From The Texas Tribune:
New Uvalde school district records released late Monday provide more details about campus safety concerns raised before the deadly 2022 Robb Elementary school shooting — and reveal in a few teachers’ own words how traumatized they remained after the massacre.
The documents also indicate that the 18-year-old shooter had exhibited inappropriate school behavior, struggled academically and was often absent when he was an Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District student.
The materials — more than 200 megabytes — are part of the latest document disclosure by a government agency involved in the flawed response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. The release was part of a settlement agreement in a yearslong lawsuit news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, brought against state and local governments.
The records include messages from school district officers who responded to the shooting, in which 19 students and two teachers were killed. The documents reveal little new information about several law enforcement agencies’ failure to more quickly confront the gunman. ProPublica and The Tribune previously found that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and waited 77 minutes to confront him. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies.
None of the school district police officers were wearing body cameras that day because the district had not issued them the equipment, so no new video or audio was released Monday.
In one email released Monday, a fourth-grade Robb teacher wrote to the district superintendent about how terrified she was during the shooting, as she tried to keep her students safe while bullets ricocheted around her.
According to a Texas House committee’s investigation into the shooting, the teacher was in a classroom across the hall from the adjoining classrooms where the gunaman killed all of his victims and was barricaded.
“I fell on the floor and began knocking desks over onto my legs so I wouldn’t make noise, but I couldn’t block the students from bullets,” she emailed the former district superintendent, who retired after the shooting. “I told my students I loved them. I told them to stay quiet, and I told them to pray.”
ProPublica and The Tribune could not reach the teacher late Monday.
The records release is “an important step toward giving the community and public the answers they deserve,” said Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who represented the news organizations in the legal fight for records. “The court’s ruling makes clear that government agencies cannot hide behind vague legal claims to withhold public information.”
The documents released Monday show that days after the shooting, Hal Harrell, who was superintendent at the time, emailed himself a media report about the timeline detailing the 77 minutes the gunman spent barricaded while law enforcement waited to confront him.
The Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office has also agreed to release body camera footage and other records, but had not done so by late Monday.
The Texas Department of Public Safety, which dispatched more than 90 officers to the school, has appealed a judge’s order to release hundreds of videos and investigative files. Prather said the media coalition continues fighting for the release of the state law enforcement agency’s records.
“Three years is already too long to wait for truth and transparency that could prevent future tragedies,” Prather said.
ProPublica and The Tribune previously published 911 calls that showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers’ fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentary, the newsrooms showed that while the children in Uvalde were prepared, following what they had learned in their active shooter drills, many of the more than 300 officers who responded were not.
DPS spokesperson Sheridan Nolen wrote in an email Monday that the agency followed “its standard protocol in which it does not release records that will impact pending prosecutions.” Two former Uvalde schools police officers were indicted on child endangerment charges last summer over how they responded to the shooting. That includes Pete Arredondo, who was the district’s police chief during the shooting and has been widely faulted for the delay in confronting the gunman.
Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is leading the criminal investigation, did not return requests for comment. Spokespeople for the school district and county also did not immediately respond.
Former Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin, now a Republican member of the Texas House, called it “ludicrous” that the news organizations had to launch a legal fight to obtain records. He added that DPS should also release its information so that the victims’ families could get much-needed answers.
“Maybe there’s something in there that we can keep this from happening again,” he said. “This was a costly mistake, and so I believe everybody should just release their records and give these families not closure, but at least another piece of what went on that day.”
McLaughlin said he repeatedly asked DPS about releasing the information since starting his term in Austin this year.
“I basically was told it was up to the lawyers what they could and couldn’t do,” he said. “I don’t know what could be top secret in these reports that could hinder them being released.”
‘I tried to stay calm’
The teacher in the classroom across the hall from the gunman wrote in her email to the superintendent that she was convinced she was going to die.
“I physically sat almost laying myself on my students and in front of them to be sure I could block them from bullets,” she said in an email. “I knew I would die that day. I had shrapnel in my back from when he shot in my window. I had blood all over the back of me, but I tried to stay calm for my students.”
The teacher wrote about how much she loved her students and working for the district. But she also noted that no school officials ever reached out to her immediately after the shooting. She wrote that she and other staff were asked not to talk to the media.
