Grand jury seated Friday to consider criminal charges against officers in Uvalde school shooting
A Texas judge seated a grand jury Friday to consider possible criminal charges against law enforcement officers who failed to appropriately respond to one of the worst school shootings in history at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, two people with direct knowledge told the Austin American-Statesman, part of the USA TODAY Network.
The grand jury is expected to consider much of the same evidence the U.S. Department of Justice reviewed before issuing a scathing report Thursday that cited widespread failures in how law enforcement reacted to the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 children and two teachers.
It is unclear what charges the grand jury seated in Uvalde County state district court might consider against the officers, but they possibly include child endangerment or injury to a child, the Statesman confirmed. Under Texas law, a person commits the offense of child endangerment if he or she "intentionally, knowingly, recklessly or with criminal negligence" places a child 15 or younger "in imminent danger of death."
The convening of the grand jury, first reported by the Uvalde Leader-News, has been in the works for weeks, a move separate from the release of the Justice Department's report. The people who confirmed the development to the American-Statesman spoke on condition of anonymity because they did not have permission to speak about it publicly.
Multiple agencies responded to Robb Elementary during the attack, ranging from local city and school district police officers to the Texas Department of Public Safety and federal agents. During a news conference Thursday in Uvalde, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland clearly said if law enforcement officers at the scene would have immediately stopped the attack, lives would have been saved.
The Justice Department report cited widespread failures, naming the former Uvalde school district police chief, Pete Arredondo, for not treating the gunman as an active shooter instead of a barricaded subject. It said he failed to properly assume incident command, which cascaded into multiple issues, including a 77-minute delay in reaching the victims.
Asked directly why the Justice Department's report did not address the issue of whether criminal charges should be pursued, Garland said he would leave such decisions to the district attorney for Uvalde County.
"The Justice Department only has criminal jurisdiction where federal crime has occurred," Garland said at his news conference in Uvalde on Thursday. "The shooter here is dead. And there's no federal criminal jurisdiction."
Families left wondering why officers who failed them weren't named in DOJ report
From the day of the massacre — May 24, 2022 — the victims' families have wanted to know if their son, daughter, sister or brother could have survived if authorities had immediately entered the classroom, confronted the shooter and neutralized him, as has been standard protocol since the deadly Columbine shooting in 1999.
Several of the victims' family members have commended Garland for his empathetic approach and for the depth of his office's inquiry — the most sweeping investigation to date. But, 20 months after the attack, the families remain with many unresolved concerns.
Among the top questions families were left asking after DOJ issued its report Thursday were about individual police officers and how they responded to the tragedy. The exhaustive list of first responders' failures only named the highest-ranking officials, something Garland said was customary for Department of Justice reports.
"I don't understand why they are allowed privacy," said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, an activist and former mayoral candidate whose daughter was killed in the shooting. "My child, these children, they are named in this report because they are dead. Everybody should have been named."
While some officers have been fired, many remain employed — a fact that also haunts those affected by the shooting, said Brett Cross, whose son Uziyah "Uzi" Garcia was killed.
"Because the DOJ stamp is on this, maybe y'all will start taking us seriously now instead of telling us to move on, telling us to sweep it under the rug and not knowing a damn thing about it," he said, addressing community members in Uvalde. "It's hard enough … to walk into an H-E-B and see a cop that you know was standing there while our babies were murdered and bleeding out."
Cross and other family members also used the news conference Thursday to criticize Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell's refusal to release public records that could lead to criminal charges against some officers.
"I also hope this lights a fire under the district attorney's a-- because we know that she has not done a damn thing, and we refuse to accept that," he said. "Do your job."
Contributing: Staff writers John C. Moritz and Manny Garcia of the Austin American-Statesman, part of the USA TODAY Network.