Former Uvalde schools police Chief Pete Arredondo asked a state district court on Friday to quash ten felony charges of child endangerment for his response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting.

Arredondo is one of two law enforcement officers who face criminal charges for their response to Texas’ deadliest school shooting, which left nineteen children and two teachers dead on May 22, 2022. An indictment handed down in June by a Uvalde County grand jury called Arredondo the incident commander and accused him of to ten children by delaying law enforcement’s response to the active shooter and not responding as trained.

In their motion to toss out the indictment, Arredondo’s lawyers say school districts and their employees don’t have a duty to protect students from third-party threats. The lawyers also point out that the children were already in danger when Arredondo responded.

“The indictment does not allege that Mr. Arredondo engaged in any conduct that placed a child in imminent danger of death, bodily injury, or physical or mental impairment,” the filing states. “To the contrary, the language in the indictment itself makes clear that when Mr. Arredondo responded as part of his official duties, an active shooter incident was already in progress.”

Arredondo that he did not think he was the incident commander and that he did not give any orders. Nearly 400 local, state and federal law enforcement officers descended upon the school but failed to act decisively, instead waiting for more than an hour to confront the gunman.

Border Patrol agents ultimately decided to breach the classroom and killed the shooter.

Since the school shooting, families of Uvalde victims have called on local and state elected officials to hold officers accountable for their failures in leadership. Many said they were disappointed that the grand jury indicted only two officers.

In addition to Arredondo, former district officer Adrian Gonzales was indicted on 29 counts of child endangerment. Gonzales violating school district policy or state law. Both officers were released from Uvalde County Jail on bond.

Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

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Uvalde is a vibrant rural community where people truly care for one another. We have terrific businesses, educators, parents and community members who are invested in our students’ success. But all over this beautiful community, individuals are still trying to recover and rebuild from the tragedy that struck two years ago, when a gunman attacked Robb Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers.

In confronting the array of challenges inherent in both rebuilding and managing a public school district, I have found it crystal clear that local initiatives require reinforcement through increased federal support to effectively serve community needs.

This week is Public Schools Week. I am proud to be in Washington, D.C., advocating to members of Congress and the administration for my school district during this important celebration of public education. I have one simple message for them, one that all school superintendents nationwide would likely agree with: Our students need more support.

Even in Uvalde, where generous private donors like Charles Butt and the Uvalde Moving Forward Foundation have stepped up to help rebuild, and organizations like Camila and Matthew McConaughey’s Greenlights Grant Initiative are helping us apply for federal school safety funding, we are still facing major shortfalls for critical needs. These include $20 million still needed to finish paying for the replacement for Robb Elementary.

While Congress and the administration should be credited for passing the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act in response to the shooting in Uvalde, the funding that was dedicated to help districts address youth mental health and to prevent school violence is insufficient for the numerous challenges the country faces. 

Currently, all federal school safety dollars must be applied for through grants, so Uvalde has to compete with districts across America for funding for essential programs and personnel. In districts that can hire a $40,000 grant writer and have completed applications before, it’s no big deal. For high-needs, low-capacity districts like mine, having to complete a 30-page application that could take 100 hours or so in hopes of persuading a bureaucrat to give us funding to buy a tracking system for behavioral threat assessments or hire another school psychologist is not good policy.

There is no greater responsibility of the federal government than protecting the next generation and equipping them with the tools necessary to succeed. Right now, it is failing on both counts.

For example, the COPS School Violence Prevention Program grant provides funding for cameras, training and other common-sense measures that every school needs. Last year, more than 1,000 districts ; only 206 grants were awarded. That means 800 educational institutions took the time and resources to apply for federal funding to protect their children but were denied support. With the threat environment as it is today, that is unacceptable. This problem can be solved with more money and better procedures that make it easier for districts of all sizes and means to apply.

Next month, the Senate will unveil the CARE for Student Mental Health Act, a measure that would make it easier for the federal government to target funding for school mental health personnel and programs to high-needs districts. It would also make it easier for districts to find out about these opportunities and apply for them, and it would designate a portion of funding for rural districts that have historically struggled to compete with large, well-resourced school systems for federal dollars.

This is a great start, but there must be significant policy and funding improvements if America hopes to secure the nation’s schools and give children the support they need to be successful. Already this year, there have been school shootings. The money and heartache it takes to recover from these tragedies is far greater than the money districts needed to prevent them.

Budgets are value statements, so as Congress finalizes federal funding levels for the 2024-25 school year, I want them to know they must do better to ensure that districts — particularly those that are small and rural, like mine — receive more aid for school safety and mental health resources to ensure student success.

I urge all those who are interested in furthering school safety to encourage their lawmakers to advocate for funding and policy changes that will make sure that the next generation of doctors, farmers, lawyers, teachers and innovators has the safe, caring environment necessary to thrive in school.

This story was written by  and photographed by .

For 24/7 mental health support in English or Spanish, call the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s at 800-662-4357. You can also reach a trained crisis counselor through the by calling or texting 988.

UVALDE — At 7 a.m. on a Monday in February, Jessica Treviño, with squinty eyes, goes into her sons’ bedroom and in a low, raspy voice tells them to wake up. Eleven-year-old David James rolls out of bed, but 9-year-old Austin, the youngest of the four Treviño children, doesn’t move from the lower bunk bed.

The siblings get ready for school. David James grabs the car keys and starts the family’s black Ram 1500 truck for his mother.

Austin, who is still in bed covered by a blanket, tells his mother he doesn’t want to go to school.

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“I can’t leave you by yourself,” Jessica, 40, tells him, leaning over his body as their fat bulldog, Chubs, tries to jump on the bed. “You have to go to school.”

Austin doesn’t move. The night before, the sound of police sirens woke him.

“It’s ’cause there were cop sounds last night so he’s kinda scared,” David James tells his mother.

It’s not the first time one of the children won’t go to school because something spooked them. And Jessica knows it won’t be the last.

Three of the four Treviño children were students at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, and were on campus for an awards ceremony as an 18-year-old approached the school.

That day, Jessica picked up David James, Austin and her now 12-year-old daughter, Illiaña, from the school about 11:30 a.m.

Jessica later found out that as she was driving off, the shooter had just walked into a classroom, killing two teachers and 19 students — including Illiaña’s best friend, a , who was Illiaña’s defender when other children made fun of her.

A few days after the shooting, Jessica took Illiaña, whom she calls Nana, to Uvalde’s plaza to leave a teddy bear and flowers at a memorial for her friend. Suddenly, Illiaña’s heart began to race and she had trouble breathing. Jessica took her to the local hospital, which transferred her to an intensive care unit in San Antonio. The doctor there told Jessica that Illiaña was suffering cardiac arrest and her body shut down from acute stress. She was released after a week.

“Nana was born with a heart of gold,” Jessica says. “So when it breaks, that’s how she reacted.”

Now, things like the sound of police sirens, people yelling — just about any loud sound — can be triggers for Austin and Illiaña, who have developed post-traumatic stress disorder because of the shooting.

This morning, Jessica convinces Austin to get out of bed but agrees to let him miss school. She goes to the kitchen to get Illiaña’s antidepressant and anti-anxiety medicine from a lunch bag filled with prescription bottles. Then she hands Austin the pink ear protectors he uses to block out noise.