A month after the shooting, Elsa Avila, a fourth-grade teacher who survived being shot, finally felt ready to ask about what was happening to her classroom.
“Is it being packed up, if so what will happen with my personal belongings?” Avila wrote in an email to the school’s principal. “The students had piñatas they were working on, were those salvaged or did they get thrown away?”
Avila said in the email that it was hard to accept that she may never get answers to many of her questions about the shooting.
“So I guess I can start with answers about my classroom,” she said.
In a Monday evening interview, Avila said school leaders did not reach out to her directly while she was in the hospital. She also said the district should have released records sooner and that she hopes other agencies will follow.
Still, she said, the government’s actions are lacking “any follow up.”
“There were hundreds of officers there, so, to me, it still does not make sense that they only charged two officers,” she said. “Will there ever be any true accountability from other agencies? Because more people would need to be held accountable, more agencies need to be held accountable than just the two officers that they charged.”
Longstanding lock issues
The new records also show that school administrators had been aware of longstanding issues with locks on campus doors. Multiple witnesses told the legislative panel that employees often left doors unlocked, while teachers would use rocks, wedges and magnets to prop open interior and exterior doors. The shooter was able to enter the school through an unlocked exterior door, according to the legislative investigation.
According to emails released Monday, administrators had met with the owner of a lock company to discuss purchasing automatic locks for the district’s exterior doors a little less than a month before the shooting.
Emails sent after the shooting occurred showed cost estimates in the millions of dollars for installing new exterior doors, hardened windows, fencing and other security infrastructure.
The shooting spurred multiple local, state and federal investigations as more than 300 officers from about two dozen agencies responded to the scene.
Troubled history
The new school district documents also include previously withheld information about the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos. A Texas House committee report found that he had a tumultuous relationship with his family, including his mother, and likely suffered mental health issues. That investigation also said he was a victim of bullying at school in part due to his lisp, poverty and chaotic family life.
The emails released Monday show district officials raising alarms about Ramos hitting another student and using sexual language. In 2018, for example, his mother was warned that he was drawing inappropriate pictures as part of a classroom assignment, just one of many such warnings that teachers would send over the years, according to the emails and the state House committee report.
In another email, former superintendent Hal Harrell noted that Ramos was routinely failing classes and barely attending school.
Academic intervention plans recommended one-on-one tutoring and parent conferences, however it is unclear what actions district officials or Ramos’ guardians ever took. Intervention plans from the 2016-2017 school year largely list “behavior” as the reason for intervention. Ramos eventually dropped out.
Two former officers face criminal charges
U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which sent at least 149 federal agents to the shooting, declined to release most records, although the agency was not involved in the newsrooms’ litigation. It issued its own report last September that mostly evaded blame.
The school district’s records this week largely confirmed what a state House committee investigating the response had already found. The small school district police unit, led by Arrendondo, was unprepared. Arredondo, who could not be reached for comment, dropped his police radio going into the school and did not effectively take charge or communicate with other law enforcement, the report found.
The newly-released documents include a string of messages between school district officials and Arredondo, who five days after the shooting said that he was invited to a briefing with former President Joe Biden but would be avoiding news outlets. Four months later, he was fired.
Another text thread between school district officials shows Adrian Gonzales, a school police officer who would later face 29 charges related to child endangerment, being told to “go hang out at the park with the Seniors” hours before the shooting.
Later in the same thread, a school secretary wrote at 11:40 a.m. that an individual reported hearing shots outside a school. “They went ahead and locked themselves down,” the text continued.
Arrendondo then received texts at 1:07 p.m., after officers from a federal-led strike team killed the gunman, asking him if any students were injured and if the school’s secure status could be lifted.
Gonzales, who also could not be reached for comment, was among the first officers to arrive at Robb. Late Monday, Gonzales’s attorneys filed a legal request seeking a trial outside of Uvalde, arguing “it would be impossible to gather a jury that would not view the evidence through their own pain and grief,” according to KSAT.
Law enforcement experts largely regard the shooting response as among the worst in American history. A U.S. Justice Department report in January 2024 affirmed many of the newsrooms’ initial findings, and recommended that all officers in the country undergo at least eight hours of active shooter training annually.
At the time, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said, “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, not in a classroom.”
But, he added, “that is the terrible reality that we face. And so it is the reality that every law enforcement agency in every community across the country must be prepared for.”
