DALLAS — Despite early pledges from Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw to publicly release evidence from the Uvalde massacre, his legal team has quietly worked for more than a year to keep it a state secret.
“I haven’t seen so many tentacles of delay which is what we’ve seen in every aspect of these cases,” said Laura Lee Prather, an attorney from Haynes Boone, in this week’s episode of Y’all-itics.
She represents 18 local and national news outlets – from CNN to Sinclair – that have sued to get the public records in the case. TEGNA, the parent company of WFAA, is a party to that lawsuit.
“Let me give you a flavor of what hasn’t come out. No videos. No dashcams. No 911 calls. No autopsy reports. No ballistic reports. No toxicology reports. No witness interviews. No use of force reports, and the list goes on, and on, and on,” Prather explained.
The catastrophic failures of law enforcement that day have already been well established.
More than 300 armed officers rushed to the scene. But they hesitated for more than 90 minutes – refusing to confront the teenage shooter after he slaughtered 19 fourth graders and two teachers in their own classroom.
For more than two years now, families of the 21 victims have sought accountability and closure – hoping the evidence will reveal why local, state and federal officers were so hesitant to engage the mass shooter.
“Oh, I think what we’re going to end up seeing is a number of different ways in which we can get better,” Prather explained. “We already know that the majority of these officers had active shooter training but not enough of it. We’ve already been able to establish that the students in that classroom had more training for shooters coming on campus than the officers who responded which is staggering – just staggering.”
In court, Texas DPS insists that the records cannot be made public because it remains an open investigation. But Texas law enforcement agencies use discretion every day to publicly release evidence in open cases.
Plus, in the Uvalde situation, the shooter is dead. DPS Director Steve McCraw even admitted the physical evidence is not changing.
In September 2022, months after the massacre, McCraw told Austin’s KVUE-TV that he wanted the records made public.
“The more evidence that comes out – and I look forward to releasing all of the evidence – and particularly the video and audio evidence because the public is in the best position to look at it and determine for themselves, but I can’t change it. I can’t change the facts. It may be unseemly to some but in the end, it’s the truth,” McCraw said.
But McCraw’s legal team has quietly fought at every turn to keep the truth a secret.
Victims’ families have their own lawsuits against DPS requesting the same evidence.
Some videos have been made public, but they only represent a sliver of the total evidence.
“The video shows [police] on their cell phones and yet no text messages are being produced. If they’re sitting there on their cell phones and you can see that they’re texting – who knew what when,” Prather asked.
After the Texas House of Representatives conducted its own investigation, state Rep. Dustin Burrows, R-Lubbock, released some school surveillance videos from the hallway of Robb Elementary.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, a Republican, released body camera footage of the seven Uvalde officers who responded that day. The city of Uvalde recently settled with victims’ families for $2,000,000.
But DPS refuses to release more than two more terabytes of data, she added. The few officials who have seen the evidence were required by DPS to sign non-disclosure agreements.
Last fall, a Travis County judge ordered DPS to make the data public. DPS appealed, delaying again.
DPS did not respond to a request to interview McCraw for this story.
“We all know when we make a mistake, we need to do the right thing and fess up. And I just cannot fathom why [with] this clear, large mistake, that has been made – people cannot fess up and decide to do better,” Prather said. “There’s nobody in this state that wants DPS to fail. We all benefit from DPS learning and getting better from this but that doesn’t happen with an internal review. That happens with a full, transparent disclosure of information so external voices can say – hey did you consider this?”
DPS is investigating itself for failures that day. And despite the dozens of state troopers who responded, just a few faced any disciplinary actions for the systemic failures and no one in leadership has been held accountable.
On this week’s episode of Y’all-itics, Prather takes us through this bizarre legal journey and reveals something that’s about to happen legally in Texas that might only make it more challenging to learn the truth.