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City officials in Uvalde, Texas, released another trove of videos Tuesday from officers responding to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, footage that they had previously failed to divulge as part of a legal settlement with news organizations suing for access.
The new material included several police body camera videos and dashboard videos. Reporters with The Texas Tribune and ProPublica are currently reviewing the footage and this story will be updated.
In August, as part of the settlement, the city released hundreds of records and videos to media organizations, which largely affirmed prior reporting by ProPublica, the Tribune and FRONTLINE on law enforcement’s failures to engage a teen shooter who killed 19 children and two teachers. Officers only confronted the gunman 77 minutes after he began firing, a delay that U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said cost lives.
But days after releasing those records, city officials acknowledged that an officer with the Uvalde Police Department had informed the agency that some of his body camera footage was missing.
Police Chief Homer Delgado ordered an audit of the department’s servers, which revealed even more videos had not been turned over. He shared those with District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is overseeing a criminal investigation into the botched response, and ordered his own internal probe into how the lapse occurred.
In the release Tuesday, Uvalde city and police officials did not explain how or why the error occurred. City officials and Mitchell did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
It is unclear whether the new footage would alter Mitchell’s investigation. A grand jury in June indicted former Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales on felony child endangerment charges. Footage released in August and on Tuesday comes from city police officers, not school district officers, so it does not include any video from Arredondo or Gonzales. None of the school district officers were wearing body cameras that day because the department did not own any, Arredondo later told investigators. He also dropped his school-issued radio as he rushed into the school.
According to the school district’s active-shooter plan, Arredondo was supposed to take charge. His indictment alleges in part that he failed to follow his training and gave directions that impeded the response, endangering children. Gonzales, along with Arredondo among the first officers on scene, “failed to otherwise act in a way to impede the shooter until after the shooter entered rooms 111 and 112,” according to his indictment.
Experts have said their cases face an uphill battle as no officers in recent history have been found guilty for inaction in mass shootings. Both men pleaded not guilty and the next hearing is set for December. No Uvalde Police Department officers have been charged.
News organizations, including the Tribune and ProPublica, sued several local and state agencies more than two years ago for records related to the shooting. The city settled with the news organizations, agreeing to provide records requested under the state’s Public Information Act. But three other government agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue fighting against any release of their records.
The Uvalde Leader-News reported last month that former Uvalde Police St. Donald Page faced disciplinary action related to the withheld footage and subsequently resigned. Page’s attorney declined to answer most questions, but wrote in an email to the Tribune and ProPublica that the veteran officer in fact retired.
Delgado, the Uvalde police Chief who replaced Daniel Rodriguez after he resigned in March, told the Leader-News in a statement that he didn’t believe the city intentionally withheld any of the footage.
Reporting by the news organizations has found that Page entered the school building in which the gunman had holed up at about 11:36 a.m., three minutes after the shooter began firing more than 100 rounds. Page remained in the hallway for much of the next 74 minutes, sometimes leaving to help rescue children in other classrooms through exterior windows.
Page told investigators that responding officers knew the gunman was using an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and that factored into their decision to wait to enter the two connecting classrooms in which he killed students and teachers.
“There was no way of going in,” Page said. “We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”
In an hourlong documentary reported with FRONTLINE and an accompanying investigation, Page is shown helping to rescue children at about noon — the first time some officers told investigators that they realized any kids were inside the wing with the shooter. Page later told investigators that although he had received some active shooter training, he had never learned how to enter a room in which the door was locked.
“How they train you is, classroom door is open, you go in, clear it, come out,” he said.
A Texas House committee investigating the shooting found that the door to the adjoining classroom in which the gunman was barricaded was likely unlocked all along, yet none of the hundreds of local, state and federal officers who responded ever checked until a Border Patrol-led SWAT team opened it more than an hour later at 12:50 p.m.
Page had not taken an active shooter training course in person since 2011, more than a decade before the Uvalde school shooting, state training records show. Since then, he completed seven hours of online active shooter-related courses.
The sergeant’s lack of training was on par with many officers who responded to Robb Elementary that day. The news organizations’ analysis of training records for 116 state and local officers who arrived before officers killed the gunman found that since graduating from the police academy, many had only taken one active shooter training course, often years earlier. About one-third had no such training.
Federal law enforcement agencies, who sent about 180 officers to the scene before and after the breach, declined to provide training records for their officers, leaving the amount of instruction they received unclear. But a Customs and Border Protection probe released last month found that active shooter training received by its federal agents did not “adequately prepare” them to respond that day.
Across the country, the news organizations found, more states require active shooter training for teachers and students than they do for the officers expected to protect them. At least 37 states have laws mandating that schools conduct active shooter-related drills, most of them annually. Texas was the only state to require repeat training for officers as of earlier this year, 16 hours every two years, in a mandate that only came about after the Uvalde massacre.
Experts said repeated training was necessary for these high-pressure responses, and a Justice Department review earlier this year recommended at least eight hours of annual active shooter training for every officer in the country.
More than two years after the shooting, relatives of the victims in Uvalde have said that they still feel like there has been little accountability or transparency. They said that they feel betrayed and as if government agencies attempted a “cover-up.”
In all, nearly 400 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the shooting. Yet despite at least seven investigations launched after the massacre, only about a dozen officers have been fired, suspended or retired.
One of those, Texas Ranger Ryan Kindell, was reinstated in August after fighting his termination.