By Kanishka Singh
(Reuters) – A Texas state senator sued the state’s Department of Public Safety on Wednesday for access to the complete records of the shooting at an elementary school in May that killed 19 children and two teachers.
Texas state Senator Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat who represents Uvalde where the mass shooting took place, said that the response to the massacre at the Robb Elementary School “has been full of misinformation and outright lies” from the start. “The community of Uvalde deserves answers now,” he said in a statement after filing the lawsuit in a district court in Travis County.
The state senator said that the department had denied his open records request for documents about the shooting. The department did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin said a day earlier that the Uvalde County district attorney has asked the city to not release records related to the district attorney’s probe into the school shooting.
McLaughlin also said the district attorney and the Texas Department of Public Safety have not provided the city with any information on their probe into the shooting.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said on Tuesday the law enforcement response to the shooting was “an abject failure” in which a commander put the lives of officers over those of the children.
Many parents and relatives of the children and staff have expressed deep anger over police action after the gunman entered the school and began shooting.
Greg Abbott, Texas’s Republican governor, has also said he wants all facts regarding the shooting released to the victims’ families and the public as quickly as possible.
The shooting in Uvalde and another racist shooting in Buffalo, New York, where 10 people were killed at a supermarket, has prompted U.S. lawmakers to work on a deal to curb gun violence.
(Reporting by Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Jonathan Oatis and Aurora Ellis)
