Uvalde Failure: DOJ Report Finds 377 Officers Waited 77 Mins as 19 Kids, 2 Teachers Killed by 1 AR-15

AMY GOODMAN: We begin today’s show in Texas. It was May 24th, 2022, when an 18-year-old gunman armed with an AR-15 rifle shot dead 19 fourth graders and two teachers at Robb Elementary in Uvalde, Texas, as nearly 400 law enforcement officers who descended on the school took 77 minutes to confront and kill him.

Now the Justice Department has issued a scathing 600-page review of the massacre. The long-awaited report details a series of, quote, “cascading failures,” starting with a “haphazard” initial response in which officers failed to quickly establish a command post and did not immediately treat the attack as an active shooter situation. Attorney General Merrick Garland released the report Thursday at a news conference in Uvalde.

ATTORNEY GENERAL MERRICK GARLAND: The chaos and confusion that defined the law enforcement response while the shooter remained a threat also defined the aftermath of the shooting. For example, surviving victims, some with bullet wounds and other injuries, were put on buses without being brought to the attention of medics. Some families were told that their family members had survived, when they had not. And victims, families and community members struggled to receive timely and accurate information about what had occurred at Robb Elementary.

AMY GOODMAN: Parents of the Robb Elementary School mass shooting victims gathered Thursday to respond to the DOJ report. This is Kimberly Rubio, the mother of Lexi, one of the 19 children killed.

KIMBERLY MATA–RUBIO: I hope that the failures end today and the local officials do what wasn’t done that day, do right by the victims and survivors of Robb Elementary — terminations, criminal prosecutions — and our state and federal government enact sensible gun laws, because Robb Elementary began the day an 18-year-old was allowed to purchase an AR-15.

AMY GOODMAN: Also at Thursday’s news conference in Uvalde was the attorney Josh Koskoff. He represents the Robb Elementary victims’ families.

JOSH KOSKOFF: How did this 18-year-old kid even know enough to know how to equip himself in this way? What happened? What are the means by which gun companies are marketing these weapons to our children? How are they reaching them? Where’s the role of marketing and the gun companies in this report? There’s no fault or investigation whatsoever.

AMY GOODMAN: Just three weeks into this year, there have already been at least two school shootings in the United States.

For more, we’re joined by Democratic Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde. He’s running for U.S. Senate for the seat currently held by Republican Ted Cruz.

State Senator Gutierrez, welcome back to Democracy Now! We spoke to you repeatedly after the massacre. Can you respond to the report? And be very specific about what happened inside, and the fact that — what was it? — 377 law enforcement, police, troopers, etc., stood by for 77 minutes as the children inside desperately called police — the children acting like adults, and the adults like children.

SEN. ROLAND GUTIERREZ: Yes. Amy, first off, thank you for having me on your show. I think it’s important that people like yourself, people in the media, continue to tell this story in a real way and to begin to shed light and continue to shed light on this issue.

What happened on May 24th was the worst law enforcement response to a school shooting in our nation’s history, let’s be very clear. The police on that day, they all failed, not just the district police chief, not just the local sheriff, not just the acting chief of police, but the Department of Public Safety failed. Ninety-six officers of Greg Abbott’s Operation Lone Star were on the scene, as they show up to all scenes in rural Texas. And not one of those officers, including his high-level command officers, took control of that scene. Not one of them said, “We need to do something to stop this madness. We need to coordinate a command center.” That never happened, not before, during or after this event. As the attorney general suggested yesterday, this cascading folly of errors, this cascading failure, it was everything that could have happened and everything that could have gone wrong happened, from radios that didn’t work to just complete chaos and complete lack of leadership and management.

But the biggest thing that occurred was something that I had to see for myself as I viewed over 400 hours of bodycam footage. I needed to see why in the world this failure occurred. And amidst all of that carnage and all of the blood and all of the gore and all of those poor children that had passed on, the same refrain from cops over and over and over: “He’s got an AR-15 in there. There’s an AR-15. He’s got an assault rifle.” Not one cop, not one DPS trooper, not one sheriff, over and over and over, you would hear that one simple refrain, cumulating in one of the last officers to suggest that. He said, “I don’t want to die today.” Specifically, he said, “I don’t want to get clapped out today.” The children certainly were more brave than the police.

Even though I’ve seen all of this, and even though all of this is for me now 20 months in the making, even yesterday I learned something new that I had not seen on my bodycam footage: the fact that one officer yelled into that room, “If there’s anybody in there, let us know.” A child cried out, said, “I’m in here.” The gunman went back into that room, four shots were fired, and that child was killed.

What occurred on that day is something that we should all continue to talk about, because these incidents don’t happen in a vacuum. They don’t happen in 12 minutes, as is the national average. The fact is, most do, and most do get resolved in those 12 minutes. That’s not what happened here in Uvalde on that day. What happened was extreme failure. What’s happened was cowardice. What’s happened was that cops knew that this guy had a gun that they were afraid of. And that is why policymakers in the state of Texas and in the United States need to do something about this particular gun, because the damage it makes and the ease by which it kills is astounding and profound, and we must stop it. And we need an assault weapons ban in this country, once and for all.

