UVALDE, Texas — A Texas prosecutor has convened a grand jury to investigate the Uvalde school shooting that killed 21 people, multiple media reported Friday.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell that a grand jury will review evidence related to the Robb Elementary School shooting in 2022 that left 19 children and two teachers dead. She did not disclose what the grand jury will focus on, the newspaper reported.
Mitchell did not immediately respond to emailed questions and calls to her office. The empaneling of the grand jury was first reported by .
Texas State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, D-Texas, center, sits with family members of shooting victims as they listen to Attorney General Merrick B. Garland and Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta during a news conference were they shared the findings of a federal report into the law enforcement response to a school shooting at Robb Elementary, Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024, in Uvalde, Texas.
Families of the children and teachers killed in the attacked renewed demands for criminal charges after released Thursday again laid bare numerous failures by police during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
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“I’m very surprised that no one has ended up in prison,” said Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister was one of the two teachers killed in the May 24, 2022, shooting. “It’s sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review ... we deserve justice.”
The release of the nearly 600-page report — roughly 20 months after the shooting — leaves a criminal investigation by Uvalde County prosecutors as one the last unfinished reviews by authorities into the attack at Robb Elementary School.
Nineteen students and two teachers were killed inside two fourth-grade classrooms, while highly armed police officers waited in the hallways for more than hour before going inside to confront the gunman.
U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland called the police response “a failure that should not have happened.”
But the report is deliberately silent on the question that still burns in the minds of many victims’ families: Will anyone responsible for the failures be charged with a crime?
President Joe Biden said Thursday that he had not yet read the full findings. “But I don’t know that there’s any criminal liability,” he said.
Since the shooting, at least five officers have lost their jobs, including two from the Texas Department of Public Safety and the on-site commander, then-school district police chief, Pete Arredondo. But no one has been charged in the criminal investigation that was led by the Texas Rangers. The Justice Department report says the FBI has assisted the Rangers but is not doing its own investigation.
The Rangers — part of the Texas DPS, which had more than 90 officers on the scene of the shooting — submitted their initial findings at the start of 2023. Mitchell initially said she hoped to bring the case to a grand jury by the end of last year. But she in December and said Thursday that she will need time to review the voluminous Justice Department report.
“I am a working DA with a small office,” Mitchell said in an email Thursday. "It is going to take me awhile to go through this report. I am hopeful that it was informative for the community.”
The pace of the criminal investigation has long frustrated families of the victims, Uvalde's former Republican mayor and a Democratic state senator who represents the small South Texas town and has called for the head of the Texas state police to be fired.
“Twenty months later, there’s no end in sight for this local district attorney to be able to do anything,” state Sen. Roland Gutierrez said. "We don’t know if she’s going to indict anybody at all. It’s really a shame where we are now.”
In the report, federal officials detailed “cascading failures” by police, from waiting for more than an hour to confront and kill the gunman to repeatedly giving false information to grieving families about what had happened.
Raquel Martinez comforts her two daughters May 26, 2022, while her husband, Daniel Martinez, comforts their sons outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. Police officials who responded to the deadly school shooting waited far too long to confront the gunman, acted with “no urgency” in establishing a command post and communicated inaccurate information to grieving families, according to a Justice Department report released Thursday.
Produced by a Justice Department office that supports local police, the document is among the most comprehensive accountings to date of what went wrong. It says training, communication, leadership and technology problems extended the crisis, even as agonized parents begged officers to go in and terrified students called 911 from inside a classroom where the gunman had holed up.
Uvalde is a of 15,000 about 85 miles southwest of San Antonio. Parents of children killed in the shooting grew up and went to school with some of the officers they now blame, and they feel abandoned by local and state leaders who they see as intent on moving past the massacre.
“We need our community," said Brett Cross, who was raising his 10-year-old nephew, Uziyah Garcia, when the boy was killed in the shooting. "It is hard enough waking up every day and continuing to walk out on these streets, walk to a (grocery store) and see a cop who you know was standing there when our babies were murdered and bleeding out.”
