Uvalde school board member now faces heat
UVALDE — At 11:41 a.m. on May 24, Uvalde school board member Jesus Suarez Jr. entered Robb Elementary School. In his right hand was a pistol. His left was on the shoulder of Constable Johnny Field, who was in front of him.
Field had on a bulletproof vest. Suarez wore a royal blue polo shirt and tan khakis, but no protective gear.
What came next — a bumbling police response to the nation’s second-deadliest school shooting — has ignited victims’ families and friends in Uvalde. Grief-stricken and angry, they’ve demanded the resignations, suspensions or dismissals of school administrators, police officers and their bosses, and elected officials — any authority figure they believe failed Robb Elementary students and teachers, either directly or indirectly.
On Thursday, the families took their grievances to the state Public Safety Commission in Austin. Brett Cross, who regarded the 10-year-old nephew he lost in the shooting as a son, stood a few paces from Steven McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, and said:
“You, sir, have told lies. You’re not in control of your officers. Nor are you the leader this great state deserves at the helm of what was once known as one of the best law enforcement agencies.”
Suarez is the latest target of
the victims’ families and their allies.
A former Uvalde police detective, he won his seat on the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s sevenmember board of trustees in early May, just weeks before the massacre. He led Southwest Texas Junior College’s law enforcement academy and was one of five reserve officers for the school district police force.
After entering Robb Elementary on May 24, Suarez is seen on police body camera video at 11:46 a.m. standing with six officers in a hallway near classrooms 111 and 112, where a shooter had gunned down 19 students and two fourthgrade teachers. Some of the victims may still have been alive at the time.
By this point, Suarez was wearing a black bulletproof vest with “POLICE” in white letters across the front. It’s unclear who gave it to him.
The gunman — Salvador Ramos, 18, of Uvalde — had entered Robb Elementary at 11:30 a.m.
“Is there a window where we can try to do negotiations?” one of the officers asked.
“There might be a window,” another answered.
“Y’all have a bullhorn?”
The answer was no.
Suarez spoke up. “I’m gonna go see if I can get a bullhorn, John,” he said to Field, the elected constable for Uvalde County’s Precinct 1.
Then Suarez left the building. The brief exchange highlights what law enforcement experts have since described as a grave misreading of the situation early on — that the gunman was barricaded with students and teachers in the classrooms. Officers’ training tells them to deal with a barricaded suspect cautiously and deliberately.
When facing an active shooter, training protocols call for police to immediately confront the gunman and end the rampage, without waiting for backup.
Officers at Robb Elementary waited more than 70 minutes to enter classroom 111 and kill the shooter, who’d fired his assaultstyle rifle sporadically, in short bursts, after spraying more than 100 rounds in the first several minutes of his rampage.
The school district’s then-police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, was an early and conspicuous target of criticism for the failed response. The Uvalde school board fired him in August.
Seven DPS officers are under investigation by the department’s inspector general to determine whether their actions that day violated department policy. One of the seven, Sgt. Juan Maldonado, a regional public information officer, was fired Oct. 21.
Now, Uvalde activist Jesse Rizo and others have locked on Suarez’s role during the massacre.
“He had plenty of time to eliminate the threat,” Rizo said. “He had plenty of time to potentially save children, and he did not.”
Rizo, whose niece, Jackie Cazares, was killed in the shooting, was even more pointed in a Facebook post.
“JJ Suarez, one of the most qualified individuals, decides to exit the building instead of following his active shooter training,” he wrote. “He could have sent someone else to look for a bullhorn, but instead he chose to leave everyone behind, including the children and teachers.”
Suarez did not respond to requests for an interview.
Rizo and others briefly confronted Suarez during a contentious comment period at a school board meeting Oct. 19, at which district officials appointed an interim superintendent.
Superintendent Hal Harrell had announced his retirement the week before, ending his 30year career with the district, after several months of intense pressure.
Rizo, 51, is one of several grassroots leaders who have represented the grieving families, pushing for the removal of Arredondo from his school district job and his seat on the City Council, to which he’d been elected in early May. They repeatedly asked that the school district’s police department be suspended pending an investigation — district officials took that step Oct. 10 — and sought the ouster of Harrell.
Rizo also has called for Constable Field to resign.
Confusion reigned
On the day of the shooting, 376 officers from 23 law enforcement agencies converged on Robb Elementary, according to a Texas House committee investigative report. Throughout most of the long wait to confront the shooter, no one took clear command, even as confusion and uncertainty reigned among police in and around the school building.
