This article was produced in collaboration with ProPublica and Texas Tribune. Sign up for newsletters from ProPublica and that Tribune.

---

Police video, audio, text messages and emails released Saturday by Uvalde, Texas, city officials offer new details about the Robb Elementary school shooting while largely confirming reporting about law enforcement’s failure to engage a gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers.

In a report, a municipal police officer in Uvalde said the police had to rely on a parent to use bolt cutters to break open the locks of the fence the shooter had dared to enter the school. The same officer also stated in his report that he overheard a female relative of the shooter discussing how he had expressed suicidal thoughts the night before the massacre on May 24, 2022. And in a 911 call, the shooter’s uncle asked police to speak with the teenager, saying he believed he could talk him down. However, the call came six minutes after police killed the gunman.

Text exchanges between Uvalde officers also offer insight into their frustrations after Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw blamed local police in the days after the shooting.

A report from the Texas House of Representatives was released two months laterinstead, the blame spread to scores of local, state and federal law enforcement officials — including McCraw’s at least 91 DPS troopers — who also responded to the scene and failed to take control.

The day after McCraw’s public comments, Uvalde police Lt. Javier Martinez, who was shot within the first few minutes of the response, said he had received a call from U.S. Sen. John Cornyn, a Texas Republican.

In a text detailing the conversation, Martinez said the senator told him McCraw “should NOT have done that.” Martinez said he told Cornyn that McCraw had “screwed all of us” and that the local police officers were all receiving death threats.

Cornyn’s spokesman declined to comment, while McCraw did not immediately respond. An attorney for the Martinez and Uvalde officers said he was unaware of the text exchange. Martinez did not respond to a message asking about it.

Most of the other records released by the city, such as body camera footage and audio of 911 calls from children inside the classrooms, were described in earlier reports by The Texas Tribune, ProPublica and FRONTLINE after the news organizations independently obtained hundreds of hours of investigative footage through a confidential source .

Saturday’s release is the first major disclosure of documents from a state agency involved in the botched response to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. It was part of a settlement agreement in a lawsuit between the city and the news organizations. Three other state agencies — the Texas Department of Public Safety, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District and the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office — continue to fight not to release any records.

Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin, who is now a Republican candidate for the Texas House, said in a telephone interview Saturday that the other state entities in the lawsuit should follow the city’s example.

“The only way we’re going to know what really happened is for everybody to release their records, put them out there,” McLaughlin said. “Mistakes were made. There’s no denying that. Take your lumps.”

By now, the failures of law enforcement during the response to the Uvalde shooting are well documented, including the fact that officers mistakenly treated the shooter as a barricaded object, rather than an active threat, and failed to confront him for 77 minutes. No officer took control of the response, preventing coordination and communication between agencies. According to records released Saturday, for example, a DPS aviation officer struggled to coordinate the logistics of two helicopters, SWAT team members and the San Antonio Police Department because they couldn’t reach an incident commander.

The newsrooms published 911 calls which showed the increasing desperation of children and teachers pleading to be saved and revealed how officers fear of the shooter’s AR-15 prevented them from acting more quickly. In a collaboration with FRONTLINE that included a documentarythe editors also showed it while the children in Uvalde were prepared and followed what they had learned in their active shooting exercisesmany of the officers who responded were not.

Read more: “Somebody Tell Me What To Do”

US Department of Justice later published a report who strongly criticized the delayed response, saying some victims would have survived if officers had followed their training.

According to the records released Saturday, Uvalde Township Police Officer Bobby Ruiz Sr. said in an incident report after the shooting that police had to rely on a parent cutting a lock on the gates of a fence around the school. Once the gate was open, students and teachers began running towards the opening.

“I ran upstairs with two other male individuals where we rushed the students and school staff behind cover,” the officer said.

Ruiz was then sent to the nearby house where the gunman lived with his grandparents. The teenager had shot his grandmother in the face and taken his grandfather’s truck to school. Ruiz said that while he was at the house, he heard a relative say they had held up with the gunman the night before after he expressed a desire to die by suicide.

In a 911 call, the shooter’s uncle, Armando Ramos, urged police to let him talk to the shooter, confident he could talk him into stopping.

“Everything I tell him, he listens to me,” said a distraught Ramos. “Maybe he could stand down … or turn himself in.”

But his nephew was already dead, killed minutes earlier by police after he came out of a closet in the classroom and fired at them.

An attorney for the news agencies and the uncle of one of the children killed at Robb Elementary said information about the shooting — and law enforcement’s response — will help grieving relatives gain closure and will better prepare authorities for future massacres. They pressured other agencies to follow the city’s move and release records.

Read more: ‘Inside the Uvalde Response’ Director and Reporter Talk About Helping People Understand ‘How This Went Wrong’

Jesse Rizo’s 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares was one of the fourth graders killed. He was elected to the Uvalde school board in May and has pushed the district to release information requested by news organizations. He said the fragmented nature of the public disclosures spurs residents to suspect government officials are involved in a cover-up.

“And then we start to lose faith and trust,” he said. “And the longer things are delayed from being made public, the greater the lack of confidence we have.”

Brett Cross, the father of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, who was also killed that day, said he is upset that the city released information to media organizations through the settlement without notifying the families first. He demanded that more documents be released.

“They have to show everything, the world, what this is really like,” Cross said. “This is not something we can just turn off. The world has to turn off the TV and walk away. We don’t have time. We have to live this daily.”

Two Texas state judges have ordered the county, DPS and school district to release records related to the shooting. All three have appealed the decisions.

Only the city has settled with the news organizations, saying in a statement Saturday that it wanted to comply with the court order and end a legal battle.

DPS representatives and a school district spokesperson did not immediately return calls or emails Saturday. Uvalde County Sheriff Ruben Nolasco said in a statement that the potential release of records was “under the purview of the office’s attorney.”

Only a handful of responding officers have been publicly disciplined, and no trial date has been set for the two who were indicted by a grand jury in June. These two men – Pete Arredondo and Adrian Gonzales – pleaded not guilty. An attorney for Gonzales called the charges “unprecedented.”

Uvalde city officials chose to release the records against the longstanding wishes of District Attorney Christina Mitchell, who is preparing to indict those two school district officials, including the agency’s former director, for alleged inaction. Mitchell has argued that the release of records will interfere with those cases.

Attorneys representing the news organizations have said there is no evidence to support her claims and that agencies cannot withhold the information under state law.

Laura Prather, a media rights chair for Haynes Boone who represented the news agencies in the legal battle over the records, called the city’s release a “step toward transparency,” though she noted the legal battle continues.

“Openness is necessary to help Uvalde heal and allow us all to understand what happened and learn how to prevent future tragedies,” Prather said.

---