DALLAS — State Sen. Roland Gutierrez says a new report on the Uvalde massacre is only adding to the confusion and does nothing to help the community heal.
“That report is just much more of the same, again, adding insult to injury to a community that is begging for the truth,” Gutierrez said on Inside Texas Politics. “And I think that you and I know the truth. I think that what we had here was human error, system failure, just a calamity of circumstances that kept officers from going in.”
The report by the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training (ALERRT) Center at Texas State University documents several missed opportunities by law enforcement to stop the shooter.
It even claims a Uvalde officer sought permission to shoot the suspect before he got inside the school, but the supervisor either didn’t hear, or responded too late.
But Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin has since disputed that claim, arguing the ALERRT report does not give a complete or accurate account of what happened at Robb Elementary.
Watch the segment below:
McLaughlin says no Uvalde officer saw the shooter prior to him entering the school and no Uvalde officer, he says, had any opportunity to take a shot at the gunman.
Gutierrez also continues to point out that the largest responding agency was the Texas Department of Public Safety, with 91 officers.
And the senator says the most important aspect of the report can be found at the end, when it says there was no incident command, so no agency had command and control of the scene.
“The report had very little new information. We’ve known all of this. If anything, the report was wrong,” said the senator. “It mentions DPS troopers five times in 27 pages. It doesn’t mention the federal government, who actually went in and killed this person. It doesn’t mention them at all or very little.”
Gutierrez and McLaughlin have also called on Gov. Greg Abbott to remove the Uvalde County district attorney as head of victims services, which distributes financial aid to those families.
The senator says the DA has a conflict of interest, as she’s making financial decisions for some the same people she’s interviewing as part of a criminal investigation she’s leading.
Gutierrez also says the district attorney simply doesn’t have the manpower to do it all.
As an example, he says victims’ families can claim upwards of $50,000 in compensation from the state through the Uvalde Together Resiliency Center, which is providing long-term support services to Uvalde residents.
But the senator says some families only received two weeks worth of lost wages.
“Families are staying home with their children that don’t want them to go back to work. Families that lost children are simply shattered and devastated,” he told us.
Gutierrez is instead calling on the Texas Department of Emergency Management to lead the compensation effort.