AMY GOODMAN: State Senator Gutierrez, you have described the children. And, you know, media doesn’t show dead children with their faces blown off. And I really hate to say this. But unless we’re very direct and graphic about what an AR-15 does, people can continue to say, “You know, one weapon or another, whatever. It’s the person, not the weapon.” Tell us what an AR-15 does.

SEN. ROLAND GUTIERREZ: Oh, it’s quite different, Amy. It’s quite different. In the first barrage as the gunman enters in, when you’re looking at it — and I think the public has seen this image, this video footage of him going into the classroom, and then you don’t see him anymore, but you hear close to over 100 rounds just go off in a span of a minute and — a minute-plus. He’s going into the first room. He kills every child in that first room, no survivors, leaves only the teacher, who he thinks is dead — that teacher was alive and has survived this event — goes into the next adjacent room and just sprays that room.

Those kids died like we trained them to die. And that sounds horrible, but these kids have grown up with a different kind of anxiety than you and I did when we were growing up. For me, we had fire drills at school. There were no active shooter drills. And for some people that are older, they might remember the old nuclear bomb drill. You’d get under your desk. These children grow up with a very specific set of instructions that they practice month after month after month: shut the lights off; close the curtains or the blinds; go in the closet, if there is one, and if there isn’t, huddle together as best you can. In that second classroom, there’s two stacks of — two piles of kids, teacher draped over each one, trying to save their children, trying to shield them from all of this madness — one teacher dead, one barely living, most of the kids in that classroom dead.

As they go into the classroom and they take down the gunman, you immediately see the faulty trauma care. And I’m not a doctor, and I’m not a — I don’t know about how you treat people. But you see police and law enforcement officials dragging dead bodies out by their limbs. A little girl comes out. I remember my general counsel telling me, “You need to hold on when you see this image, because she’s going to be dragged out, and she’s not going to have a face.” This little girl was dragged out by this one Texas trooper. And indeed, her face was gone. And the only — I cannot think of a word to explain what that looks like, other than some kind of dysmorphia. It’s just — it’s just — it doesn’t look like a face anymore. It’s just blood and bone and deep red blood and carnage like you cannot believe, the worst movie you’ve ever seen in your life multiplied — horror movie, multiplied by a thousand. A whole classroom full of blood, full of smoke, this little girl just completely gone.

There is a surviving young boy. I won’t mention his name. His parents are friends of mine. And that little boy talks about his girlfriend — and he told this story to his parents, told this story to his therapist — a little 9-year-old girl sitting in the desk next to him. All he can remember — and this boy was shot, as well. He survived. And all he can remember was lying on the ground looking at his friend. And all he can remember is teeth all over that floor. That little girl is just — that little boy will live with that memory for the rest of his life, just like Khloie Torres will live with her memory, and she’s been on on different news networks talking about her story, just like Miah Cerrillo will recount having to cover herself in blood to let the shooter know that she was dead — the blood of her best friend. We’re just lost on this issue.

AMY GOODMAN: State Senator, I want to ask you. You have introduced 21 state Senate bills seeking changes in gun laws, including universal background checks and red flag warnings. None passed last year in Texas. And yet you have, for example, Wayne LaPierre on trial for corruption, steps down as head of the NRA. He famously said the only thing that stops a bad guy with a gun is a good guy with a gun. The NRA at its weakest point ever, how is it possible that an assault weapons ban isn’t something that is embraced fully by Democrats, not to mention many Republicans?

SEN. ROLAND GUTIERREZ: Well, Amy, I mean, the fact is, you know, you have too many cowardly politicians. And certainly, the Republicans, on the other side of the aisle, they’re all cowards on this issue, and Democrats, as well. There’s a few out there that refuse to say this, and they need to say this: We need an assault weapons ban in this country.

Look, Amy, I have guns, a lot of them. And I don’t need an AR-15. I’ve fired them. It’s the most powerful gun I’ve ever fired. It fires three times the speed of my .9 millimeter. When you put a certain round of ammunition in there, it’s just complete death and destruction.

And I saw it all. And I say “cowardly” for this reason. I remember sitting in the lieutenant governor’s office. And it was very raw and very early for me, maybe as soon as the session started. I said, “Look, Dan, you’ve got to be able to do something on this issue. You’ve got to be — just raise the age limit.” After an hour of sitting there and him telling me that there is nothing that they could do, I recounted a story to him about this little girl, the same story I just told you, about her getting dragged out, no face to speak of, and the horror of it all. Back then it was very raw. I mean, quite honestly, I couldn’t keep it together. At the end of that meeting, he says, “Roland, do you know there’s a reason we don’t look at the videos?” This is the second most powerful man in Texas. I promise you this, Amy: Ted Cruz and others like him, they have not seen the videos, the death, the destruction, and the finality of a little child’s life, full of hope, waiting simply for school to come to an end, just for the summer to begin. And in all that, in an instant, their life is over, and all of those hopes are gone. These politicians are cowards on this issue. They’re cowards because they haven’t looked at what they need to see, the videos and the footage that I’ve seen, and the footage all over this country, because this story repeats itself week after week after week.