DALLAS — Nearly two years after the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, the state of Texas has yet to publicly release a full investigative report, the evidence file or even any accountability efforts to make sure the same mistakes never happen again.
For some of the folks trying to extract that information from the state, it feels like a cover-up.
Laura Lee Prather is a partner at Haynes Boone and represents 14 media organizations, including our parent company Tegna, who sued the state to make the evidence public, in an effort to unwrap details from that day.
"Fess up if you do something wrong," Prather tells the Jasons on this week's episode of Y'all-itics. "Don’t do it again. And then you can try to re-establish trust, right? I’m sure you learned it from your parents. I learned it from my parents. Apparently these folks never learned that because that’s not what’s happening here. You don’t have folks that are allowing for the accountability and the regaining of trust."
Last summer, a judge ruled in favor of the media companies.
But the Texas Department of Public Safety, the lead agency on the ground in Uvalde, appealed that decision in December.
“I absolutely think it's a stalling tactic,” Prather said firmly. “I mean, the grounds of the appeal is basically that they don't agree with the trial court's judgment. And what the trial court ruled was that disclosure of this information won’t interfere with the investigation. Why? Well in part because the shooter’s dead. And because the investigation is complete.”
The state’s appeal has had at least two negative consequences.
First, it has ensured that the entire effort to learn these details and find out what exactly happened inside and outside Robb Elementary will take much longer.
Second, it means the clock will likely run out on the Uvalde victims and their families, who could lose their ability to get justice in court.
Those families have two years to sue the state over what happened that day and that deadline is now just a few months away.
And if you don’t think having access to the evidence file would make a difference for the families, consider that the state has 2.8 terabytes of data it is trying to keep cloaked in secrecy.
"That's more than half-a-million photos," Prather said. "Almost 2,000 hours of two hour movies. And, you know, about 300,000 Webster dictionaries worth of documents. Okay. That's the vast amount of information. And at this point, they're arguing every single stitch of information, everything, including about the dead shooter who's not being prosecuted, should be kept under wraps."
In the latest episode of Y’all-itics, the Jasons ask Prather if she thinks the average Texan has a good understanding of what truly happened, and what went wrong, on May 24, 2022.
“The answer is no,” she told them bluntly. “You’ve seen what people have decided to leak to the media. Which then leaves all of us, including these families, in a position of having to unweave that narrative and those partial disclosures to figure out the truth and that’s impossible.”
So, what options do the Uvalde families have? And how does Prather think the state is preventing accountability and keeping law enforcement from learning valuable lessons from the failures? Listen to the entire episode of Y’all-itics to learn more.