U.S. Justice Dept. finds "cascading failures" lead to Uvalde school shooting killing 23

HOUSTON, Jan. 18 (Xinhua) -- The U.S. Justice Department on Thursday released a review into the May 2022 primary school shooting in which 19 kids and two teachers were killed in Uvalde, Texas, blaming "cascading failures of leadership" in law enforcement response to the tragedy.

"The response to the May 24, 2022, mass casualty incident at Robb Elementary School was a failure," said the 575-page Critical Incident Review that includes gut-wrenching new details about the shooting and its aftermath.

Several hundreds of state and local responding officers waited some 77 minutes before breaching a classroom and killing the 18-year-old gunman in the Robb Elementary shooting.

"Officers on scene should have recognized the incident as an active shooter scenario and moved and pushed forward immediately and continuously toward the threat until the room was entered, and the threat was eliminated. That did not occur," it said.

Instead, the intensity level dropped even as more officers arrived and the signals of ongoing danger multiplied and that was the "single most critical tactical failure," the review found.

"For the span of more than 1 hour, between 11:37 a.m. and 12:49 p.m., there were at least 10 stimulus events, including at least six separate instances of gunfire totaling approximately 45 rounds in law enforcement officer presence, as well as officer injuries and the presence of victims. Any one of these events should have driven the law enforcement response to take steps to immediately stop the killing," it said.

"During that period, no one assumed a leadership role to direct the response toward the active shooter, provide situational status to responding officers, establish some form of incident command, or clearly assume and communicate the role of incident commander," the probe found.

Medical response and crime scene probe were also flawed plus the lack of information in Spanish offered to residents of the border town and erroneous messages posted by local authorities without correction it said.

"[Some] families received incorrect information suggesting their family members had survived when they had not," the report noted. "And others were notified of the deaths of their family members by personnel untrained in delivering such news."

The shooting has passed nearly two years, but the pain of losing a loved one lingers on.

"Several family members indicate they cannot move forward with their lives and do the things they normally need to do until they know what happened to their children,"the document said. "Many victims and family members have reported that no one has taken accountability for what happened, no one has apologized, nor even acknowledged that the families deserve this information."

"This void of information about the circumstances of the death of their loved ones has contributed to their trauma. Families report they cannot heal without the information they need about what happened to their family members on May 24, 2022, and they are unable to even begin to recover until those in charge are held accountable."

The review was based on the analysis of more than 14,100 documents and over 260 interviews, it said. Members of the review team visited Uvalde nine times and spent more than 50 days there.

In the aftermath of the shooting, Attorney General Merrick Garland commissioned nine law enforcement experts to conduct interviews and review evidence to craft a "complete incident reconstruction."