Officials in the city of Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday released new video footage from police responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting. These recordings were previously withheld as part of a legal settlement with the news organizations.
The new material, which included at least 10 police body camera videos and nearly 40 dashboard videos, largely corroborates preliminary reports from ProPublica, The Texas Tribune and FRONTLINE detailing the failure of law enforcement to deal with the teenager who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers did not confront the gunman until 77 minutes after he opened fire, a delay that U.S. Attorney Merrick Garland said cost lives.
In one 30-minute video released Tuesday, police officers lined up in a school hallway as they prepared to break down a classroom door an hour after the shooter first entered the building. The recordings, although not new, showed a slightly different angle than those previously published. In this one, the victims are completely blurred out, but their cries and screams can be heard and blood can be seen in the hallway. The video also shows officers performing chest compressions on a victim on the sidewalk.
In another video, a police officer wearing a body camera cries at the points and tells someone on the phone, “They’re just kids. He’s screwed.” He adds: “I never thought such crap would happen here.” Another officer asks him to take his gun and tells him to sit down and “relax.” A seven-minute video after the incident shows medics working on someone in an ambulance.
News organizations previously reported during an investigation by The Washington Post that officers initially treated teacher Eva Mireles, who was shot in room 112, on a sidewalk because they did not see ambulances, even though two were parked just around the corner from the building. Mireles, one of three victims who still had a pulse when they were rescued, died in an ambulance that never left the school.
Most of the other body camera footage shows officers waiting after the incident or evacuating empty classrooms, with little revealing detail. Officers are also seen outside the school answering questions from passersby.
Dashboard videos also offered few new details: officers in idling patrol cars outside Robb Elementary. A few officers walked up and down the parking lot, communicating overheard via radio and cell phone. One video shows a television crew arriving at the scene, and another shows paramedics and parents waiting as helicopters circle overhead.
In August, as part of the settlement, the city released hundreds of records and videos to media organizations that also largely corroborated prior reports. But days after the records were released, city officials acknowledged that an officer with the Uvalde Police Department notified 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 that no more videos had been played. She shared them with District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is overseeing the investigation into the botched response, and has ordered her own internal investigation into how the failure occurred.
City officials said in an email late Tuesday that the internal investigation revealed not only “technology issues” but also an “inadvertent lack of proper vetting” of police department records by the person who served as custodian. City officials said the officer, who they did not name, was disciplined and retired from the department. They said the investigation found “no evidence of a deliberate effort to withhold information.” They added that the department is working to improve its internal record-keeping procedures and overcome technological barriers to “prevent this type of failure from happening again.”
THE The Uvalde Leader-News reported last month that former city police Sgt. Donald Page faced disciplinary action over the withheld recordings and then resigned. Page’s attorney declined to answer most questions, but wrote in an email to the Tribune and ProPublica that the veteran officer had in fact retired. Page oversaw operations, including dispatch and evidence technicians, according to interviews with detectives and investigators city report of shootingand that day she was in plain clothes. It’s unclear if he was wearing his own body camera. It does not appear to be part of any published footage.
Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin on Tuesday praised the city’s police department 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 disappointed to find out that there was something we had overlooked, but everyone has to release their stuff. … It’s the only way these families can get closure.”
It’s unclear whether the new footage will change Mitchell’s investigation. He did not respond to inquiries Tuesday.
Grand jury in June filed charges against former Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. The footage released in August and Tuesday is from city police, not school district officers, so it doesn’t include video of Arredondo or Gonzales. Arredondo later told investigators that none of the school district officers were wearing body cameras that day because the department did not own one. He also dropped his school-issued radio when he stormed into the school.
The school district’s active shooter plan would have had Arredondo take over. Her indictment alleges, in part, that she failed to follow her training and gave instructions that impeded her response, putting the children at risk. Gonzales, who along with Arredondo was among the first officers on the scene, “did not otherwise act in a way to obstruct the shooter until the shooter entered rooms 111 and 112,” according to the indictment.
Experts said their cases face an uphill battle as no officer has been found guilty of inaction in a recent mass shooting. Both men pleaded not guilty and the next hearing is set for December. No charges were brought against the Uvalde Police Department.
News organizations including the Tribune and ProPublica sued multiple local and state agencies over records related to the shooting more than two years ago. The city settled with the news organizations and agreed 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 to fight the release of their records.
More than two years after the shooting, relatives of the victims said they still feel there is little accountability or transparency. They said they felt betrayed and as if government agencies were trying to “cover up.”
According to news organizations, more states across the country require active shooter training for teachers and students than for the officers waiting to protect them. At least 37 states have laws requiring schools to hold active shooter drills, most of them annually. Texas was the only state to require officers to retrain, 16 hours every two years, beginning that year, a mandate that did not come into effect until after the Uvalde massacre.
According to experts, repeated training was required for these high-pressure responses, and a Ministry of Justice review The Uvalde response recommended at least eight hours of active shooter training for all officers in the country this year.
In all, nearly 400 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the shooting. Still, despite at least seven investigations following the massacre, only about a dozen officers have been fired, suspended or retired.
One of them, Texas guard Christopher Ryan Kindell was reinstated in August after fighting his resignation.
