Family members of the victims of the Robb Elementary School shooting yelled "cowards" and angrily walked out of a Uvalde City Council meeting after an investigation and report ordered by city leaders defended the actions of local police. The examination into the shooting, which killed 19 students and two teachers, acknowledged wide failures by police during the 2022 attack and reiterated rippling missteps that the Justice Department and state lawmakers have previously laid bare, The Associated Press reports. Nearly 400 law enforcement agents, including Uvalde Police Department officers, rushed to the scene of the shooting -- but they waited more than an hour to confront a teenage gunman who was armed with an AR-style rifle. But an investigator hired by Uvalde officials found that the city’s officers did not violate policies, and in some cases, praised their actions during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
Jesse Prado, an Austin-based investigator and former police detective who wrote the report for the Uvalde City Council, 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. His report is just one of several probes into the massacre, including a Justice Department report in January that criticized the “cascading failures” of responding law enforcement, because of the wait by law enforcement, even as children inside the classrooms called 911, begging police to rescue them. The nearly 600-page Justice Department report found massive 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.