Uvalde parents want indictments after DOJ's scathing school shooting report

The Justice Department on Thursday released a damning 575-page report detailing "cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training" by law enforcement during the May 2022 school shooting in Uvalde, Texas. A lone 18-year-old gunman killed 19 students and two teachers while at least 380 officers from 24 local, state and federal agencies waited outside for 77 minutes, a handful of them just down the hall from the unlocked classroom. 

The "most significant failure" in Uvalde was a decision by local police to classify the active-shooter incident as a barricaded standoff, the report found. Had police "gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived," Attorney General Merrick Garland said in Uvalde on Thursday.

The Justice Department review, launched just days after the shooting, added details to a July 2022 report from a Texas House committee and subsequent investigations by news organizations. Relatives of the 21 people murdered at Robb Elementary School said they appreciate the DOJ's authoritative postmortem of the shooting but they still have unanswered questions — and they want names and accountability.

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Three other investigations — from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the city of Uvalde and Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell's office — remain unreleased, The Texas Tribune reported. Mitchell has not said if her criminal investigation will lead to charges.

"There's no justice until some cops get indicted for their malfeasance," said local state Sen. Roland Gutierrez (D).

"Because the DOJ stamp is on there, maybe y'all will start taking us seriously now," Brett Cross, whose son Uziyah died in the shooting, said after Garland's press conference. "It's hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on the streets and walk to an H-E-B and see a cop that you know was standing there while our babies were murdered and bleeding out," he said, adding that he hopes this report "lights a fire up under the district attorney's ass."

The Justice Department report focuses on what went wrong in Uvalde and how to improve police response to school shootings.

"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 the battlefield," Garland said. "And communities across the country, and the law enforcement officers who protect them, deserve better than to be forced to respond to one horrific mass shooting after another. But that is the terrible reality that we face," and "every community across the country must be prepared."