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Will We Ever Know the Truth About Uvalde?
Link to tweet
Tweet text:
Forrest Wilder
@Forrest4Trees
NEW from: For the last three weeks, authorities in Texas—both local and state—have refused to provide almost any information about Uvalde. The stonewalling and obfuscation is so extreme that it makes me wonder if we will ever know the whole truth.
texasmonthly.com
Will We Ever Know the Truth About Uvalde?
Texas authorities bungled the facts about the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School. Then they went silent.
11:01 AM · Jun 17, 2022
Forrest Wilder
@Forrest4Trees
NEW from: For the last three weeks, authorities in Texas—both local and state—have refused to provide almost any information about Uvalde. The stonewalling and obfuscation is so extreme that it makes me wonder if we will ever know the whole truth.
texasmonthly.com
Will We Ever Know the Truth About Uvalde?
Texas authorities bungled the facts about the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School. Then they went silent.
11:01 AM · Jun 17, 2022
https://www.texasmonthly.com/news-politics/will-we-ever-know-truth-uvalde/
No paywall
https://archive.ph/rUVrb
More than three weeks have passed since the terrible events in Uvalde. What was once a torrent of appalling facts about the police response—many of them misleading or false—has now slowed to a trickle of leaks and lawyer-mediated, self-serving narratives. Governor Greg Abbott has pivoted to talking about the border again. Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw, last seen slipping into a closed-door meeting of a state House investigative committee, has gone quiet. The Uvalde schools chief of police, Pete Arredondo, finally emerged from hiding last week, lawyer at hand, to contradict reports that he had made the call to wait around for more than an hour while the gunman lingered in the classrooms with dead and dying children and teachers; hours later, key parts of his story were contradicted by evidence reported in the New York Times.
For anyone expecting an apology, accountability, or even a clear and concise narrative of what happened at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, well, you may be waiting a while longer—perhaps forever. No one has resigned, no one has been fired, and local and state authorities from the Uvalde CISD superintendent up to the governor have stopped providing updates. Local and state agencies are refusing most requests to release information they are supposed to make available under Texas’s open records law, even to the state senator who represents Uvalde. Off-duty police from around the state, as well as mysterious motorcycle clubs whose members reportedly include former police officers, descended on Uvalde to physically block reporters from talking to families and community members, even after those locals had agreed to talk—a blockade so unusual and aggressive that one veteran Texas journalist has called it “bordering on official oppression.” It’s as if those in power concluded that the answer to communicating poorly was to stop communicating altogether, and to obstruct anyone seeking answers.
Perhaps all will be revealed soon. Perhaps ongoing investigations by the Texas Rangers and the U.S. Department of Justice will bring clarity. Perhaps the Texas House committee, which is taking testimony in private, will emerge with a full report. Perhaps someone will take responsibility. But right now, it seems that authorities are biding their time, waiting for public attention to move on to the next outrage, and hoping to insulate themselves from accountability. “People in Uvalde are angry,” said state senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents the small city. “They want answers. They’re distrusting of law enforcement. The credibility of law enforcement is at stake,” he said. “They’re good people, but they just want honesty, man.”
The inflection point—the shift from a public reckoning to a studied silence—came on May 27, just three days after the nineteen kids and two teachers were killed. That morning McCraw gave a press conference in which he announced to a stunned world that police had committed a grave “mistake.” They had not, as Abbott and McCraw had stated in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, engaged the gunman at the earliest possible moment. Instead, the DPS director said, law enforcement had waited more than an hour before breaching the classroom and killing the shooter.
*snip*
14 replies
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= new reply since forum marked as read
I'd not read this!
Great catch! Poor kids & families! 
Btw, if they are not obligated to protect innocent kids under fire at school, we should not have to fund them with tax dollars!
To clarify: I am not in favor of abolishing or defunding police by any means. Only making a point.
Ty for finding, but your word is ecery bit as good to me.