Cross is among those who hope the Justice Department report will unify Uvalde around a common set of facts and spur criminal charges. During a news conference in the city, Garland stopped short of saying if charges should be filed, leaving that to Mitchell.
The Department of Justice report faults state and local officials with undercutting the public's trust in law enforcement by repeatedly releasing false and misleading information about the police response. That includes Gov. Greg Abbott, who initially praised the officers’ courage “running toward gunfire."
As what happened has become clear, Jesse Rizo has been among those left looking for more accountability. Rizo, whose niece was among the shooting victims, still hopes Mitchell will bring charges, but he has little faith in those in power.
“You hope for the best," he said, “but the past will tell you basically what your outcome is going to be.”
This is a breaking news story and will be updated.
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Yes, it's getting worse: New data shows mass shootings are more frequent
Yes, it's getting worse: New data shows mass shootings are more frequent
was produced by , a nonpartisan, nonprofit news organization that seeks to create and sustain a sense of national urgency about the U.S. criminal justice system, and reviewed and distributed by Stacker Media.
On Oct. 25, 2023, a gunman opened fire in Lewiston, Maine, ultimately killing 18 people and injuring 13 more at a bowling alley and a nearby bar. He was after a two-day manhunt. Maine, which has one of the lowest homicide rates in the nation, remains in shock.
If it feels like U.S. mass shootings have become more frequent, that intuition remains correct, according to data analysis by .
Under even one of the most conservative definitions of "mass shootings," in which a gunman slaughters four or more strangers in a public place, the number of these crimes has indeed been climbing in the last few years — and they have higher death tolls, as well.
Mass shootings account for just a fraction of the daily toll of firearm deaths in the U.S., where every day in acts of gun violence in 2022.
Our analysis is based on data through 2022 from The Violence Project, a nonprofit research group that uses a narrow definition of mass shootings adopted from the Congressional Research Service, which advises federal lawmakers.
Mass shootings have been on the rise steadily for the past 40 years
Thirty-three of these massacres occurred from 2018 through 2022, compared with 25 from 2013 through 2017, according to The Violence Project data. We compared five-year periods, rather than annual data, so we could more clearly see trends over time. A focus on yearly data would be skewed by 2020, when there were two mass shooting incidents, which researchers attribute to the COVID-19 lockdown.
Still, the latest five-year period saw more attacks than any other comparable timespan dating back to 1966 — an average of about 6.6 mass shootings per year since 2018.
The Violence Project as single incidents in which four or more people are killed (not including the shooter), in public locations, such as schools, stores, or workplaces. It excludes murders that occur as a result of other crimes, such as domestic violence, robbery and gang violence.
At least seven mass shootings so far in 2023 fit this definition:
- , California: 11 dead, 9 injured.
- , California: 7 dead, 1 injured.
- , Tennessee: 6 dead.
- , Kentucky: 5 dead, 8 injured.
- , Texas: 8 dead, 7 injured.
- , Pennsylvania: 5 dead, 2 injured.
- , Maine: 18 dead, 13 injured.
This means 2023 is on par with the number of mass shootings in recent years. The Violence Project counted eight mass shootings in 2021, and seven in 2022.
While shooting incidents show a gradual upward trend, the number of those killed is rising at an alarming rate
As mass shootings in the U.S. reached a record high, so did the number of deaths and injuries. From 2018 to 2022, perpetrators killed 257 people — close to the 266 fatalities in the five-year period that ended in 2017, and significantly more than any previous period.
The rise in deaths and injuries from 2013 through 2017 was mostly due to the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. At a Las Vegas music festival in 2017, a gunman with multiple assault weapons killed at least 60 people. Over 850 people were injured, including scores hurt in a stampede, according to The Violence Project.
Injuries have likewise risen significantly; one contributing factor: assault weapons
Our analysis shows that in the past five years, assault-style weapons have been used in half of mass shootings. Prior to 2013, they were used in one-third or fewer of all mass shootings.
There is no national, legal definition of a "mass shooting." Several organizations track this form of gun violence, but use different yardsticks.
In 2024, The Marshall Project will update the charts included in this article with full data from 2023. For more on mass shootings and how they are defined, is available.
