThis story was produced by The Marshall Project, a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
On Oct. 25, 2023, a gunman opened fire in Lewiston, Maine, ultimately killing 18 people and injuring 13 more at a bowling alley and a nearby bar. He was found dead after a two-day manhunt. Maine, which has one of the lowest homicide rates in the nation, remains in shock.
If it feels like U.S. mass shootings have become more frequent, that intuition remains correct, according to data analysis by The Marshall Project.
Under even one of the most conservative definitions of "mass shootings," in which a gunman slaughters four or more strangers in a public place, the number of these crimes has indeed been climbing in the last few years — and they have higher death tolls, as well.
Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the U.S., where about 132 people died every day in acts of gun violence in 2022.
Our analysis is based on data through 2022 from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers.
