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| Photo Credit: AP. |
AUSTIN, Texas (AP) — Uvalde’s school district suspended its entire police force Friday amid fresh outrage over the hesitant law enforcement response to the gunman who massacred 21 people at Robb Elementary School.
The
extraordinary move follows the revelation that the district hired a former
state trooper who was among hundreds of officers who rushed to the scene of the
May 24 shooting.
School
leaders also put two members of the district police department on
administrative leave, one of whom chose to retire instead, according to a
statement released by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District.
Remaining officers will be reassigned to other jobs in the district.
Uvalde
school leaders’ suspension of campus police operations one month into a new
school year in the South Texas community underscores the sustained pressure
that families of some of the 19 children and two teachers killed have kept on
the district.
Brett Cross,
the uncle of 10-year-old victim Uziyah Garcia, had been protesting outside the
Uvalde school administration building for the past two weeks, demanding
accountability over officers allowing a gunman with an AR-15-style rifle to
remain in a fourth-grade classroom for more than 70 minutes.
Uvalde
families have said students in the district are not safe so long as officers
who waited so long to confront and kill the gunman remain on the job.
“We did it!”
Cross tweeted.
The Uvalde
school district had five campus police officers on the scene of the shooting,
according to a damning report from Texas lawmakers that laid out multiple
breakdowns in the response. A total of nearly 400 officers responded, including
school district police, the city’s police, county sheriff’s deputies, state
police and U.S. Border Patrol agents, among others.
The fallout
Friday is the first in Uvalde’s school police force since the district fired
former police Chief Pete Arredondo in August. He remains the only officer to
have been fired from his job following one of the deadliest classroom attacks
in U.S. history.
The district
said it would ask the Texas Department of Public Safety, which had already
assigned dozens of troopers to the district for the school year, for additional
help. Spokespersons for the agency did not immediately return messages seeking
comment Friday.
“We are
confident that staff and student safety will not be compromised during this
transition,” the district said in a statement.
The
statement did not specify how long campus police operations would remain
suspended.
The former DPS
trooper who was hired by the district was among at least seven troopers later
placed under internal investigation for her actions at Robb Elementary.
Officer
Crimson Elizondo was fired Thursday, one day after CNN first reported her
hiring. She has not responded to messages left by The Associated Press.
Steve
McCraw, the head of the Department of Public Safety, has called the law
enforcement response to the shooting an “abject failure.” McCraw has also come
under pressure as the leader of a department had more than 90 troopers on the
scene but still has the support of Republican Gov. Greg Abbott.