Uvalde school shooting victims seek $27B in suit
AUSTIN, Texas — Victims of the Uvalde school shooting that left 21 people dead have filed a lawsuit against local and state police, the city and other school and law enforcement officials seeking $27 billion due to delays in confronting the attacker, court documents show.
The lawsuit, which was filed last week in federal court in Austin, says officials failed to follow active shooter protocol when they waited over an hour to confront the attacker inside a fourth-grade classroom.
It seeks class-action status and damages for survivors of the May 24 shooting who have sustained “emotional or psychological damages as a result of the defendants’ conduct and omissions on that date.”
Among those who filed the suit are school staff and representatives of minors present at Robb Elementary when a gunman stormed the campus, killing 19 children and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in the U.S. since 2012.
Instead of following previous training to stop an active shooter, “the conduct of the (376) law enforcement officials who were on hand for the exhaustively torturous seventy-seven minutes of law enforcement indecision, dysfunction, and harm, fell exceedingly short of their duty bound standards,” the lawsuit claims.
City of Uvalde officials said they had not been served the paperwork as of Friday and did not comment on pending litigation. The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Uvalde Consolidated School District did not respond to requests for comment.
A group of the survivors also sued Daniel Defense, the company that made the gun used by the shooter, and the store where he bought the gun. That separate lawsuit seeks $6 billion in damages.