Austin says he puts them on “only when I hear the screams.”

Jessica said Austin’s therapist has told her that the kids may talk about the shooting like they were there in an unconscious attempt to empathize with the children they saw at school every day.

In the aftermath of the school shooting in Uvalde, much of the public’s attention has focused on the families of the children who died at Robb Elementary. Artists from San Antonio painted murals all over downtown memorializing the students and teachers who were killed. A year later, the city’s plaza is still adorned with crosses and photos of those who died.

The shooting has also caused emotional and psychological damage to a generation of Uvalde children, particularly the more than 500 students who attended Robb last spring. For the Treviño family, the shooting has reshaped their lives and influenced their children’s outlook on life. It has forced them to learn coping skills and learn how to be resilient.

Illiaña, David James and Austin barely escaped the horror their fellow students endured — hiding in their classrooms and hearing gunshots and the screams of terrified children. They each lost friends and classmates in the massacre and are dealing with that trauma in their own way.

Illiaña gets panic attacks, and David James and Austin have nightmares. Austin wets the bed at night and has accidents at school.

Illiaña and Austin are in therapy. So is the family’s oldest child, 13-year-old Ameliaña, who was in middle school last year and since the shooting has taken on the responsibility of helping to emotionally support her younger siblings. David James refuses to see a therapist.

Between 2018 and 2019, more than 100,000 American children attended a school where a shooting occurred, according to research co-authored by Maya Rossin-Slater, an associate professor at Stanford University School of Medicine.

“While many students are physically unharmed, studies have consistently found consequences to their mental health, educational, and economic trajectories that last for years, and potentially decades, to come,” .

Most people “don’t think about the parents who had children who survived,” says David, Jessica’s husband. “All the costs that we have to pay for because of the shooting, like therapy and other things.”

Jessica says she gave the state-funded counseling at Uvalde’s new resiliency center a try for Illiaña but didn’t like its practice of rotating staff, which meant her daughter couldn’t see the same counselor at every visit.

Jessica takes a sip from the first of four cups of coffee she will drink today and swallows a tablet for her oral chemotherapy. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in November but opted not to undergo radiation treatment because she fears it would sap the last of her energy.

“I’m doing oral chemotherapy because otherwise I wouldn’t be able to take care of them,” Jessica says, motioning toward her children. “And as you can tell, it’s a job to take care of them.”

David, 42, stays in bed. He is paralyzed from the waist down, so it’s hard for him to help with the children in the mornings.

By 7:45 a.m., Jessica gets the four children in the truck and drops them off at their new schools: Illiaña, David James and Austin attend Sacred Heart, the local private Catholic school, while Ameliaña — an angsty teenager who’s easily annoyed by her mother’s advice — goes to Uvalde Classical Academy, a private high school. The Treviños hoped their kids would be safer at private schools and that maybe Illiaña wouldn’t face bullies.

After drop-offs, Jessica returns home with Austin, where she’ll spend the day with him until it’s time to pick them up again. She quit her job cleaning vacation cabins shortly after the shooting so she could be around her children as much as possible. Now they survive on David’s disability checks and Jessica’s dwindling savings.

David says he sometimes feels helpless, knowing that he doesn’t have the tools to help his children cope with the trauma the shooting has caused.

“It’s hard for me because I’m the type of man that if there’s anything in the way of my family’s happiness, I would move it out of the way,” he says. “But after [the shooting], there’s nothing to move out of the way, there’s nothing physically that I can do. It’s all mental. So that’s what makes it really hard for me.

“It’s just really hard because I know how my children were before the shooting.”

February 21

On a Tuesday evening, Jessica takes Illiaña and Ameliaña to a park near the edge of town for softball practice. The Treviños got all of the kids into basketball or softball after the shooting to help them stay busy. As her daughters join the other girls on the team, Jessica stands nearby, holding a can of Monster Energy drink. It helps offset the chemo pills, which make her lethargic.

A coach bats fly balls to the girls. Jessica looks on and laughs when she sees Illiaña, who is twirling and dancing in place on the field, entertaining herself. Jessica says Illiaña — a sassy preteen who enjoys drawing, reading Japanese comics and listening to rock music — joined the softball team mostly to spend time with her older sister, who takes the sport more seriously and dreams of playing on the Baylor University team.

Jessica treasures moments like this, when they can all forget what happened. But it instantly makes her feel guilty for enjoying her children. So many parents in Uvalde lost their children last year.

“It breaks my heart that I have mine and they don’t,” Jessica says. “The guilt eats me up.

“I just feel so blessed to still have them with me.”

In the first weeks after the shooting, Jessica gave media interviews explaining that while her children weren’t physically harmed, the tragedy affected their entire family’s mental health. She opened a GoFundMe account to help with their medical and therapy costs.

Most people were supportive, she said, but some strangers sent ugly messages, telling Jessica that her children don’t deserve help because they shouldn’t be considered survivors.

One person wrote: “Why is Illiaña getting help if she’s not one of the survivors?”

Later in the evening, Jessica gets a call from Ameliaña’s best friend’s mother, who tells Jessica that her daughter has troubling screenshots of a private chat group. A teenager in the group told the other participants that he hated Ameliaña and threatened to hurt Ameliaña’s father.

This worries Jessica enough that she goes to the police station to file a report, worried the boy may follow through on his threats.

Before May 24, Jessica says, she would have dismissed the incident.

“Before, I’d be like, ‘DĂ©jalo,’” — let it go — “‘they’re just kids talking shit,’” she says. “But now you can’t second-guess yourself. Now that we know what could happen, now that we know kids have access to guns.”

February 23

After dropping the kids off at school on Thursday, Jessica drives an hour and a half to San Antonio for a follow-up appointment with her cancer doctor. The MRI results show she has another nickel-sized tumor, but the other tumors have shrunk. The doctor says she can continue with oral chemotherapy but eventually she will have to go through radiation.

Jessica plans to push that off for as long as she can.

“My biggest priority right now is to keep Nana safe at school and deal with the bullying,” Jessica says. “I usually put what the kids need first before anything else.”

The cancer isn’t her only worry: Before her diagnosis in November, Jessica developed desmoid tumors in her left leg — they aren’t cancerous, but they cause her constant discomfort.

“I’m in a lot of pain,” she says, rubbing her thigh as she picks up the boys’ clothes from the living room floor after returning from San Antonio. “Usually, it’s at night that I deal with a lot of pain, but I think it’s because it’s been hectic lately.”

Doctors have told her that surgery is an option, but there’s a risk the tumors will grow back. The pain gets so bad that Jessica says she’s thought about amputating her legs.

“My doctor said, ‘I’m game if you’re game.’ But we think about the kids a lot,” Jessica says, standing over a pile of laundry before she goes back into the kitchen to season chicken for dinner.

* * *

Having both parents in wheelchairs isn’t an option. David does what he can to help Jessica, but in his mind it’s not enough.

“I’ve always worked, that’s how I was built,” he said on a recent afternoon as he watered his lawn outside of their four-bedroom home on a quiet street shaded by large trees. “Sometimes I want to go to work but I can’t.”

