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A year has passed since the massacre at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Tex. — and still, the public doesn’t know the whole story.
We know that more than 375 local, state and federal officers took more than an hour to kill the gunman who entered a fourth-grade classroom with an AR-style rifle. We know that the medical response was so disjointed that none of the available helicopters carried victims directly to the hospital; that a school bus with no medics on board transported six students including one who was seriously wounded; that several victims dragged from the building conscious or with a pulse nonetheless did not survive. We know that authorities in the days after the shooting gave conflicting, sometimes inaccurate accounts of what happened. We know that 19 children and two teachers are dead.
This information has come in part from a 77-page report by the Texas House of Representatives. Some of it has come from a report by researchers at Texas State University, and still more has come from the media. But pieces are still missing, including details that could reconcile the inconsistencies among accounts. The Texas Department of Public Safety, whose Texas Rangers probed the tragedy, has a comprehensive set of records, from 911 calls to ballistics reports to body-camera footage, that could finally explain why what went wrong went so, desperately, wrong. Yet officials are refusing to release them — and a consortium of news organizations, including The Post, has filed a lawsuit to force their disclosure.
Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell has said in a court filing that disclosing the records could jeopardize any criminal charges she might seek in response to the Texas Rangers’ investigation after “ample time” to review the case. This has been the Department of Public Safety’s excuse for keeping secrets. But according to the department itself, the investigation has already ended, and it’s unclear what harm the disclosure of these materials would actually do. The district attorney also says the victims’ families agree with her decision, yet the vast majority of them are refuting that claim.
How much time is needed, really? Twelve months without answers for the families of those killed — answers that could show the community whom to hold accountable for their grief as well as possibly spare other families the need to grieve — already seems like more than enough.
The Post’s View | About the Editorial Board
Editorials represent the views of The Post as an institution, as determined through debate among members of the Editorial Board, based in the Opinions section and separate from the newsroom.
Members of the Editorial Board and areas of focus: Opinion Editor David Shipley; Deputy Opinion Editor Karen Tumulty; Associate Opinion Editor Stephen Stromberg (national politics and policy); Lee Hockstader (European affairs, based in Paris); David E. Hoffman (global public health); James Hohmann (domestic policy and electoral politics, including the White House, Congress and governors); Charles Lane (foreign affairs, national security, international economics); Heather Long (economics); Associate Editor Ruth Marcus; Mili Mitra (public policy solutions and audience development); Keith B. Richburg (foreign affairs); and Molly Roberts (technology and society).
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