Day: January 19, 2024

Uvalde victims’ families get official word of botched shooting response

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UVALDE — Relatives of some of the 21 people killed in the deadliest shooting in Texas history sat in a community center on the outskirts of this town Thursday, clasping each other’s hands, nervously tapping their feet and passing around a box of tissues.

They sat in front of the nation’s top law enforcement official more than a year and half after some of them joined the throng of residents anxiously gathered outside Robb Elementary School, begging a swarm of law enforcement to go inside and save their kids trapped in a classroom with the shooter.

But responding officers waited 77 minutes to confront a gunman indiscriminately using an AR-15 against students and teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms. In the months since the May 24, 2022 massacre, the grief-stricken families of those killed have pleaded with local and state leaders to hold law enforcement accountable.

On Thursday, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland and other top federal officials finally acknowledged — in critical, explicit, unapologetic terms — that some of the Uvalde victims’ worst nightmares were true: Law enforcement’s delayed and bungled response cost lives.

“When he says that lives could have been saved, I just couldn’t believe it,” said Jerry Mata, who lost his daughter Tess in the shooting. “For these officers to sit there and not do anything, and still be out there on the streets like nothing happened, and my daughter’s gone — it was hard, it was hard.”

Garland and other national leaders traveled to this town straddling Hill County and South Texas about 80 miles west of San Antonio to release the U.S. Justice Department’s review of the police response. At a press conference…

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