Report paid for by Uvalde council clears city cops of wrongdoing in school shooting

Months after a U.S. Justice Department report found "cascading failures" in law enforcement's response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, an internal report commissioned by Uvalde City Council cleared the city's police officers of wrongdoing.

Released Thursday, the analysis drew outrage from parents of the 19 children killed in the massacre, according to the Texas Tribune. At least two members of the council also blasted the report.

Commissioned in July 2022 and conducted by retired police Austin police detective Jesse Prado, the report maintains that even though law enforcement personnel waited 77 minutes to enter the school and confront the gunman, none of the initial five Uvalde police officers to arrive violated policy or committed serious acts of misconduct, according to ABC News. The document also cleared three Uvalde police dispatchers working that day.

The investigation almost exclusively looked into officers still employed by the Uvalde Police Department. Many who worked the day of the massacre have since retired or been dismissed from the department.

The report generated outrage among Uvalde residents attending Thursday's council meeting, including Kimberley Mata-Rubio, whose daughter, Lexi, died in the shooting.

"Are these people that you want responding to your loved ones? I guarantee it's not," Mata-Rubio told council in video shared on the social media platform X. "We keep getting kicked while we're already down. It's just blow after blow, and all I heard today was, 'It's the school's fault, it's the training instructors' … what you're not saying is it's y'all's fault."

Another gutwrenching day in Uvalde.

“We keep getting kicked when we’re already down,” Kim Rubio said.

For these families, it’s another day of disappointment as the city’s investigation into their police finds little individual wrongdoing in the delayed, deadly response to Robb pic.twitter.com/0cEQKu8rBH

— Ryan Chandler (@RyanChandlerTV) March 7, 2024

Mata-Rubio's comments were shared by Austin-based KXAN reporter Ryan Chandler.

Prado left after presenting his findings and before the public-comment session of the meeting, drawing chants of "Bring him back!" according to the Texas Tribune. A person in the crowd also shouted, "Coward."

"Prado returned five minutes later and sat with an expressionless face, underneath a big white cowboy hat he did not once remove, for the following hour as relatives of those killed castigated him and dismissed his audit as 'bullshit,' 'a joke' and disrespectful," the Tribune reports.

Prado's findings stand in stark contrast to a report published in July by the U.S. Justice Department, which found that "cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training" led to an blundering response to the active-shooter crisis.

"Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in an active shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved, and people would have survived," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said at the time, according to the Texas Tribune.

To date, none of the law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School have been held criminally liable.

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