Uvalde parents angered by report that clears city police of any missteps

An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers defended the actions of local police in a report released Thursday, prompting shouts of “cowards” during a City Council meeting and causing several family members of the victims to angrily walk out.

The report acknowledged wide failures by police during the 2022 attack and reiterated rippling missteps that the Justice Department and state lawmakers have previously laid bare. Nearly 400 law enforcement agents, including Uvalde Police Department officers, rushed to the scene of the shooting but waited more than an hour to confront a teenage gunman armed with an AR-style rifle.

But an investigator hired by Uvalde officials found that the city's officers did not violate policies, and in some cases, praised their actions during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history. The presentation prompted an eruption of anger among some of the victims' family members, who also scolded the investigator for leaving the room before they had a chance to address him.

“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.

Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council, began his presentation by describing the failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.

“There were problems all day long with communication and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”

The city's report is just one of several probes into the massacre, including the Justice Department report in January that criticized the “cascading failures” of responding law enforcement.

Law enforcement took more than an hour to get inside the classroom and kill the gunman, even as children inside the classrooms called 911, begging police to rescue them.

But Prado said his review showed that officers showed “immeasurable strength” and “levelheaded thinking” as they faced fire from the shooter and refrained from shooting into a darkened classroom.

“They were being shot at from eight feet away from the door,” Prado said.

Prado also said the families who rushed to the school hampered efforts to set up a chain of command as they had to conduct crowd control with parents trying to get in the building or pleading with officers to go inside.

Family members erupted when Prado briefly left after his presentation.