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Texas prosecutor convenes grand jury to investigate Uvalde school shooting, multiple media outlets report
A Texas prosecutor has convened a grand jury to investigate the Uvalde school shooting that killed 21 people, multiple media reported Friday.
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the San Antonio Express-News that a grand jury will review evidence related to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting that left 19 children and two teachers dead. She did not disclose what the grand jury will focus on, the newspaper reported.
Mitchell did not immediately respond to emailed questions and calls to her office. The empaneling of the grand jury was first reported by the Uvalde Leader-News.
Families of the children and teachers killed in the attack renewed demands for criminal charges after a scathing Justice Department report released Thursday again laid bare numerous failures by police during one of the deadliest classroom shootings in U.S. history.
The report, conducted by the Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented Policing, known as the COPS Office, looked at thousands of pieces of data and documentation and relied on more than 260 interviews, including with law enforcement and school personnel, family members of victims, and witnesses and survivors from the massacre. The team investigating visited Uvalde nine times, spending 54 days on the ground in the small community.
“I’m very surprised that no one has ended up in prison,” Velma Lisa Duran, whose sister, Irma Garcia, was one of the two teachers killed in the May 24, 2022, shooting, told the Associated Press. “It’s sort of a slap in the face that all we get is a review … we deserve justice.”
Thursday’s report called the law enforcement response to the Uvalde shooting an “unimaginable failure.” The 600-page report found that police officers responded to 911 calls within minutes, but waited to enter classrooms and had a disorganized response.
In the report, much of the blame was placed on the former police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, who was terminated in the wake of the shooting, although the report also said that some officers’ actions “may have been influenced by policy and training deficiencies.”
The school district did not have an active shooter policy, and police gave families incorrect information about the victims’ conditions. Families said the police response to the May 2022 shooting – which left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead — exacerbated their trauma.
The Justice Department’s report, however, did not address any potential criminal charges.
“A series of major failures — failures in leadership in tactics, in communications, in training and in preparedness — were made by law enforcement and others responding to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said during a news conference from Uvalde. “As a result, 33 students and three of their teachers, many of whom had been shot, were trapped in a room with an active shooter for over an hour as law enforcement officials remained outside.”
The attorney general reiterated a key finding of the Justice Department’s examination, stating that “the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, and in the hours and days after was a failure that should not have happened.”
“Lives would’ve been saved and people would’ve survived” had law enforcement confronted the shooter swiftly in accordance with widely accepted practices in an active-shooter situation, Garland said.
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A Russian court on Monday convicted a theater director and a playwright of terrorism charges and sentenced them to six years each in prison, the latest in an unrelenting crackdown on dissent across the country that has reached new heights since Moscow sent troops into Ukraine.
Zhenya Berkovich, a prominent independent theater director, and playwright Svetlana Petriychuk have already been in jail for over a year awaiting trial.
Authorities claimed their play “Finist, the Brave Falcon” justifies terrorism, which is a criminal offense in Russia punishable by up to seven years in prison. Berkovich and Petriychuk have both repeatedly rejected the accusations against them.
In one hearing, Berkovich told the court that she staged the play in order to prevent terrorism, and Petriychuk echoed her sentiment, saying that she wrote it in order to prevent events like those depicted in the play.
The women’s lawyers pointed out at court hearings before the trial that the play was supported by the Russian Culture Ministry and won the Golden Mask award, Russia’s most prestigious national theater award. In 2019, the play was read to inmates of a women’s prison in Siberia, and Russia’s state penitentiary service praised it on its website, Petriychuk’s lawyer said.
Alexander Zemlianichenko / AP
The case against Berkovich and Petriychuk elicited outrage in Russia. An open letter in support of the two artists, started by the independent Novaya Gazeta newspaper, was signed by more than 16,000 people since their arrest.
The play, the letter argued, “carries an absolutely clear anti-terrorist sentiment.”
Dozens of Russian actors, directors and journalists also signed affidavits urging the court to release the two from custody pending investigation and trial.
Immediately after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine, the Kremlin unleashed a sweeping campaign of repression, unparalleled since the Soviet era. It has effectively criminalized any criticism of the war, with the authorities targeting not only prominent opposition figures who eventually received draconian prison terms, but anyone who spoke out against it, publicly or otherwise.
Pressure mounted on critical artists in Russia, too. Actors and directors were fired from state-run theaters, and musicians were blacklisted from performing in the country. Some were slapped with the label “foreign agent,” which carries additional government scrutiny and strong negative connotations. Many have left Russia.
Berkovich, who is raising two adopted daughters, refused to leave Russia and continued working with her independent theater production in Moscow, called Soso’s Daughters. Shortly after the start of the war in Ukraine, she staged an anti-war picket and was jailed for 11 days.
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