Opinion: Indictments aren't enough to account for law enforcement's 'epic' failures at Uvalde school shooting

Teachers and students followed active shooter survival steps.
Law officers did not. (Adobe Stock photo)

On May 24, 2022, Salvador Ramos, 18, entered Robb Elementary School with his AR-15-style rifle and started looking for victims. When shots rang out from his gun, teachers and students implemented their live shooter training. The Uvalde, Texas, police arrived at the scene within five minutes of the first 911 call, but they did not enter the building. In the 77 minutes it took for police to breach classroom 112, 19 children and two teachers were shot dead.

Last week a grand jury indicted former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales on criminal charges for failing to protect the victims, but many Uvalde residents feel the indictments fail to hold the larger law enforcement community accountable, writes Neil Sturdevant in his commentary for the Uvalde Leader-News. "Perhaps to some, the 29 felony indictments for child endangerment/abandonment feel like justice served, but we think otherwise. Other officers, especially those in leadership positions who failed to intervene. . . should not walk away without consequences."

Arredondo served as the "de facto on-scene commander," as concluded in the 575-page Department of Justice report released last January. "The veteran officer bore direct responsibility to protect life on the Robb campus," Sturdevant explains. But his mistakes multiplied the victims. He treated the shooter as though he was a "barricaded suspect" instead of an active shooter in a school filled with young pupils. 

Gonzales was the "first on the scene and was able to quickly identify the classroom where the carnage was unfolding. . . and yet he did not approach the classroom," Sturdevant writes. "Gonzales had undergone active shooter training and taught the course earlier that year." But Arredondo and Gonzales weren't the only officers who abandoned students and teachers. Four other officers actively delayed intervention, which allowed more children to be shot or bleed to death while they waited for help.

"We wonder how evidence presented to grand jurors failed to illicit similar indictments for [those other] men," Sturdevant asks. "The same can be said for members of the Uvalde Police Department, elite Texas Rangers and state police who milled in the Robb hallway during the rampage killing. . . . Now two men stand alone as the sole source of blame for one of the most incompetent police responses in U.S. history."

"How does Uvalde district attorney Christina Michell look families in the eye and say this is a good deal? Mountains of evidence outlined a failure of epic proportions," Sturdevant writes. "The children and teachers who were carried, limped or dragged from their classrooms. . .were clearly abandoned by police. Now our criminal justice system has failed to right those grievous wrongs."

Quick hits: Documentary on Uvalde Leader-News shooting coverage to air; adding solar can benefit farms; wildfire prep

Front page of Uvalde Leader-News special
memorial section for Robb Elementary shooting.

A new documentary, Print It Black, that premieres on ABC News Live and Hulu at 8 p.m., E.T. on Friday, May 24, will examine how Uvalde Leader-News journalists covered the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in 2022, reports Kory Grow of Rolling Stone magazine. "A trailer for the film shows the stress and devastation the staff felt in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, beginning with reporter Kimberly Mata-Rubio, who lost her daughter, Alexandria, in the massacre." The trailer also presents the "public cries for justice that followed the massacre, which was made worse by a delay on the part of local authorities to act after the shooting began."

Some farmers are welcoming solar energy as a way to save on their electrical bills and maximize land use. "Jerry Howle was skeptical about installing a $300,000 solar panel system on his South Carolina chicken farm. Then he found out he could get it free of charge," report Amrith Ramkumar and Patrick Thomas of The Wall Street Journal. "Solar panels now sit on his two chicken houses, powering giant fans that keep as many as 60,000 birds inside cool. The panels are being paid for entirely by subsidies from the new climate law and will virtually eliminate the farm's $10,000 annual utility bill."

Wildfire season can be unpredictable, but planning and reliable tools can make managing it easier. Wirecutter has gathered a "best of wildfire preparedness" to help those who live in wildfire-prone areas be as ready as possible. "This guide to wildfire preparedness builds on the expertise of its original author, Eve O'Neill, who was forced to evacuate her California home in 2017 during the Tubbs Fire, which killed 22 people," reports Ellen Airhart of Wirecutter. "This list was also informed by interviews and research conducted for our larger guides to the best emergency-preparedness supplies and the best gear for your bug-out bag."

Solar storms knocked some farmers offline during peak
planting time. (Photo by Chris Ensminger, Unsplash)

While active solar storms knocked some farmers offline during the thick of planting season, the problem was not as dramatic as some reported. "Many farmers were forced to press pause and wait until GPS satellites came back online. . . . It seems, however, that like most things discussed online [on] social media channels perhaps made the situation seem a bit more dire than it turned out," reports Matthew J. Grassi of Farm Journal. Curt Covington from AgAmerica told Grassi, "There were some scattered reports of these storms delaying planting over the weekend, particularly in the Midwest, but no major disruptions have been reported by farmers at this time."

Many American families are facing some hard health care realities -- there aren't enough in-home care workers and those that do exist are often outside of their financial reach. As a result, many children are forced to care for aging or injured family members, reports Clare Ansberry of The Wall Street Journal. "There are an estimated 5.4 million children under the age of 18 providing care to parents, grandparents or siblings with chronic medical conditions or functional decline, up from about 1.3 million nearly 20 years ago, according to two reports from the National Alliance for Caregiving and others."

U.S. mining company Energy Fuels opened the mines last
year. (Photo by S. Hermann/F. Richter, Pixabay via MT)

To lessen U.S. dependence on Russian uranium and keep global energy promises, "Three uranium mines have gone into production along the Arizona-Utah border, with more on the way elsewhere in the Mountain West, as market conditions for the mineral needed for nuclear energy improve in response to a global push to reduce the consumption of fossil fuels to slow climate change," reports Wyatt Myskow of Inside Climate News. "The biggest problem the mining industry faces — especially with uranium—is opposition from local communities, tribes and environmentalists. The three mines that just started operations endured years of pushback and litigation."