As a boy, he earned money collecting lost golf balls at the local country club. As an adult, he worked in the oil fields, operated heavy machinery and then became a truck driver. In November 2019, he was driving an 18-wheeler on a rainy day and lost control. The rig rolled and threw him out of the cab. He survived but was paralyzed from the waist down.

Still, he helps around the house. He cooks, he plays basketball with the boys, he coaches Austin’s football team and he drives the kids to practice — he plays softball in a wheelchair league and connects with his children through sports. At his daughters’ softball games, he’s among the loudest parents.

Jessica and David met at a dance in 2008, two years after she had moved to Uvalde from her hometown of Houston. They started dating and nearly two years later Jessica was pregnant with Ameliaña. They got married in July 2011.

Since the shooting, Jessica says she wants to move out of Uvalde. She wants her children to grow up somewhere far from reminders of the shooting.

“I want my kids to get better, but how can I do that if they’re in the same spot?” she says.

David says he doesn’t want to move — he was born here and loves Uvalde too much. He says he wants his children to grow up with the same positive experiences he had.

Despite what happened at Robb, David still feels like Uvalde is a safe town — as safe as anywhere else anyway. He can go to El Herradero de Jalisco, a town watering hole, for Mexican food and see the same people there every time.

“I don’t have to worry about who’s around me and my kids,” he says.

March 21

It’s a sunny afternoon in March, and Austin is in the backyard hitting softballs off a tee into a net. He says he stayed home from school this morning because he had a hard time falling asleep the night before and woke up with a fever. Jessica gave him the benefit of the doubt and let him stay home.

Nearly every day since the shooting, Jessica has to convince Austin or Illiaña to go to school, and they miss school at least once a week. Sometimes Jessica gets a call to pick them up before the school day is done because Illiaña has a panic attack or Austin’s anxiety gets too intense.

Austin admits that he wasn’t really sick this morning: “I had a bad thought last night that I was going to be in a mental hospital,” he says, picking up a softball and setting it on the tee. He spends the next half hour methodically hitting balls, working on his swing.

“One more for the fans,” he says, pretending he’s in a real game. He swings but barely chips the ball, which dribbles off the tee.

“The fans deserve better,” he says, grabbing the ball. He swings again, this time hitting the ball squarely. It soars in the air before hitting a tree in the backyard.

“Yeah!” Austin yells, dropping the bat and running inside the house.

Illiaña emerges to take her own batting practice. Jessica wanders out to the backyard to watch as her daughter gathers the neon-colored softballs, puts them in a bucket and places one on top of the tee. One by one, she hits the balls into the net.

A few hours earlier, Jessica had rushed to Sacred Heart with hydroxyzine, used to treat anxiety, after the school called to tell her Illiaña was biting her fingertips and hyperventilating. Jessica decided to bring her daughter home. After the shooting, a doctor diagnosed Illiaña with post-traumatic stress disorder, major depressive disorder and Graves’ disease, an autoimmune disorder.

Jessica watches as Illiaña practices, wondering why her daughter continues having panic attacks and whether they’re going to increase as May 24 approaches.

“I don’t know if it’s the anniversary coming,” Jessica says.

She’s noticed that on the 24th of any month, Illiaña and Austin get more anxious and Illiaña’s panic attacks are more frequent. And just a mention of Illiaña’s best friend can trigger a panic attack.

Before the shooting, Illiaña was targeted for constant bullying by her classmates. Her friend was always there to confront the bullies. Now she’s gone, and Illiaña is dealing with a new set of bullies at her new school.

“Nana gets teased a lot about her height and weight,” Jessica says later as she fries corn tortillas in oil on the stove while Ameliaña does homework at the kitchen table. “I have to keep reassuring her there’s nothing wrong with her, that it’s OK to be different.

“It hurts me to see her crying because she doesn’t feel like she’s good enough to be someone’s friend,” Jessica adds. “And it’s just me to reassure them.”

March 22

Most days are unpredictable in the Treviño house. Jessica and David try to maintain a routine for their children, but anxiety and panic attacks force them to improvise.

At about 11:30 a.m. on a Wednesday, Jessica packs sandwiches in a red lunch bag with Ameliaña’s name on it, then drops the bag off at school and returns home to help her husband get dressed and in his wheelchair.

Half an hour later, a staffer at Sacred Heart leaves Jessica a voicemail, asking if she wants to bring Illiaña’s medication or pick her up — she’s having another panic attack. Jessica rushes to the school.

“This is always the worst part,” Jessica says on the way to the school. “I don’t know what I’m walking into, like does she just not feel well, or is she having a panic attack?”

Jessica goes into the school and emerges a few minutes later holding the 12-year-old’s hand. They get into the car and Illiaña says her stomach and lower back were hurting.

“Something was going through my head,” she tells Jessica.

“What did your counselor say you do when that happens?” Jessica says. “To think of something else and breathe.”

“But I couldn’t,” Illiaña says.

“What did you dream about last night?” Jessica asks Illiaña.

“About being at Robb and everyone was there and the kids screaming and yelling.”

When they arrive home, David is in front of the house, smoking a cigarette.

“Are you all right?” he asks Illiaña.

“My back was hurting,” she tells him.

Inside the house, Jessica gives Illiaña a pill, which she swallows with a drink of water.

* * *

An hour after Illiaña gets home, Jessica receives another message from Sacred Heart, asking her to bring a set of clean clothes for Austin, who had an accident at school. She grabs a pair of red shorts, a T-shirt and Huggies wet wipes.

“It’s one of those days, David,” she says.

“Tell me about it,” he says.

On the drive, Jessica says she’s going to take Austin home.

“As a parent, you’re never ready for stuff like this. We tackle it because we’re moms but deep down it tears you up inside,” she says.

She says she and David have tried to understand what their 9-year-old is going through. They have repeatedly asked him what’s wrong.

“When it first happened, Austin told me, ‘That guy got me all screwed up in the head,’” Jessica says, referring to the shooter.

“ ‘You can’t let him win,’ I told him,” Jessica says.

She goes into the school again and comes back out with Austin. On the way home, they stop at a convenience store, where she buys him some chicken tenders and a bottle of Coke. When they arrive home, Austin showers and emerges in clean clothes.

He grabs his Coke and goes into the backyard, where he lines up the bottle cap on the edge of a handrail and opens the bottle with a quick smack of his hand. The Coke fizzes out and he immediately begins to drink it before it spills.

He says last night he heard loud bangs outside his home and the noise kept him up and made him anxious. In class, he kept thinking about what those sounds could be. He says he decided not to tell his teacher what was going through his mind that caused him to have an accident.

Chubs, Austin’s brown and white bulldog, starts reaching for Austin’s food. The boy wraps his arms around the dog.

“He protects me from dangerous people,” Austin says.

* * *

After Jessica picks up Ameliaña and David James from school, she tells the girls to get ready because it’s picture day for the softball team.

Illiaña sits in her bedroom and begins to cry. Jessica goes into her room, strokes her hair and asks her what’s wrong. She tells her mom she doesn’t want to take pictures.

Jessica asks her why.

“They’re going to make fun of me,” Illiaña says.

