The U.S. Department of Justice concluded in a report released Thursday that there was a failure in law enforcement's response to the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead on May 24, 2022 There was a “cascade of failures”.
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The department's team that led the investigation launched in the days after the shooting “identified several serious errors before, during and after the shooting,” the more than 550-page report said, noting in particular the fact that The police officers on site did not “immediately assume that there was a shooter on duty”.
It points to a “cascade of failures in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to these errors and omissions.”
“The shooter was only killed around 77 minutes after the first police officers arrived,” the authors of the report emphasize.
After the murder that shocked this small, quiet Texas town, the delay in police action to stop the massacre had led to anger and incomprehension as the 19 officers on the scene waited for a special unit to attack.
This came despite law enforcement receiving numerous calls from people in the affected classrooms, including from a child who pleaded, “Please send the police now.”
“Trapped in a Room”
“The victims and survivors of the Robb Elementary School shooting deserve better,” admitted in a statement Attorney General Merrick Garland, who will hold a news conference about the report at noon in Uvalde. , carried out from 260 interviews and nine visits, i.e. 54 days on site and the analysis of more than 14,100 documents.
He called the law enforcement response a “failure” that “resulted in 33 students and three of their teachers, many of whom had been shot, trapped in a room while a gunman was on duty.” More than an hour, while the police remained outside.
The report's authors say they are “deliberately not naming the perpetrator of the shooting so as not to glorify his actions and out of respect for the victims' families.”
On the other hand, the names and ages of the 21 people killed, aged between 9 and 48, appear there.
In 2022, a Texas parliamentary commission of inquiry identified nearly 400 agents from various police agencies who intervened in the facility on May 24 of that year.
In his report, he denounced a “chaotic” situation, a lack of leadership and “apathetic” police officers. The Uvalde School District's police chief was fired in August 2022.