by Lomi Kriel, ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, and Alex Nguyen and Paul Cobler, The Texas Tribune

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Records released this week provide more details about campus safety concerns raised before the deadly 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting in Uvalde, Texas, and include some surviving teachers’ accounts that school leaders didn’t check on them after they were injured and traumatized.

The documents from Uvalde County and the school district also indicate that the 18-year-old shooter had behavioral and attendance issues before he dropped out of high school, and that his mother had told sheriff’s deputies that she was scared of him.

The county and Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District released the materials — nearly 12 gigabytes — as part of a settlement agreement in a yearslong lawsuit that news organizations, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, brought against state and local governments.

The records reinforce the failure of law enforcement agencies to more quickly confront the gunman, who killed 19 students and two teachers in the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. ProPublica and the Tribune previously found that officers wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and waited 77 minutes to confront him. No officer took control of the response, which prevented coordination and communication between agencies.

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which dispatched more than 90 officers to the school, has appealed a separate judge’s order to release hundreds of videos and investigative files to the news organizations that sued for access. The agency’s effort to slow the release of information continues to draw criticism from families of the victims, teachers and the former mayor, who is now a Republican state lawmaker.

“It’s important so that the families can begin to heal, so that the families can begin to trust, so they begin to have some sort of closure,” said Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece, Jackie Cazares, was killed during the May 24, 2022, massacre.

Rizo, now a school board member who voted to release the agency’s records, added, “It will never be complete closure, but some sort of closure, and rebuilding that trust in law enforcement.”

The news organizations will continue to fight for release of the DPS records, said Laura Prather, a media law chair for Haynes Boone who is representing the outlets.

Law enforcement experts largely regard the Uvalde shooting response as among the worst in American history. A U.S. Justice Department report in January 2024 affirmed many of the newsrooms’ initial findings and recommended that all........

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