The elementary school where a shooter murdered 19 students and two teachers last month in Uvalde Texas is set to be demolished.
On Tuesday, Don McLaughlin, the mayor of Uvalde, stated during a tearful council meeting with locals that he didn’t think any student or teacher should be required to return to Robb Elementary School, the scene of the fatal shooting on May 24.
“My understanding — and I had this discussion with the superintendent — that school will be demolished,” he said.
“You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school ever,” McLaughlin added.
According to reports, there’s no set a date for the demolition.
At the council meeting on Tuesday, McLaughlin criticized the difficulty in collecting information from those looking into the fatal shooting at Robb Elementary and the poorly received police response.
McLaughlin expressed his displeasure at not receiving updates on the inquiry, led by the Texas Rangers, a division of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
“I’m very frustrated with the way they’re handling it. Very frustrated because, like I said, we’re not getting any information,” he said.
“The gloves are off,” he said. “As we know it, we will share it.”
“We are not going to hold back anymore,” he said. “We kept quiet at the request (of other agencies) because we thought we were doing a formal investigation and doing the right thing.”
“What matters to Uvalde is that these broken-hearted families and this grieving community get a full investigation and accurate report of what happened that day,” he said.
The Director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Steve McCraw, stated that law enforcement’s response to the shooting at the Uvalde school was an “abject failure.”
McCraw added that “compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre.”
McGraw claimed that on that particular day, police officers’ lives were prioritized over the lives of young children, despite criticism of their decision to wait for backup for about an hour rather than engage the shooter as the school shooting developed.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from (entering rooms) 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” he said.