Austin goes inside the bedroom and asks his sister what’s wrong. Illiaña, irritated, yells: “Get out of my room, close the door.”

Jessica leaves Illiaña’s room and begins to curl Ameliaña’s hair as the teenager sits on a chair in a living room, watching a video on her cellphone.

“It just hurts to see her like that,” Jessica says, passing a curling iron through Ameliaña’s hair. “She is just having a shitty day all around.”

When Illiaña finally emerges from her room and sees her sister ready for pictures, she decides to go after all.

March 24

Like most Fridays, David is grilling dinner for the family. The house is full of people: Their neighbors are here along with two of David’s cousins, Oscar Treviño and Ida Velasquez, who brings her 8-year-old daughter to play with the Treviño children.

The smell of boiling beans fills the kitchen. Outside, smoke pours from the grill and Mexican corridos play on a Bluetooth speaker as Austin and David James play basketball in the street, teaching Velasquez’s daughter how to shoot.

Illiaña stays in her room and begins to cry. Jessica grabs a bottle of pills and rushes into her daughter’s bedroom along with Velasquez.

“You’re OK,” they tell her.

“No, I’m not,” Illiaña snaps back.

Jessica calls for Ameliaña, who tries to get her younger sister to start a breathing exercise.

“I can’t,” Illiaña says.

Velasquez tries to rub Illiaña’s back to console her, but Illiaña doesn’t want to be touched.

“Let go! Let go! Let go!” Illiaña screams. “Stop touching me.”

Jessica tries to convince Illiaña again to do a breathing exercise. Illiaña buries her face into a plush bear and muffles, “I’m sorry.”

Illiaña then starts to bite her fingertips. Ameliaña rushes out of the room to get Steve, her favorite kitten from the litter that the family cat gave birth to recently. Ameliaña passes the kitten to Illiaña and after about 15 minutes, Illiaña calms down.

Everyone leaves the room. Illiaña stays in bed, caressing Steve.

In the kitchen, Velasquez wants to cry, too. It hurts her to see her niece struggling. Jessica tells her to hold it together. If Illiaña hears or sees her crying, she may break down again.

“You have to be mentally strong to go through this, because look what time it is,” Jessica tells Velasquez. “It’s not like you can take the kids anywhere right now for help.”

After dinner, Illiaña finally emerges from the house, walks to her aunt and hugs her without saying a word.

“You OK, mija?” Velasquez asks her. Illiaña nods her head.

It’s past midnight before the house is finally quiet again. Jessica walks to the back porch and lights up a Marlboro, staring off into the night. She leans against the porch railing, arms crossed.

“I come out here to think: ‘What can I do better the next day?’” she says, then stubs out the cigarette and flicks the butt into the yard.

March 25

The next day is Saturday, and like most weekends, the Treviños try to spend time away from the house as a family.

They pile into the pickup and drive to Del Rio, pulling up to a house where a group of men dressed in boots, denim jeans and black leather vests with the Bad Company motorcycle club logo are waiting with their Harley-Davidson motorcycles.

The bikers greet the Treviño children warmly.

The motorcycle group is made up of military veterans who routinely participate in public events to help raise awareness about mental health issues. Last summer, shortly after the shooting, the club came to Uvalde to take part in a community event for children affected by the shooting and met the Treviño children.

As part of the event, Austin also got to smash a pie in club member Albert Treviño’s face. Since then, Albert — who served four years in the Army, including a tour in Afghanistan, and was diagnosed with PTSD in 2016 — has stayed in touch with Austin and his family. Albert, 33, said he and Austin got along right away because of the boy’s charismatic personality.

He said he appreciates the Treviños doing everything they can to provide a support system for their children, even with their limited resources. He said his brother, who did two tours in Afghanistan with the Army, took his own life after struggling with PTSD, so Albert wants to give the Treviño children another adult to turn to for help.

“Growing up in a Latino family, mental health is kind of like a joke,” he said. “They say stuff like, ‘No, pobrecito, esta menso’” — No, poor him, he’s just dumb.

The bikers help Illiaña, David James and Austin put on helmets. The children sit behind the men, who rev the Harleys’ engines before they take off on rides around the city.

Alexander “Tripp” Arneson, a club member, said that veterans diagnosed with PTSD use motorcycle riding as a form of therapy.

“Riding the bike, you feel the cold wind hit your arms and just feel the speed of the bike,” he says. The club, he adds, wants to help the children create happy memories and have something positive to think about when they’re feeling anxious.

“They shouldn’t go through with what they experienced,” he says. “So whenever they’re feeling bad, this helps them remind them that there are people who care for them.”

When the rides are done, the family decides to go to Blue Hole Park, a popular local swimming spot.

The children excitedly run to a bridge over a broad stretch of San Felipe Creek and jump into the water.

David waits in the truck, out of the sun, while Jessica sits in a lawn chair nearby, wearing a hat and sunglasses, and watches her kids frolicking in the water. She wonders out loud: “Do you think the world still thinks of these kids?”

“Not really,” Illiaña chimes in as she emerges from the water, dripping wet in her basketball shorts.

“So you think they’re just like, ‘Whatever’ now?” Jessica asks.

“Yeah, there are other things that are happening in the world,” Illiaña responds before diving into the creek again. A teenage boy asks Ameliaña for her number. Austin chases him off with a Nerf water gun. “Get away from my sister,” he says.

Jessica smiles.

“At least they get to be kids here and be worry-free,” she says. For a little while, everyone is happy, and the day that a teenager walked into a school with a rifle and changed their lives feels far away. That’s what Jessica and David want for their children — to be able to forget and just be normal kids again.

“I don’t want them remembered as Robb kids,” Jessica says. “I want them remembered as good kids.”

May 20

It’s four days before the one-year mark of the Robb Elementary shooting. The Treviños have decided they don’t want to be in Uvalde for it. So they’ve rented an Airbnb in Del Rio for a week.

The children are excited to go. “It’s a lot of fun over there,” David James says.

“I think the kids need a break from everything going on here,” Jessica says. “It’s just not good for them, it’s not good for their mental health.

“Maybe next year will be different.”

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

The Texas Education Agency a plethora of proposals that would, among other changes, require public schools to install silent panic alarms and automatic locks on exterior doors.

Other proposals include inspecting doors on a weekly basis to make sure they lock and can be opened from the outside only with a key. Two-way emergency radios would also have to be tested regularly. Schools would need to add some sort of vestibules so visitors can wait before being let in, and all ground-level windows would have to be made with bulletproof glass.

These proposed requirements come about five months after a gunman killed 21 people, including 19 children, at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde. The gunman entered a door that had been closed by a teacher, but the automatic lock failed.

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If approved, schools would have to start putting in place these safety measures starting in 2023. Before the end of this year, the education department will collect on the proposed rules.

The state has $400 million for increased safety measures that will be disbursed to districts. In the coming weeks, the education department will make a grant application available to districts. Districts will receive those grants based on enrollment, while smaller, rural schools will receive the minimum $200,000.

Proposing these safety measures is the latest action the state has taken to secure schools in the wake of the Uvalde shooting. In June, the education department that it would check all the locks on exterior doors prior to the start of the 2022-2023 school year and review every district’s school safety plans.

