The Justice Department’s report on what went wrong in Uvalde, Texas, nearly two years ago when an 18-year-old gunman armed with a high-powered rifle slaughtered 19 children and two teachers in their classrooms is utterly depressing, and utterly damning.
It will not make anyone who reads it feel one bit better about the grotesque events of May 24, 2022, including the helplessness of the 33 students and three teachers who were trapped in a classroom with the gunman for more than an hour as police officers milled around in the hallway outside.
But it will, one must fervently hope, help other law enforcement agencies avoid the kind of deadly mistakes that were made at Robb Elementary School two days before the start of that year’s summer vacation. For that reason, if nothing else, the report is worth absorbing.
Many who followed the awful events in Uvalde will recall the bumbling police response, the conflicting information from police agency representatives afterward, the anguish of the families who were never given an adequate accounting of the tragedy. Though the Texas House of Representatives issued its own damning report in July 2022, the new reckoning goes into excruciating detail in a much longer, sweeping, minute-by-minute account of the tragedy.
Department of Justice investigators spent many months interviewing 267 people and poring over thousands of documents, photographs, body camera and CCTV footage, training manuals and transcripts.
At more than 500 pages, the document paints a picture of an almost Keystone Kops-like response to the tragedy: There was no proper command structure in place. The local police chief ditched his radios on arrival because, he told investigators, he wanted his hands to be free, so he was left to communicate only with his phone and voice in that hectic and deadly situation.
After several of his officers were grazed with shrapnel as they rushed toward the classrooms where they heard gunfire, the chief ordered them to stay back and evacuate other classrooms rather than engage the gunman. Thus, instead of storming the two joined classrooms where the gunman continued to slaughter children, officers retreated and waited for SWAT officers and specialized equipment to arrive. This was a terrible, unforgivable failure.
Perhaps most devastating, although officers were on the scene within three minutes of the gunman storming the campus, 77 minutes would pass before he was killed. In that time, police heard him squeeze off 45 rounds.
Some passages of the report are almost too painful to read. The account of a 16-minute 911 call by fourth graders trapped in their classroom with the shooter is especially brutal. While officers waited in the hallway, the children pleaded for help: “I don’t want to die. My teacher is dead.” “One of my teachers is still alive but shot.” “There is a lot of dead bodies.”
Had officers executed their jobs, said Attorney General Merrick Garland, who unveiled the report at a news conference in Uvalde, “lives would have been saved and people would have survived.”
Garland could not help but address the larger issue — the easy availability of guns, which has made mass shootings a near daily occurrence in the United States.
“Our children deserve better than to grow up in a country where an 18-year-old has easy access to a weapon that belongs on a battlefield, not in a classroom,” Garland said. “We hope to honor the victims and the survivors by working together to try to prevent anything like it from happening again, here or anywhere.”
It really is pathetic that we have to put our energy toward developing better responses to mass shootings instead of getting weapons of war off our streets in the first place.
Robin Abcarian is an opinion columnist at the Los Angeles Times.
