By Lomi Kriel and Lexi Churchill, The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, and Zach Despart, Terri Langford and Pooja Salhotra, The Texas Tribune
Editor’s note: This story contains explicit language.
City officials in Uvalde released another trove of videos Tuesday from officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, footage that they had previously failed to divulge as part of a legal settlement with news organizations suing for access.
The new material included at least 10 police body camera videos and nearly 40 dashboard videos that largely affirm prior reporting by ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing law enforcement’s failures to engage the teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers only confronted the gunman 77 minutes after he began firing, a delay that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said cost lives.
In one 30-minute video released Tuesday, officers lined up in the school hallway as they prepared to breach the classroom door about an hour after the shooter first entered the building. The footage, while not new, showed a slightly different angle from what had previously been released. In it, victims are completely blurred, but their cries and screams can be heard and blood is visible in the hallway. The video also shows officers performing CPR on a victim on the sidewalk.
In another video, an officer wearing a body cam at points is crying, telling someone on the phone, “They’re just kids, it’s fucked up.” He adds, “I just never thought shit like that would happen here.” Another officer asks if he should take his weapon from him and tells him to sit down and “relax.” That seven-minute video after the breach shows medics working on someone in an ambulance.
The news organizations previously reported in an investigation with the Washington Post that officers initially treated teacher Eva Mireles, who was shot in Classroom 112, on a sidewalk because they did not see any ambulances, although two were parked just past the corner of the building. Mireles, one of three victims who still had a pulse when she was rescued, died in an ambulance that never left the school.
Much of the other body camera footage shows officers waiting around after the breach or clearing classrooms that are empty, offering little revelatory detail. Officers are also seen outside the school responding to questions from bystanders.
Dashboard videos also offered few new details, showing police officers idling in patrol cars outside of Robb Elementary. Some officers paced the parking lot and communicated inaudibly through radios and cell phones. One video shows a television crew arriving at the scene, and others show ambulances staging and parents waiting as helicopters circle overhead.
In August, as part of the settlement, the city also released hundreds of records and videos to media organizations, which similarly largely confirmed prior reporting. But days after releasing those records, city officials acknowledged that an officer with the Uvalde Police Department had informed the agency that some of his body camera footage was missing.
Police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which revealed even more videos had not been turned over. He shared those with District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is overseeing a criminal investigation into the botched response, and ordered his own internal probe into how the lapse occurred.
In the release Tuesday, Uvalde city and police officials did not explain how or why the error occurred. City officials and Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment.
Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin on Tuesday praised the city police for releasing the material. He called on other law enforcement agencies to follow suit.
“It should have been done from day one,” said McLaughlin, who is currently running for the Texas House. “I was frustrated when I found out we had something we had overlooked, but everybody needs to release their stuff. … It’s the only way these families are going to get some closure.”
It is unclear whether the new footage would alter Mitchell’s investigation. A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Footage released in August and on Tuesday comes from city police officers, not school district officers, so it does not include any video from Arredondo or Gonzales. None of the school district officers were wearing body cameras that day because the department did not own any, Arredondo later told investigators. He also dropped his school-issued radio as he rushed into the school.
According to the school district’s active-shooter plan, Arredondo was supposed to take charge. His indictment alleges in part that he failed to follow his training and gave directions that impeded the response, endangering children. Gonzales, along with Arredondo among the first officers on scene, “failed to otherwise act in a way to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered rooms 111 and 112,” according to his indictment.
Experts have said their cases face an uphill battle as no officers in recent history have been found guilty for inaction in mass shootings. Both men pleaded not guilty and the next hearing is set for December. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.
News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state agencies more than two years ago for records related to the shooting. The city settled with the news organizations, agreeing to provide records requested under the state’s Public Information Act. But three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting against any release of their records.
The Uvalde Leader-News reported last month that former Uvalde Police St. Donald Page faced disciplinary action related to the withheld footage and subsequently resigned. Page’s attorney declined to answer most questions, but wrote in an email to the Tribune and ProPublica that the veteran officer in fact retired. Page oversaw operations including dispatch and evidence technicians, according to his interview with investigators and the city’s report into the shooting, and was in plain clothes that day. It is unclear whether he was wearing his own body camera. It does not seem to be part of any released footage. A text from a responding Uvalde Police officer to his superiors also did not include Page among a list of officers wearing body cameras that day, according to records the city previously released.
Delgado, the Uvalde police Chief who replaced Daniel Rodriguez after he resigned in March, told the Leader-News in a statement that he didn’t believe the city intentionally withheld any of the footage.
More than two years after the shooting, relatives of the victims in Uvalde have said that they still feel like there has been little accountability or transparency. They said that they feel betrayed and as if government agencies attempted a “cover-up.”
Across the country, the news organizations found, more states require active shooter training for teachers and students than they do for the officers expected to protect them. At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills, most of them annually. Texas was the only state to require repeat training for officers as of earlier this year, 16 hours every two years, in a mandate that only came about after the Uvalde massacre.
Experts said repeated training was necessary for these high-pressure responses, and a Justice Department review into the Uvalde response earlier this year recommended at least eight hours of annual active shooter training for every officer in the country.
In all, nearly 400 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the shooting. Yet despite at least seven investigations launched after the massacre, only about a dozen officers have been fired, suspended or retired.
One of those, Texas Ranger Ryan Kindell, was reinstated in August after fighting his termination.
This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2024/10/08/uvalde-school-shooting-videos-released-lawsuit/.
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