During a news conference three days after the massacre, DPS’ McCraw identified Arredondo as the on-scene commander and blamed him for the disastrous response. McCraw has never publicly said DPS troopers erred by not seizing control of the situation.
For his part, Arredondo has said he didn’t consider himself the on-scene commander.
Officers were positioned on both ends of the hallway in front of classrooms 111 and 112, and communication between the two groups appears to have been choppy.
At 12:12 a.m., a female police dispatcher’s voice crackled over a radio, alerting officers to a 911 call from a boy inside one of the two classrooms. “He is in the room full of victims — full of victims at this moment,” the dispatcher said.
A heavyset officer standing just outside the school building looked distraught. He repeated the message he’d heard seconds before: “Child called 911, saying the room’s full of victims.”
It was unclear where Suarez was at that turning point — when it was beyond question that there were shooting victims inside the classrooms — or how many of the officers on the scene got the message.
Although several leaders and grassroots groups have sprung up in the wake of the shooting, locals say Rizo has the support of families of the fallen in his effort to force Suarez off the school board. Brett Cross said as much before the Oct. 19 board meeting.
“One, he’s family,” Cross said, referring to Rizo. “And two, anybody that was there needs to be held accountable. I don’t speak for everybody, but you see nobody’s told him no.”
Cross said he and other victims’ family members would do whatever it takes to sweep the current crop of trustees off the school board.
Public anger at the school district’s leadership remains palpable.
The Texas House committee report faulted the district for ringing Robb Elementary with a security fence that was too short and for not fixing the broken lock on the door to classroom 111 before the shooting.
Victims’ families have pilloried the district for not moving quickly enough to fire Arredondo and for hiring a former DPS officer — one of the seven under investigation for their actions May 24 — as a Uvalde school police officer. Officer Crimson Hux Elizondo was fired less than a day after her hiring came to light this month.
“They’re going to be gone,” Cross said. “They’re all going to be gone. We’re not going to stand for this.”
Rizo, a longtime Uvalde resident, has become a familiar figure at school board and City Council meetings. He’s an AT&T customer service technician who graduated from Uvalde High School in 1990 and holds a bachelor’s degree in business from St. Edward’s University in Austin.
After the Oct. 19 school board meeting, Rizo said, Suarez spoke briefly with him, his brother and his wife, as well as with Dora Garcia, grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza, a 10-year-old killed in the shooting, and Cross.
“He said he just couldn’t hear the gunshots,” Rizo recalled, adding that Suarez told them, “‘I’m sorry, there’s no way I can feel what you feel, but know that I am sorry.’”
Still, Rizo is convinced that Suarez must have heard at least one of the gunman’s shots after his initial, minutes-long burst of gunfire and must have known police were dealing with an active shooter, not a barricaded suspect.
During an Aug. 8 school board meeting, Rizo pressed Suarez to explain his actions the day of the shooting.
Suarez said he entered the school and someone — he couldn’t remember who — told him that “a person was barricaded in a room.”
“There were no active shots,” he added.
“Did they tell you there were children in there?” Rizo asked. “No, sir,” Suarez responded. In an interview, Rizo said he would reach out and encourage families and their friends to join his effort to force Suarez off the board. Part of the pressure campaign, he said, would include social media posts and protests at school board sessions, tactics that have been employed repeatedly since the start of the drive for accountability in Uvalde.
“I feel betrayed,” he said.
Background in blue
Suarez was a detective on Uvalde’s police force for 11 years, then went to work at Southwest Texas Junior College in Uvalde as its criminal justice director in 2008.
He’s currently chair of the community college’s Allied Health and Human Services program. In that job, he had overseen the law enforcement academy, along with health care-related programs — until the school shooting.
College officials pulled the police academy from Suarez’s purview in July. College President Hector Gonzales said the move “was in the best interest of the academy.”
Field, the constable, is the academy’s program coordinator; he previously reported to Suarez, but now answers to the dean of applied sciences. Gonzales said an outside agency reviewed the academy’s training program and found “nothing that I would consider of serious significance or concern.”
“My responsibility is to the academy and to ensure that it continues operating and training cadets — turning out quality cadets,” Gonzales said. “I think it’s very similar to the chief at the school district. So, from day one, the chief’s role was compromised, even before everything else came out.
“It’s just tainted,” he said.