DA to present Uvalde case by end of year
The Uvalde County prosecutor said she will present a case stemming from the Robb Elementary School massacre to a grand jury by the end of this year.
The Texas Department of Public Safety has handed the findings of its investigation of the May 24, 2022, killing of 19 students and two teachers at the Uvalde school to District Attorney Christina Mitchell earlier this summer.
“I’ve had it since July — two months,” Mitchell said of the state police agency’s case file.
She said her office is still combing through a mountain of evidence.
The case file — produced by the Texas Rangers, an arm of DPS — includes police’s and federal agents’ reports and supplementary documents, transcripts of interviews with witnesses and survivors, and recordings from school surveillance and police car and body-worn cameras, as well as video of the 18-year-old gunman buying guns at a Uvalde gun store before his rampage.
Mitchell declined to say what aspects of the incident her investigation is focusing on, who potential targets are or what evidence will go before grand jurors.
The shooter was killed by a Border Patrol tactical unit in one of the two adjoining classrooms where he carried out the carnage with an assault-style rifle, and authorities say the Uvalde school dropout acted alone. The prosecutor’s investigation instead could center on the disastrous police response that day.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from local, state and federal agencies converged on Robb Elementary, but none of them confronted the gunman until 12:50 p.m., more than 70 minutes after he entered the school that Tuesday morning.
A Texas House investigative committee said in its report on the school shooting, released July 17, 2022, that the long delay was the result of “systemic failures and egregious poor decision making.”
Mitchell is conducting the review with an investigator already on the DA’s payroll and special prosecutor Bill Turner, a former Brazos County DA. His salary is paid from a $1.4 million grant that the state of Texas awarded Uvalde County last summer in the wake of the shooting.
The grant also covered county first responders’ costs the day of the massacre, and paid for overtime and the autopsies of the 21 victims and the shooter, according to Mitchell.
“The autopsies cost more than $100,000,” she said.
She has not asked Uvalde County for any additional funding for the Robb Elementary investigation. County records show the budget for her office, which includes Uvalde and Real counties, will total $480,000 for fiscal year 2024, which starts Oct. 1.
Dr. Mark Escott, the chief medical officer for DPS and the city of Austin, has been leading a panel of experts convened by the Texas Rangers to determine whether any of the children or teachers killed at Robb Elementary could have survived if first responders had gotten to them sooner.
Officials have said the gunman shot most of his victims within the first few minutes after he entered the school through an unlocked side door.
Mitchell has planned to use the results of the review by Escott’s panel to help determine whether to charge any responding officers. However, Escott told ABC News earlier this month that he had requested autopsy reports from Mitchell’s office last fall but had yet to receive any of them.
“It’s been months,” he told ABC News. “And the most important piece of evidence are the autopsies, and I don’t have any of those.”
Mitchell declined to comment on Escott’s remarks, whether her office has given him the information, or whether he remains a goto medical expert for her investigation.
“It’s disappointing to have a potential expert on the case discussing it in the press,” Mitchell said.
Escott did not respond to a request for comment.