Victims of the Uvalde school shooting have filed a $27 billion lawsuit against local and state police, city and other school and law enforcement officials for failing to follow active shooter protocol as officers waited more than an hour did. The assailant inside a fourth-grade classroom, according to court documents.
The lawsuit, which was filed in federal court in Austin On Tuesday, the class action seeks status and damages for survivors of the May 24 shooting who have sustained “emotional or psychological harm as a result of defendant’s conduct and omissions on that date.”
Those filing the lawsuit include school employees and representatives of minors who were present at Robb Elementary when a gunman stormed the campus, killing 19 children and two teachers, the worst incident in the US in nearly a decade. The deadliest was the school shooting.
“The conduct of the three hundred and seventy-six (376) law enforcement officers who were on hand for seventy-seven minutes of law enforcement indecision, procrastination, and harm, instead of following previous training to stop an active shooter, fell short of their duties” well below the bound standards,” the lawsuit claims.
city Uvalde officials said they had not been served the paperwork as of Friday and would not comment on pending litigation.
The Texas Department of Public Safety and the Uvalde Consolidated School District did not respond to requests for comment.
A group of survivors also sued Daniels Defense, the company that made the gun used by the shooter, and the store where he purchased the gun. That separate lawsuit seeks $6 billion in damages.
Daniel Defense, located at Black Creek, Georgia, did not respond to a request for comment. In a congressional hearing over the summer, CEO Marty Daniels called the Uvalde shooting and others “deeply troubling” but dissociated the weapons themselves from the violence, saying that America’s mass shootings solve local problems at a local level. is to solve.
Earlier this week, the mother of a child killed in the shooting filed another federal lawsuit against several of the same people and entities.
Two officers have been fired and others have resigned or been placed on leave because of their actions at the scene. In October, Colonel Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, acknowledged mistakes by officials when confronted for the first time by families of Uvalde victims over falsification and shifting of accounts from law enforcement and a lack of transparency in available information. , But McCraw defended his agency, saying they “didn’t fail” Uvalde.
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follow up APCoverage of the Uvalde school shooting: https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting https://apnews.com/hub/uvalde-school-shooting