The families of 19 children who were killed in the Uvalde school shooting two years ago announced a lawsuit on Wednesday against the Texas Department of Public Safety and 92 police officers involved in the botched shooting response, as well as a $2 million settlement with the city.
The lawsuit seeks to hold the Uvalde officials and troopers accountable for waiting 77 minutes before engaging the 18-year-old active shooter inside Robb Elementary School. In addition to the 92 named police officers, the Uvalde School District, former Robb Elementary School principal Mandy Gutierrez, and former Uvalde School District police chief Peter Arredondo are listed as defendants.
“Nearly 100 officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety have yet to face a shred of accountability for cowering in fear while my daughter and nephew bled to death in their classroom,” said Veronica Luevanos, whose daughter Jailah and nephew Jayce were killed.
Moreover, the city of Uvalde will pay $2 million to the victims’ families as part of a settlement that includes multiple stipulations such as improved training for current and future police officers to prevent a similar tragedy from occurring again.
The announcement comes two days before the two-year anniversary of the shooting, which was the deadliest in the state’s history. As part of the settlement, Uvalde will establish May 24 as an annual day of remembrance for the 19 students and two teachers who died that day in 2022 and create a permanent memorial at the city plaza.
“For two long years, we have languished in pain and without any accountability from the law enforcement agencies and officers who allowed our families to be destroyed that day,” Luevanos added. “This settlement reflects a first good faith effort, particularly by the City of Uvalde, to begin rebuilding trust in the systems that failed to protect us.”
The families pursued legal action after the Department of Justice released a 610-page report in January on the failed police response to the mass shooting. The report documented the “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training” that day.
For instance, law enforcement ran toward the sound of gunfire in the school but then stopped outside two adjacent classrooms before killing the shooter. Officers then proceeded to wait for a SWAT team before breaching the classroom doors.
The mass-casualty incident, as the Department of Justice called it, is widely known for local and state officials’ inaccurate assessment of the situation, which Arredondo initially described as a “barricaded suspect” operation rather than an “active shooter” scenario, affecting how first responders acted. Arredondo was fired in August 2022 after a separate investigative report, published by the Texas house the month before, found similar missteps made by 376 law-enforcement officers at the scene.