Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott was called out this week after not publicly acknowledging the two-year anniversary of the deadly mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school.
The two-year anniversary of the Robb Elementary School shooting took place last Friday. Yet, the governor didn’t mention it in any of the press releases his offices sent that day, nor did he do so on any of his social media accounts.
That fact did not sit well with Democratic state Senator Roland Gutierrez, whose district includes Uvalde.
On Saturday morning, Gutierrez railed on Abbott and his failure to mention the Uvalde shooting on the two-year anniversary.
As he wrote on the social media platform X:
“Not once did @GreggAbbott_TX mention Uvalde yesterday. The second anniversary of the worst school shooting in Texas history and the governor doesn’t say a word about it. What a piece of s–t.”
On May 24 of 2022, a gunman who was 18 years old entered Robb Elementary School and ensued in a mass shooting that resulted in the death of two teachers as well as 19 students.
The gunman was able to enter the school and commit the heinous crime while multiple law enforcement officers from multiple agencies stood outside for more than an hour before deciding to confront him. Eventually, he was killed by law enforcement officials.
Just recently, the family members of the victims filed a lawsuit against Texas’ state law enforcement agency over its failed shooting response. According to the suit, troops didn’t follow their training, as they waited before they decided to confront the shooter.
That lawsuit comes a few months after the Department of Justice released a scathing report in January that found multiple failures at multiple levels in the response. The report is the result of a nearly two-year investigation into the matter.
As the DOJ report said, police officials at the scene that day waited way too long before they confronted the gunman and acted with “no urgency” to establish a command post.
In addition, the report said that the officials then communicated information that was inaccurate to the grieving families. Ultimately, the report highlighted that there were “cascading failures” in how law enforcement handled the shooting.
During a news briefing held in Uvalde following the release of the report, Attorney General Merrick Garland said:
“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 continued that the victims in Uvalde “deserved better” than what the law enforcement officers who were hired to protect them gave.
The federal report followed one conducted by Texas lawmakers that placed fault on law enforcement officials at every level for failing “to prioritize saving innocent lives over their own safety.”
The DOJ report, which totaled almost 600 pages, outlined how poorly officers responded to the attack.