Matthew Gutierrez, superintendent of the Seguin Independent School District, said the safety measures that the state would require are needed, but he’s not sure smaller school districts like his would be able to meet a 2023 implementation date.

The 7,000-student district is located about 36 miles east from San Antonio.

Gutierrez also said he’s not sure if the funding available would be enough for the state’s 1,026 school districts that vary dramatically in size.

“We had the opportunity to look at costs and just how significant it would be when you think of [adding] shatterproof glass,” he said.

Upgrading aging schools will prove to be another monetary issue as they don’t have the infrastructure to be easily upgraded, Gutierrez said. As part of the midterm elections, the Seguin school district is asking its voters to approve a $15 million package that will go to upgrading security features on several campuses, but that’s nowhere near enough to cover what the district needs.

Brian Woods, superintendent of the Northside Independent School District, echoed Gutierrez and said his main concern is cost.

“What appears to be perhaps affordable given the size of the grant today may not be in six months because so many districts will be out spending money,” Woods said.

His school district includes the northwestern neighborhoods in San Antonio and serves about 102,000 students.

As Texas moves forward with different safety measures, there is no indication that beefing up security in schools has prevented violence. Rather, they can can be detrimental to children, especially Black and Hispanic children. Black students are overrepresented in all types of disciplinary referrals and than their white peers.

Advocates and Uvalde parents have criticized the state’s response in the months after the shooting, demanding state lawmakers raise the minimum age to purchase a semi-automatic rifle in the state from 18 to 21 years old.

They have to call a special session to make this happen. , who has signed legislation to expand gun rights, hasn’t budged.

This article originally appeared in , a member-supported, nonpartisan newsroom informing and engaging Texans on state politics and policy. Learn more at texastribune.org.

A Texas House committee released a 77-page Sunday on the Uvalde school shooting, concluding that allowed an 18-year-old gunman to enter Robb Elementary School May 24 and kill 19 children and two teachers. The report, described as the most exhaustive account of the tragedy, cited a disorganized, chaotic law enforcement response crippled by an across-the-board leadership failure, multiple missed warning signs about the shooter’s propensity for deadly violence and a lax atmosphere toward security at the school that had developed over time.

Shortly after Texas news outlets published raw footage of the recent mass school shooting in Uvalde — and of police officers’ gut-wrenching delay in taking out the gunman — shady corners of the internet became a haven for new conspiracy theories. 

On 4Chan, the fringe chat board that’s notorious for hosting extremist content, users insisted the 82 minutes of school surveillance camera footage of the May 24 shooting, which resulted in the deaths of 19 children and two teachers, was staged. Rather than depicting one of the deadliest mass school shootings in U.S. history, forum users claimed the heavily armed officers seen milling about were either “crisis actors” or simply participants in a harmless training exercise.

“I didn’t see anyone get shot,” one user commented.

“Saw a lot of police standing around during a live shooter training exercise though,” another said.

The footage jointly released by the Austin American-Statesman newspaper and KVUE TV briefly features the 18-year-old suspect as he walks unimpeded into the school and the piercing sounds of gunfire, but is mostly focused on police standing back in the brightly painted hallway. The news outlets chose to edit out the children’s screams and nobody is shown getting shot on frame, details that quickly became fodder for conspiracy theorists, including one who dubbed it propaganda promoting “DEMOCRAP GUNGRABBING.”

Ever since news outlets released the footage this week inside Robb Elementary School, the small community west of San Antonio has endured a new round of trauma and turbulence. Anger once again focused on the failed police response, as the footage showed how officers with rifles and protective shields idled for more than an hour before confronting the killer, one casually sanitizing his hands from a wall dispenser.

 Yet for many, the publication itself became the focus of fury. 

While some experts saw the images as critical to holding police accountable, some Texas officials criticized the news outlets for their decision. Uvalde residents, particularly the victims’ families, said releasing the video publicly, before they were scheduled to see it privately first, was re-traumatizing. 

“Who in the hell do these people think they are?” Angel Garza, whose daughter Amerie was killed, said on CNN. “You want to go ahead and air their final moments to the entire world. What makes you think that’s OK? The least you can do is have some freaking decency for us.” 

Meanwhile, researchers who study school shootings and online extremism warned the footage would likely have intense preoccupation in fringe online communities, including those that advocate real-world violence. The video’s release has opened a debate about whether it serves any utility for the general public and has left some experts concerned that the footage could become useful for someone planning the next fatal attack. 

The Uvalde shooting “will have tremendous fascination for a certain segment of the population,” said psychologist Peter Langman, who has spent decades . Time and again, his research has shown, perpetrators study and emulate the behaviors and tactics of previous gunmen. 

In , the Department of Homeland Security warned that online forums dedicated to the glorification of domestic extremist violence have been flooded with posts urging copycat attacks in the wake of Uvalde. Six of the nine deadliest mass shootings in the U.S. since 2018 , and federal law enforcement officials have warned that fringe online forums are being leveraged to radicalize young, violent extremists. Some have seized on the attack “to spread disinformation and incite grievances, including claims it was a government-staged event meant to advance gun control measures,” the threat bulletin warned. 

Violent videos are often presented online as memes or jokes and aren’t inherently harmful, said Kurt Braddock, an assistant professor of public communication at American University and a faculty fellow with the Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab. But such jokes, he said, can serve to radicalize. 

“Kids and young people, they have a technological capacity that people who are older never had,” he told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. “The problem is that they don’t have the media literacy skills to distinguish what’s a joke and what’s a call to action.”

A compulsive interest with mass shootings in fringe online communities traces back to the 1999 Columbine High School attack in suburban Denver, which has been repeatedly cited by the shooters in subsequent attacks. In online communities, so-called “Columbiners” mull over every detail of the infamous shooting, sharing a vast photo and video archive of the high school gunmen. That includes haunting surveillance video footage from inside the school cafeteria. 

“There’s a whole phenomenon of Columbiners, people who are obsessed with every aspect of Columbine and track down every photo they can find of the perpetrators and post them on websites,” said Langman. Because so many people were killed in Uvalde, he said a similar warped pursuit could emerge with the Texas massacre. Intellectual curiosity has driven some people to become obsessed with Columbine and subsequent attacks, Langman said, and others have developed romantic infatuations with the perpetrators. Meanwhile, he said a segment of the community is motivated by the desire for violence. 

 â€œMost of the people fascinated with these attacks are not aspiring killers but some of them are likely to be eventual killers and that’s where the potential danger is.” 

‘Too graphic’

Surveillance video footage depicting the mayhem inside a school during a shooting is rarely released publicly. Beyond footage of the Columbine cafeteria, a limited selection of videos were made public after the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, Florida. But none were as extensive as the footage released in Uvalde, experts said. 

The video was published Tuesday by the Texas news outlets nearly a week before state Rep. Dustin Burrows, a Republican leading a legislative investigation into the shooting, had planned to show the video to victims’ families in a private screening before releasing it publicly alongside the probe’s preliminary findings. In a series of tweets on Tuesday, Burrows said he is “glad that a small portion is now available for the public,” which deserves to see police officers’ response to the shooting, but expressed disappointment that victims’ families were unable to see it first. Meanwhile, efforts to withhold certain images and audio of the violence, he said, “were not achieved.”

