New Questions Over Actions of State Police in Uvalde School Shooting
More questions have been raised as to what officials knew about the threat to the small Uvalde school before the shooting that killed three students and left two wounded.
The Uvalde school board recently held a special meeting to address the tragic incident.
The five members of the board were all present at the meeting and voted unanimously to release a letter addressed to the Texas governor.
In their letter, the board members said the board believes any actions taken by the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) were well within the authority given under current state law.
The Texas DPS has been named as a defendant in the case.
Earlier this week DPS Director Steven McCraw said that the information the agency received about the threat to the Uvalde school was not in the proper format under the law and therefore gave the agency no authority to act.
“We received information from DPS and that’s one of the very few instances where we were wrong,” McCraw said during an interview on Friday.
“The facts are what they are. We still received information and that’s what we needed to do the next day.”
In the letter Friday the board, at the request of state Rep. John Otto, R-Seguin, stated that what DPS had been reported as was a threat to the Uvalde school by a person who, as the board wrote, was believed to be “a person who is a member of the white supremacist and anti-Semitic groups that have surfaced in Texas.”
The person or persons who made the threat should have been reported to law enforcement, not the DPS, the board said.
Otto has asked for a hearing in the case and is also asking state Rep. Donna Howard-Williams, D-Dallas to investigate the actions of the DPS, the board wrote, “to determine whether they followed their procedure properly.”
The board also asked what actions the DPS should take to address the public concern they have been voicing.
Otto