The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) has been ordered to release documents related to the Robb Elementary School shooting more than 13 months after the massacre rocked Uvalde.
Police in the small Texas city were widely criticized for their response after an 18-year-old gunman entered the school on May 24, 2022, and killed 19 children and two adults using an AR-15-style assault rifle. Officers took more than an hour to confront and kill the shooter, prompting outrage and a string of firings and suspensions for police.
District Court Judge Daniella Lyttle on Thursday granted a motion to release documents related to the massacre, according to The Texas Tribune. More than a dozen news organizations, including the Tribune, sued DPS last year, alleging that the records, which reportedly concern the police response, were being illegally withheld under Texas law.
Texas Highway Patrol troopers on May 27, 2022, stand at attention in front of a memorial for the victims of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. A judge on Thursday ordered the state Department of Public Safety to release records related to the mass shooting.
Michael M. Santiago
The documents will not be released immediately. Lyttle gave DPS until August 31 to produce a list of redaction proposals. A hearing on the redactions is expected to occur in September. The altered documents will likely be released after the hearing, pending the outcome of any potential appeal from DPS.
Newsweek has reached out to the Texas DPS via email for comment.
DPS and the Texas Rangers, a division of the department, opposed the release of the records while arguing that doing so could impact ongoing investigations. DPS, in a letter to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton last year, also argued that releasing the documents would amount to “enabling criminals.”
“Revealing the marked records would provide criminals with invaluable information concerning Department techniques used to investigate and detect activities of suspected criminal elements,” DPS wrote in the letter, according to Vice.
“[Releasing the records] will compromise law enforcement purposes by enabling criminals to anticipate weakness in law enforcement procedures and alter their methods of operation in order to avoid detection and apprehension,” the department continued.
Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell supported keeping the documents away from the public in a court filing in March, warning that it would jeopardize her ability to file any criminal charges. She also claimed that the families of the victims wanted the records to remain sealed.
“All of the families of the deceased children have stated to District Attorney Mitchell that they do not want the investigation of the Texas Rangers released until she has had ample time to review the case and present it to an Uvalde grand jury, if appropriate,” her office wrote in the filing, according to The Texas Tribune and ProPublica, another organization that sued DPS.
However, parents of the victims quickly contradicted Mitchell’s office, making it clear that they did support release of the records. Brent Ryan Walker, an attorney representing the parents of 16 deceased children and one survivor, said that the families “fundamentally deserve the opportunity to gain the most complete factual picture possible of what happened to their children” in a court filing, according to CBS Texas.
Additional attorneys representing the families filed a request to join the lawsuit against DPS one week later, reportedly arguing that the families had “a compelling need for the information that will override the need to keep the information withheld” and that the reasons for withholding the documents were “without merit and unreasonable.”
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