Robb Elementary, the school in Uvalde, Texas where a teenaged gunman killed 19 children and two teachers in May, will be razed, NBC News reports.
Mayor Don McLaughlin said during a Uvalde Council meeting Tuesday that officials are planning to demolish the school. “My understanding — and I had this discussion with the superintendent — that school will be demolished,” he said. He added: “You can never ask a child to go back or a teacher to go back in that school ever.” McLaughlin did not specify when the demolition would take place.
The news came the same day the Texas Department of Public Safety Director (DPS) Steve McCraw called the law enforcement response to the Uvalde school massacre an “abject failure.” His testimony during a state Senate committee hearing in Austin was the first time McCraw had publicly addressed the police response since a late May press conference.
“There’s compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack at Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we’ve learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” McCraw testified on Tuesday, where he also said police could have stopped the gunman within three minutes after he entered the school, but they did not do so.
Law enforcement’s response and the conflicting information that was provided in the aftermath has been heavily criticized and is the subject of multiple investigations, including from the U.S. Justice Department, Texas DPS, and the local district attorney’s office. Instead of immediately confronting and stopping the active shooter as is protocol following the Columbine killings in 1999, in Uvalde it took law enforcement 77 minutes to confront and stop the shooter.