UVALDE, Texas – The Uvalde City Council stuck to the agenda of its regularly scheduled meeting on Tuesday evening despite the expectation that city leaders would address two big elephants in the room —the resignation of the city’s police chief and the internal investigative report on the city’s police department that cleared officers of any wrongdoing during the May 24, 2022, Robb Elementary School shooting.
After waiting out more than an hour-long executive session, parents, including Brett Cross, the guardian of Uziyah Garcia, demanded answers during the citizens’ input portion of the meeting. The answers did not come.
“Y’all told us last week that y’all were going to give us some damn answers, and you’re still not giving us answers. Do y’all accept (the report) or not,” Cross said.
“I understand. I understand completely, Brett, how you feel, but we gotta have some more time, man,” Mayor Cody Smith said during the meeting.
The findings of the report prepared by Austin-area investigator Jesse Prado conflict with the assessments made in a report released by the Department of Justice, which criticized the “cascading failures” of responding law enforcement.
“How is this continuously happening to us? Just disappointment after disappointment. I remember being in this building on May 24th waiting for answers only to find out my daughter is dead and she’s never coming home. Now, I wait, and I still can’t get answers,” Kim Rubio, mother of Lexi Rubio, told KSAT.
Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez who handed in his resignation earlier on Tuesday did not attend the public portion of the meeting.
“We expected him to stand up and do what was right, but at the end of the day I guess he was more afraid to fire his friends than was to do the right thing,” said Veronica Mata, mother of Tess Mata.
One of the school shooting victims’ families was noticeably missing from Tuesday night’s council meeting. It was Xavier Lopez’s birthday. His family was at the cemetery, marking the day that he should have turned 12.
Brett Cross said he would stand in protest outside the Uvalde Police Department headquarters on Wednesday starting at 11:33 a.m. — the time that the school shooting started.
March 12 City Council Meeting by Julie Moreno on Scribd