By Zach Despart, The Texas Tribune
July 12, 2022
“Texas House committee to release Uvalde shooting video to public on Sunday” was first published by The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan media organization that informs Texans — and engages with them — about public policy, politics, government and statewide issues.
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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.
Since the May 24 shooting, community members have repeatedly pressed officials for details about what happened. Those calls intensified after Gov. Greg Abbott and Department of Public Safety officials initially made several inaccurate statements about the police response. The governor and DPS director Steve McCraw have since said that video footage from the school surveillance cameras should be released publicly.
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This article originally appeared in The Texas Tribune at https://www.texastribune.org/2022/07/12/texas-house-investigators-uvalde-shooting-video/.
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