By Acacia Coronado | Associated Press
UVALDE, Texas — An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb Elementary School shooting put no blame on local police officers and defended their actions Thursday, despite acknowledging a series of rippling failures during the fumbled response to the 2022 classroom attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Several family members of victims walked out in anger midway though a presentation that portrayed Uvalde Police Department officers of acting swiftly and appropriately, in contrast to scathing and sweeping state and federal past reports that faulted police at every level.
The investigator who presented the report blamed families who rushed to the school that day for compromising the police response, prompting an eruption of anger from several families and some stormed out. Law enforcement took more than an hour to get inside the classroom and kill the gunman, even as children inside the classrooms called 911, begging police to rescue them.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Another person in the crowd screamed, “Cowards!”
Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report for the Uvalde City Council, described several failures by responding local, state and federal officers at the scene that day: communication problems, poor training for live shooter situations, lack of available equipment and delays on breaching the classroom.
“There were problems all day long with communication and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”
The city’s report is just one of several probes into the massacre. Texas lawmakers found in…
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