An eight-year-old survivor of the Uvalde shooting confronted Texas school board members wearing the same white sundress she had on as the gunman stalked and murdered her classmates.
“This was the last dress that all my friends saw me (in),” the daughter of Tina Quintanilla-Taylor told school district officials seated behind tables on a high school auditorium stage.
“Most of those kids were my friends, and that’s not good. And I don’t want to go to your guys’ school if you don’t have protection.”
Anger and frustration boiled over at the school board meeting on Monday, the day after the release of an official report into the 24 May massacre that occurred at Robb Elementary where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
Taking the microphone after her daughter had spoken, Ms Quintanilla-Taylor said her daughter was encouraging her friends not go to to school when the term starts in under a month.
“Advocacy starts at this age. Leadership is standing up here and showing our children that that is not leadership. That is poor leadership.”
A damning report and hours of body camera footage released on Sunday laid bare the chaotic response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to the school, but “egregiously poor decision making” resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman was finally confronted and killed, according to the report by the Texas House of Representatives.
Speaking at Monday’s meeting, Uvalde resident Hector Luevano said it was “embarrassing” to see the inaction of the officers, who waited “at the expense of these children.”
Another Uvalde father said he had no confidence that the school officials could keep his children safe.
“If something doesn’t change soon, I will pull all three of my kids, out of your school.”
The Texas House committee slammed the “lackadaisical approach” of law enforcement to the Uvalde mass shooting.
The law enforcement response was described as “chaos” where there was no clear leadership and officers on the scene “failed to prioritise saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety”.
“There was an overall lackadaisical approach by law enforcement at the scene. For many, that was because they were given and relied upon inaccurate information. For others, they had enough information to know better,” the report states.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said the city’s acting police chief on the day, Lt. Mariano Pargas, had been placed on administrative leave to determine whether he was responsible for taking command of the scene.
