The commission and its professional staff intend to meet privately with the families of the 21 victims in Uvalde and provide them with a hard copy of the preliminary report and a link to the video, a source close to the commission said. The committee also plans to answer questions from the families about the findings, the source said. Last month, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Col. Steven McCraw criticized that delay as a “major failure,” citing in part evidence from the runway surveillance video. Some images from the video, obtained by the Texas Tribune and the Austin American-Statesman, showed officers in tactical gear and considerable firepower — including weapons and a tactical shield — long before they finally breached the door. Burrows pushed for the video to be released to the public amid scrutiny of the police response. “I can tell people all day what I saw, the committee can tell people all day what we saw, but it’s very different to see it yourself and we think that’s very important,” Burrows said. But he said last week he was barred from doing so because he signed a nondisclosure agreement with DPS. It also released a letter in which DPS said it agrees the video will bring “clarity” to what happened, but explained that the Uvalde District Attorney “objected to the release of the video.” CNN sought comment from Uvalde District Attorney Christina Mitchell Busbee on Friday and Sunday about why she objects to the release of the video, but has not received a response.
The families of the victims react to the video that is coming
Berlina Irene Arreola, the grandmother of Uvalde school shooting victim Amerie Jo Garza, told CNN her family has “mixed feelings” about whether to see the hallway surveillance video. “We want to see the video,” he said. “At the same time, I’m afraid of how I’m going to feel because right now we have so much anger, we have so many mixed emotions. . Hurt more than anything because of what happened. Then anger, because we don’t get the answers we need. “Seeing that, I think it’s going to make other people angrier, knowing that they were just standing there, basically doing nothing for that long. They might say they were waiting or preparing. Seventy-seven minutes to prepare is too long,” he said. Amerie Jo’s stepfather, Angel Garza, told CNN he feels like he knows more about the timeline of events for last week’s Highland Park parade shooting than the Uvalde shooting in May. “And that’s wrong, it’s so wrong,” Garza said. “We’ve had a lot of people tell us they’ve never seen anything like this — agencies arguing, arguing, pointing fingers at each other. No one wants to admit they were wrong and our daughter is no longer here. We deserve to know what happened.”
What the video and report will show
The video and preliminary report are expected to clarify what police actually did as they waited in the hallway and will contradict previous public statements and official reports. For example, a report just last week from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) said an armed Uvalde police officer spotted the gunman outside the school and asked for permission to shoot. However, the source close to the committee said that this account is not true and it did not happen. Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin also dismissed the account as untrue. And on Monday night, ALERRT assistant director John Curnutt said their findings were based on two statements by one officer that were later contradicted by a third statement. “At the time we published our initial follow-up action, the information we had about this particular officer came from two previous statements the officer made to investigators,” he said in a statement. “We were not aware that shortly before we took our initial action, the officer gave a third statement to investigators that was different from the first two statements.” Additionally, the hallway video of the response is “stark,” said Tony Ploetsky, a reporter for the Austin American-Statesman who watched the surveillance footage. The video begins shortly after the gunman entered the school at 11:33 a.m. In the video, the 18-year-old gunman walks into a classroom and “you hear a hail of gunfire,” Plohetski said. A few minutes later, a group of law enforcement officers arrive in the room and there is another exchange of gunfire. “You see the officers roll over. One of them actually touches his head” and suspects an injury, he said. In the next hour of the video, officers converge on the scene and prepare with helmets, assault rifles, ballistic shields and tear gas. But they don’t take action. “They basically stand there for an hour as those minutes go by,” he said. “It’s not until 12:50 that we see the officers move into that classroom, break down the door and take the gunman down.” The reporter said the video heightens questions about the response from local, state and federal agencies to the scene. “As to why it was handled the way it was and why the police didn’t act with a greater sense of urgency, I don’t think we’ve gotten to the truth yet,” he said. “This video, once it’s finally released, will be very disturbing to a lot of people and, I think, will really deepen the tragedy that happened that day.” CNN’s Eric Levenson contributed to this report.