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin , calling the media outlets’ decision to publish the video “one of the most chicken things I’ve ever seen.” 

In , the Austin newspaper explained that its decision came after “long and thoughtful discussions,” and was done to provide clarity about what happened inside the school after weeks of confusion and repeated misinformation. The newspaper blurred the face of a student who appears momentarily at the beginning of the video and omitted the sounds of children screaming as the gunman entered their fourth grade classroom, a detail they deemed “too graphic.” Editors ultimately chose, however, to show the face of the gunman as he entered the school undeterred.

“Our news organization guidelines state that we should not glorify these individuals and give them the notoriety that they seek,” the paper said in the op-ed. “We chose, in this instance, to show his face to chisel away at any conspiracy that we are hiding something.” 

Such conspiracy theories had already become widespread in online forums, including 4Chan. In one online forum dedicated to mass shootings, users compared the Uvalde suspect to the perpetrator who carried out the 2012 attack on Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, commenting on their physical and strategic similarities. The forum, whose previous users have included multiple mass shooters, including the Newtown gunman, was flooded with screenshots of the Uvalde suspect’s social media posts. 

Since the Columbine shooting, standard law enforcement procedures have called on officers to respond to threats immediately even at risk of their own lives, said campus security consultant Kenneth Trump, president of the Cleveland-based National School Safety and Security services. The hallway video from Uvalde, he said, is critical to hold police accountable for their hour-long delay before confronting the gunman. There’d be reason to withhold footage that depicts the gunman killing children, he wrote in an email, but not of officers in the hallway. That footage, he said, made clear that police lacked a coordinated response during the mayhem. 

“That is fair game for public scrutiny especially given the conflicting accounts and finger pointing by public officials,” Trump said. “There are questions about accountability and you cannot have accountability without transparency.”

Sen. Chris Murphy, a Democrat from Connecticut and a leading proponent of tighter gun control measures, also sees utility in the video. In an appearance Wednesday on MSNBC, Murphy said it clearly dispels a common right-wing talking point that “the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun is good guys with a gun.” 

“If one teenager with a high-powered weapon is so scary as to prevent all of those highly trained adults from going in and saving lives, maybe we should try to stop those teenagers from having those kinds of guns in the first place,” Murphy said. “Because clearly, we never have enough good guys with guns. We can never have enough high-powered weapons in the hands of law enforcement to stop an assailant if we couldn’t get that job done given what we have seen on the tapes in Uvalde.”

Yet for all its persuasive power, Murphy noted the traumatizing nature of the footage, saying “I don’t recommend that people watch it.”

A right to know? 

For years to come, the hallway video will serve as a mass-shooting training tool for police, said Jaclyn Schildkraut, an associate criminal justice professor at the State University of New York at Oswego. And given the intense scrutiny of the officers’ response, she said “the only way to set the record straight is to release this video.”

“The footage is so damning,” she said. “You had officers sitting there on their phones, you had an officer who was not only on his phone but then went and sanitized his hands. It’s incredibly problematic.”

Several officers can be seen checking their phones during the long standoff in the hallway, although a clarified that one who had come under particular attack was Uvalde school police Officer Ruben Ruiz, whose wife, Eva Mireles, had called her husband to tell him she had been shot inside the classroom. Mireles and her co-teacher, Irma Garcia, were both killed protecting their students.

Schildkraut said the video has limited value in the public domain, and could actually be harmful for the families of the victims who will be forced to relive the tragedy for the rest of their lives. They should have been given a say about the video’s public release, she argued, while noting the footage could fall into the wrong hands. 

“There’s going to be people who come up with conspiracy theories and then go harass the families because that’s what they did in Sandy Hook and they’ve done elsewhere,” she said. “This could end up on the dark web and people could idolize this individual even more. What public value does it add?”

After the Sandy Hook shooting, conspiracy theorists flooded the internet with claims the tragedy was a “false flag.” Last year, conspiracy theorist and InfoWars host Alex Jones in a defamation lawsuit by victims’ families for his repeated claims that the shooting was a hoax. 

A similar debate over the public’s right to know key details also followed the Columbine shooting, Langman said. Extensive footage has become publicly available, including the cafeteria surveillance video and other homemade videos created by the perpetrators. But some were never publicized, most notably the “basement tapes,” which reportedly included some four hours of film that offer a window into the motives and plans of the perpetrators just weeks before they carried out the attack. The tapes were due to concerns they could inspire more violence. 

American University’s Braddock said the Uvalde hallway video presents a catch-22. Transparency around the police response is important, he said, but it also offers a wealth of material to online circles of people with morbid curiosities or worse

“It’s so easy to turn the images from that video into memes that can circulate within these circles online, and those can serve to build other little communities of would-be mass shooters,” he said.

Uvalde school district Police Chief Pete Arredondo was placed on administrative leave Wednesday, schools Superintendent Hal Harrell announced in a . The move came after Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, told state lawmakers Tuesday that Arredondo’s decision to wait more than an hour to confront the gunman during a May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School “put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.” Two teachers and 19 students died in the attack, which is now under investigation by multiple agencies. Harrell said it was the district’s intention to wait until those investigations were complete before making any personnel decisions. But because of “the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations,” the schools chief said he decided to place Arredondo on leave effective Wednesday. A lieutenant in the six-member department will take over. The Texas Tribune reported that a district spokeswoman if the leave was paid or unpaid.

Police and school security experts are questioning why the Uvalde, Texas, school police chief remains on the job nearly a month after a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at the local elementary school.

While Chief Pete Arrendondo’s fiercest critics have following reports that officers under his command waited more than an hour before confronting the shooter, school safety and police accountability experts criticized education leaders for failing to remove him as head of the six-member school police force, even temporarily. 

Placing cops on “paid administrative leave or in a no-contact assignment” after an officer-involved shooting is , according to the world’s largest professional trade group for police chiefs. Those standards, experts told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ, are critical to the public’s confidence in the ensuing investigations, the school community’s safety and even the chief’s well-being. 

“It’s just baffling that you would have this conversation days after the incident, much less weeks or a month out,” said school safety consultant Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. Trump said the standards for officer-involved shootings should apply to Arredondo, a nearly 30-year law enforcement veteran whose response to the Robb Elementary School mass shooting is the subject of investigations by the local district attorney’s office, state law enforcement and elected officials and the U.S. Department of Justice that will likely take months. 

Investigators will scrutinize why officers waited outside a classroom door for more than an hour despite from the children inside begging for police to save them and that there were others trapped with the gunman who were injured but still alive. Eventually, Border Patrol agents and other law enforcement stormed in and killed the shooter. Arredondo, who as the incident commander on the scene, reportedly made the call not to go in immediately.

Steven McCraw, the director of the state Department of Public Safety, on Tuesdayresponse an “abject failure,” and said the classroom door was apparently unlocked despite the cops’ decision to wait for a key before entering the room to confront the gunman. Just minutes after the first shots were fired, he said, the police had enough firepower and protection to act.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering Room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” McCraw told Texas state lawmakers. Instead, Arredondo “decided to put the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children.”

