An investigation Uvalde city leaders ordered into the Robb elementary school shooting put no blame on local police officers and defended their actions on Thursday, despite acknowledging a series of rippling failures during the fumbled response to the 2022 classroom attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Several family members of victims walked out in anger midway though a presentation that portrayed Uvalde police department officers of acting swiftly and appropriately, in contrast to scathing and sweeping state and federal past reports that faulted police at every level.
The investigator who presented the report blamed families who rushed to the school that day for compromising the police response, prompting an eruption of anger from several families and some stormed out. Law enforcement took more than an hour to get inside the classroom and kill the gunman, even as children inside the classrooms called 911, begging police to rescue them.
“You said they did it in good faith. You call that good faith? They stood there 77 minutes,” said Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose daughter was among those killed in the attack, after the presentation ended.
Another person in the crowd screamed: “Cowards!”
The report for the Uvalde city council on Thursday comes from one of several inquests into the massacre and was conducted by Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective.
“There were problems all day long with communication – and lack of it. The officers had no way of knowing what was being planned, what was being said,” Prado said. “If they would have had a ballistic shield, it would have been enough to get them to the door.”
The city’s report is just one of several investigations into the massacre. Texas lawmakers found in 2022 that nearly 400 local, state and federal officers rushed to the scene but waited more than an hour before confronting the gunman. A justice department report in January criticized the “cascading failures” of responding law enforcement.
But Prado said his review showed that officers showed “immeasurable strength” and “level-headed thinking” as they faced fire from the shooter and refrained from shooting into a darkened classroom.
“They were being shot at from eight feet away from the door,” Prado said.
Prado also said the families who rushed to the school hampered efforts to set up a chain of command as they had to conduct control with parents trying to get in the building or pleading with officers to go inside.
“At times they were difficult to control,” Prado said. “They were wanting to break through police barriers.”
Family members erupted when Prado briefly left after his presentation.
“Bring him back!” several of them shouted.
Prado returned and sat and listened when victims’ families cried and criticized the report, the council and the responding officers.
“My daughter was left for dead,” Ruben Zamorra said. “These police officers signed up to do a job. They didn’t do it.”
A criminal investigation by the office of the Uvalde district attorney, Christina Mitchell, into the law enforcement response to the May 2022 shooting remains open. A grand jury was summoned earlier this year and some law enforcement officials have been asked to testify.
Tensions remain high between Uvalde city officials and the local prosecutor, while the community of more than 15,000, about 85 miles (140km) south-west of San Antonio, is plagued with trauma and divided over accountability.
Those tensions peaked in December 2022, when the city of Uvalde sued the local prosecutor’s office seeking access to records and other investigative materials regarding the shooting at Robb elementary school. That lawsuit is among the topics the city council could revisit on Thursday.
The city’s independent investigation comes after a nearly 600-page January report by the Department of Justice found huge failures by law enforcement, including acting with “no urgency” to establish a command post, assuming the subject was barricaded despite ongoing gunfire, and communicating inaccurate information to grieving families.
The attorney general, Merrick Garland, said the victims “deserved better” as he presented the justice department’s findings to the affected families in Uvalde.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in active shooter situations and gone right after the shooter and stopped him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Garland said at the news conference in January.
The report also found failings in the aftermath, with untrained hospital staff improperly delivering painful news and officials giving families mixed messages and misinformation about victims and survivors. One official told waiting families that another bus of survivors was coming, but that was untrue.
The Texas Republican governor, Greg Abbott, initially praised the law enforcement response, saying the reason the shooting was “not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do”. He claimed that officers had run toward gunfire to save lives.
But in the weeks following the shooting, that story changed as information released through media reports and lawmakers’ findings illustrated the botched law enforcement response.
At least five officers who had been on the scene have lost their jobs, including two department of public safety officers and the on-site commander, Pete Arredondo, the former school police chief. No officers have faced criminal charges.