The Uvalde district attorney is withholding information that would help a medical team determine if some children could have been saved during the mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers at their elementary school in Uvalde, Texas.
“It’s been months,” Mark Escott, chief medical officer for the Texas Department of Public Safety and head of the panel, told ABC News. “And the most important piece of evidence are the autopsies, and I don’t have any of those.”
The Texas DPS created a medical panel after the shooting to determine if any of the 21 victims could have been saved. The panel consisted of “five medical experts to perform a ‘casualty analysis’ to determine whether any of those killed at Robb might have survived if police, first aid and medical assistance had reached them sooner,” according to the outlet.
The panel needs to review the victims’ autopsies, but Christina Mitchell, Uvalde’s DA, has not given the panel the findings.
Gloria Cazares, whose 9-year-old daughter Jackie was murdered during the mass shooting, told “Good Morning America” that she believes her daughter could have been saved if police officers acted sooner. When police finally killed the shooter, Jackie was found with a bullet in her chest but with a pulse.
“We have to continue to fight for Jackie,” Cazares said on “GMA.”
The DPS and Mitchell did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
More than 400 police officers had gathered on Robb Elementary’s campus on May 24, 2022, and it took more than an hour for them to confront the shooter. Steve McCraw, director of the Texas DPS, called the police response on that day an “abject failure.”
A report from the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training in June 2022 determined that lives could have been saved.
“While we do not have definitive information at this point, it is possible that some of the people who died during this event could have been saved if they had received more rapid medical care,” the report read.