Before those statements, Trump said that Arredondo should be taken out of his leadership role with the school district.

“If there indeed is something found where he made some fatal errors in his decision making, then you don’t want that person still there making decisions on that or other situations,” Trump said. Arredondo witnessed one of the deadliest mass school shootings in U.S. history, a traumatic event that Trump said could cloud the chief’s decisions. “Why would you put somebody under that duress — whether they’re consciously aware of it now or at a later point in time — in a position where they could encounter another stressful or life-threatening situation?”

Arredondo’s position at the police department’s helm remains uncertain as he avoids public appearances and Uvalde district officials . But evidence suggests he’s taken on additional responsibilities since the May 24 shooting, with his attorney that the chief has picked up extra shifts to cover for grieving officers. The Texas Rangers had asked Arredondo to participate in an interview for their investigation into the immediate police response, attorney George Hyde told the news outlet, but he was too busy filling in for his officers.

Arredondo also made time to go to City Hall and as a newly elected Uvalde city councilmember a week after the mass shooting. The New York Times reported that the Uvalde City Council voted Tuesday not to offer Arredondo a leave of absence. The chief has not attended meetings since his swearing-in, its story said, and could be forced to give up his seat after missing three meetings.

The Uvalde school board at its first meeting since the armed assault, whether to reassign or fire Arredondo, but after chose not to take immediate action. Board members and a district spokesperson didn’t respond to requests for comment. 

The law firm representing Arredondo said he declined to comment for this article, but the 50-year-old police chief defended the police response in his extensive June 9 interview with The Texas Tribune. Arrendondo pushed back against statements that he was the incident commander, saying he did not consider himself to be in charge of the scene and did not give orders to other responding officers, including holding off cops who were impatient to breach the door.

“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo told the nonprofit news outlet, though his comments appear to obtained by The New York Times and later the Tribune itself. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could.” 

McCraw reiterated Tuesday that Arredondo had assumed the role of on-site commander by issuing orders and directing action.

‘He really failed’ 

Since the horrific shooting, Trump and other school security experts have been highly critical of officers’ decision to wait in the hallway. For decades, law enforcement has been trained to confront the gunman — even at the cost of their own lives. 

Such standards grew out of the 1999 mass school shooting at Columbine High School in suburban Denver, with a realization that every second counts during a mass shooting, most of which are carried out in a matter of minutes. A more aggressive response at Uvalde, experts argue, could have saved lives, perhaps including one teacher in an ambulance and three children who passed away at nearby hospitals.

Public information about Arredondo’s actions that day — and his own admissions that he ran into the school without his police radio or quick access to the key he said was necessary — raise significant questions about his ability to perform his job, said Samuel Walker, a national expert on police misconduct and professor emeritus of criminal justice at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Those questions, he said, necessitate action as investigators examine his conduct. 

“It appears that his actions were not appropriate and it’s entirely appropriate that he be on leave,” Walker said. “Unless some new evidence comes to light, it looks like he really failed in his responsibility and I think that disqualifies him from working any job in that school district.” 

Sheldon Greenberg, an education professor at Johns Hopkins University and a former police officer, said that disciplinary procedures for cops vary greatly across the country and officers often benefit from policies and labor contracts that protect them from facing repercussions for failures on the job. 

Several factors complicate this particular situation, Greenberg said. For one, as chief, Arredondo would typically make disciplinary decisions for officers in his department. In the case of the chief, that responsibility would fall to the district superintendent and the school board, who may have little to no experience in police disciplinary matters, Greenberg said. Additionally, he said it’s notably difficult to hold an officer accountable for failures to perform job duties. 

“There’s a difference between a police officer who commits an act,” like the Minneapolis police officer who murdered George Floyd “where the officer had his knee on his neck and was forcing compression on his neck for nine minutes,” Greenberg said. With Arredondo, “what he did you might categorize as omission, which is very different.” 

Officers at the 4,100-student Uvalde school district, including Arredondo, had been trained as recently as last year on how to respond to an active shooting, and materials by the Texas Commission on Law Enforcement urge cops to “Display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent.” 

“As first responders we must recognize that innocent life must be defended,” according to the state training materials. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.” 

Despite the hardline language in the training materials, Greenberg said an officer isn’t helpful during an emergency if they get killed. 

“You can’t do much if you’re dead or disabled,” he said. “You still go in with reasonable caution, just don’t go barging into a room unless you’re sure you have a genuine opportunity to stop the gunman.” 

Trump, the school safety consultant, said that placing Arredondo or any officer on administrative leave shouldn’t necessarily be framed as a disciplinary measure. While Arredondo’s continued role in the department could raise concerns about obstruction in the active investigations and about his capacity to keep the community safe, he said that any officer who responded to the elementary school should have a chance to go on leave to recover from the traumatic event. 

In many police departments, he said the move is routine procedure, yet it’s unclear what policies are in place for the school district’s six-person police force. A notes that the police chief  “shall be accountable to the superintendent,” but a review of the rules did not yield any insight on leave of absences. Arredondo and any other officers who are placed on leave should continue to receive a paycheck, Trump said. 

“They shouldn’t have to worry about income for their family, but they should have that paid leave for them to debrief, to decompress, to process, to not be exposed to continual trauma,” Trump said. While any police-involved shooting can cause distress for the officers involved, the Uvalde shooting resulted in the deaths of 19 children. “They’ve been exposed to major trauma and stress of the worst kind.” 

Trump was less sympathetic to Arredondo’s assertion that he’s been too busy to participate in interviews with investigators. Making himself available for questioning, he said, should be the chief’s number one priority. In fact, it’s another reason to put Arredondo on leave: To ensure he has the time and flexibility to cooperate. Meanwhile, officers from outside police departments across the state . 

“I can’t think of anything that anybody should or could be doing that would make them too busy to participate in an investigation into a major school shooting like this,” Trump said. “It’s among the biggest and the worst [mass shootings] that we’ve ever had. That answer certainly doesn’t carry water with most anybody, including the school community.”

‘Coward of Broward’

Arredondo is not the first school-based police officer to face scorn for his performance during a deadly crisis. School resource officer Scot Peterson was placed on administrative leave in 2018 for failing to confront the gunman at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. 

Peterson ultimately chose to retire and was subsequently charged with seven criminal counts of child neglect. Prosecutors said he took cover behind a wall while the gunman killed 17 people. Those actions earned him the nickname the “Coward of Broward” by ardent critics in his Florida county. Even his boss, then-Sheriff Scott Israel, said at the time that Peterson’s actions made him “sick to my stomach.” 

But Peterson the steps taken against him as a “political lynching.” His attorney, Mark Eiglarsh, told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ this week that with both his client and the Uvalde school police chief, “The court of public opinion is unfortunately so quick to condemn responding officers and the incident commander without knowing all the facts.” 

“Unfortunately, due to the unprecedented and irresponsible decision” by prosecutors to charge Peterson, he said in an email, he fears that other officers, including Arredondo, “may also be stripped of their liberty and face decades in prison solely because a finding is made after the fact that things could have been handled differently.”  

The case against Peterson is in September. 

