Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin is petitioning District Attorney Christina Mitchell to step down, alleging that she has obstructed justice by blocking the investigation into an horrific shooting which occurred at Robb Elementary School in 2022.
“It’s been fifteen months since this tragedy, and I feel the families and our community deserve answers,” McLaughlin said Tuesday during a press conference he held to announce the lawsuit he had filed against Mitchell. He further argued that the District Attorney has “been involved in a cover-up regarding the City’s investigation into the Robb School tragedy.”
This follows the city’s July 2022 hiring of independent investigator Jesse Prado to explore why Uvalde police officers took an hour to breach the classrooms where 18-year-old Salvador Ramos had shot students and teachers. Even top Texas law enforcement officials have commented on the “abject failure” of the police’s response.
McLaughlin claims that Mitchell’s lack of cooperation has pushed him to take legal action for a second time. He said, “It has been the City’s long-standing goal to seek transparency and integrity in the investigation of this school shooting and its aftermath. Christina Mitchell should resign immediately. Since day one, we have called for transparency from every agency that was there that day.”
Brett Cross, whose son was a victim of the shooting, echoed this call for justice. He said,“It has just been failure after failure. We still see those same officers who sat outside that school wherever we go. We see them at the grocery store, we see them at the convenience store. The same officers who stood by and did nothing. So, for this district attorney to hold onto all of this [evidence] knowing full well what we have been asking and begging for for well over a year, it’s cruel. Everybody just wants us to move on and forget about it, and that’s not going to happen.”
Mitchell has yet to agree to McLaughlin’s demands, claiming that releasing records related to the shooting “would interfere with said ongoing investigation and would impede a thorough and complete investigation.”