This is the right thing to do.
Rep. Dustin Burrows
The Texas House committee investigating the Uvalde school shooting plans to release video footage of the incident on Sunday, Rep. Dustin Burrows said.
Burrows, a Lubbock Republican and the committee’s chairman, said Tuesday that “we feel strongly that members of the Uvalde community should have the opportunity to see the video and hear from us before they are made public.”
Burrows will lead a private briefing for victims’ families in Uvalde on Sunday morning, allowing them to see the hallway video from a Robb Elementary School surveillance camera and discuss the committee’s preliminary report.
In the afternoon, the committee will release the video and report to the public and answer questions from reporters. It is making the video footage public over the objection of the Uvalde County district attorney, who had instructed the Department of Public Safety not to provide the video to the committee.
Since last month, the three-person committee, which also includes El Paso Democrat Joe Moody and former Republican state Supreme Court justice Eva Guzman, have interviewed more than a dozen witnesses behind closed doors including law enforcement and school workers.
Their report will be the second investigation into the law enforcement response of the shooting to be made public. Last week, the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center, located at Texas State University in San Marcos, released its comprehensive account of police tactics during the shooting.
The Texas Tribune in June reviewed the hallway surveillance video, the only known footage capturing the entirety of the 77-minute shootout. It depicts police arriving to the scene quickly and approaching two classrooms where the gunman, an 18-year-old Uvalde resident, was shooting students and teachers. The officers retreat after being fired on and do not return for more than an hour, when several breach one of the classrooms and kill the gunman.
See here and here for some background. We know what we know now because of that hallway surveillance video, which basically destroyed the lie that we had initially been told about a brave and forceful law enforcement response. This is now DPS’ video that we’ll be getting, which they have said they’re willing to provide as long as the Uvalde County DA approves. I look forward to seeing what it will show us. The Chron has more.
UPDATE: We didn’t have to wait until the weekend to get a preview of this video. Just reading the opening paragraphs is disturbing, so click with extreme caution. There is still more to come.