Despite the numerous investigations into the Uvalde shooting, the accountability that many in this small Texas community are demanding , according to legal experts. Qualified immunity, which protects cops from liability for their mistakes on the job, could challenge civil lawsuits. Meanwhile, charges against police officers — like the ones against Peterson — are extremely rare. But Walker, the police misconduct expert, expects the federal investigation to uncover failures in Uvalde that could help districts nationwide respond to similar attacks moving forward. 

“It looks like he failed, and if you fail and cause the death of a number of children, then it’s pretty serious,” Walker said. Yet such shortcomings likely extend beyond Arredondo, he said, and it’s important that the chief doesn’t become the scapegoat. “Clearly there’s what we would call systemic failure, and the school board probably failed in some respects” if it lacked sufficient policies to respond to such a lethal event. 

“Our elected officials have seen American after American drop from a bullet,” said Corin, a survivor of the 2018 mass school shooting in Parkland, then the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School junior class president. As a co-founder of March For Our Lives, her advocacy in 2018 galvanized a countrywide movement that brought hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to the National Mall to demand new firearms laws. “And instead of waking up to protect us, they have been hitting the snooze button. But we’re here to shake them awake.” 

Yet four years after youth activists chanted “never again,” some might argue that America is still sleepwalking through wave after wave of gun violence. The latest mass shootings in Buffalo, New York, and Uvalde, Texas, are once again wreaking havoc on American communities and student advocates are once again preparing to hit the streets to force an end to the carnage. 

On Saturday, Corin and other advocates with the youth-led March For Our Lives, including David Hogg and X Gonzalez, will return to Washington for a second rally to press for new firearm restrictions and a slew of policy changes they believe could thwart a gun violence rate that’s . 

Their insistence that children should never again be allowed to die by gunfire in school was belied — again — by  the reality of Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, where 19 children and two educators were shot and killed May 24.

“Four years ago we said ‘never again,’ there’s never going to be another Parkland, and unfortunately that has not reigned true,” Corin told ĂÛÌÒÓ°ÊÓ. Since then, Corin has graduated high school and is now a rising senior at Harvard University, where she studies government and education. During those years, mass shootings have continued to grow more common, with the Uvalde assault  becoming the second-deadliest school shooting in U.S. history. “A large reason for that is because barely anything has been done on a national level.”

Along with , organizers have planned hundreds of , all in a matter of weeks. Ahead of the event, March For Our Lives advocates are to promote their agenda. 

They hope for a different outcome this time, but acknowledge the obstacles that have blocked change in the past remain as challenging as ever. In , President Joe Biden questioned “how much more carnage are we willing to accept?” before calling on Congress to ban assault weapons — or to at least raise the age from 18 to 21 for those looking to buy one. He also pushed for a ban on high-capacity magazines, strengthening background checks and adopting a federal “red flag” law that would allow courts to temporarily remove weapons from people deemed an imminent threat to themselves or others. At the same time, he lamented that “a majority of Senate Republicans don’t want any of these proposals even to be debated.” 

After the Parkland shooting, the Trump administration , a device that uses the recoil of a semiautomatic gun to mimic an automatic rifle. Yet even though then-President Donald Trump embraced an effort to raise the age on rifle sales, efforts fell flat. 

Earlier this week, in negotiations with Republicans over gun proposals after the Uvalde shooting while pointing out that compromises would be crucial to progress. Instead of major firearm restrictions, a bipartisan deal could encourage states to adopt red flag laws and new funding for campus security upgrades — a reaction that for years has followed virtually every mass school shooting. Sen. John Cornyn, a Republican from Texas, “it will be embarrassing” if Democrats and Republicans in the Senate fail to reach a legislative response to Uvalde. 

​Meanwhile, a ruling this month from the U.S. Supreme Court a decades-old New York law that puts sharp limits on who can carry guns in public. 

For Corin, having a Democrat in the White House isn’t necessarily an encouraging sign. Biden has been president for a year and a half, yet “we haven’t seen anything done,” she said. While Biden has sought to pass the issue onto Congress, Corin said her group has called on the president to appoint a gun violence prevention director, to create a task force focused on the issue and to “declare gun violence a national emergency — but that hasn’t happened either.” 

“No one is exempt from doing work on this issue,” Corin said. “I know the executive office doesn’t have all of the power, but ultimately everyone has a role to play.” 

Corin is very aware that the post-Parkland focus on gun violence had a larger impact at the state level, where . In her native Florida, for example, lawmakers passed a red flag law, raised the age to buy rifles from 18 to 21, created a three-day waiting period on gun purchases and authorized certain educators to be armed at school. In New York, lawmakers responded swiftly to the Buffalo shooting and approved a new law on Monday to strengthen gun control measures, including a red flag law that was implemented after Parkland. 

“I can only hope that the same sadness and fury that the country is feeling now, as we all did back in 2018, will fuel the continuation of these changes on the state level and ultimately — hopefully — on a national level,” said Corin, who the former Marjory Stoneman student who pleaded guilty in October to opening fire on the school. 

In its policy platform, March For Our Lives blames American gun violence on a culture of “gun glorification,” political apathy, poverty and “armed supremacy” in which the threat of guns are used to “reinforce power structures, hierarchies, and status.” And while they recognize a national mental health crisis exists, they oppose “scapegoating” those with mental illnesses as being a threat to others when they’re actually more likely than those without such disorders to .

Solutions, according to the group, include a ban on assault rifles and high-capacity magazines and a national firearm buy-back program that could reduce the number of firearms in circulation by some 30 percent. There are an estimated 393 million guns in circulation across the U.S. — that’s more guns than people. 

But the group’s platform extends far beyond firearm policies to prevent violence and encompasses a slew of policies generally associated with Democrats. Those include ending the “war on drugs,” combating the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and reducing the scope of policing. 

For RuQuan Brown, a D.C. native whose stepfather was killed in a 2018 shooting, the conversation, he said, needs to “focus more on love than legislation.” RuQuan, who is Black, said that urban gun violence has long failed to garner the same urgency as mass shootings like the ones that played out in Parkland and Uvalde despite . 

Through his work with March For Our Lives, Brown said he’s been able to help ensure that the experiences of all gun violence victims are reflected in reform efforts. 

“I’ve been able to work with March to make sure that when we talk about March For Our Lives, that all peoples’ lives are included in that,” said Brown, who also attends Harvard. For him, uplifting disenfranchised communities will be the key to gun violence prevention. “This country and its ancestors are extremely comfortable with the deaths of Black and brown people, it’s almost a part of the fabric of this country. America wouldn’t be what it is without the deaths of Black and brown people, the genocide, the rape and the forced labor.”

He said it’s critical that lawmakers develop compassion for, and a commitment to help, society’s most marginalized people. If they were “committed to furthering the well-being of all people,” he said, “We wouldn’t even be having this conversation about gun violence.” 

With the midterm elections approaching, Corin predicted the recent mass shootings, including at the Uvalde elementary school and a Buffalo supermarket, could once again make gun violence a top issue on the campaign trail. It’s more important than ever, she said, for candidates to let people know on which side of the issue they stand. 

“If people aren’t clear on their stances and if they don’t act with courage, they’re going to be voted out,” Corin said. “And you know what, we’re going to vote in someone that doesn’t believe that children should be shot in their seats in school.”