‘Just Don’t Be Afraid’: CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz on How The Press Is Still Fighting For the Truth About What Happened In Uvalde

CNN’s crime and justice correspondent, Shimon Prokupecz, has spent the last three weeks on the ground, first in Buffalo and then in Uvalde, Texas, covering the aftermath of two horrific mass shootings.

Prokupecz explains to Mediaite how Buffalo and Uvalde were two very different stories and laid out the challenge of getting Texas authorities to clear up the “bad information” they initially released to the public regarding the murder of 19 students and 2 teachers.

The country watched on May 27th as a frustrated press corps, Prokupecz included, pushed Steven McCraw, the Texas Department of Public Safety director, on why police officers waited outside Robb Elementary School as the mass shooter had barricaded himself in a classroom with children still in it.

Prokupecz recalls McCraw finally confirming that officers waited over an hour outside the school before going in as “like someone punched me in the stomach.” In the week since McCraw’s contentious press conference, police have stopped talking to the press, a development Prokupecz says has made his job “extremely challenging.” But, as he explains, there are still many unanswered questions regarding the police response in Uvalde. Prokupecz, along with his produced Matthew Friedman, remains on the ground in Uvalde and has no intention to stop pushing until both the local community and the nation get all the answers.

Read the full Q&A with CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz, which has been edited for length and clarity:

Mediaite: What are the latest updates from on the ground, do you feel the authorities are offering more transparency as to what exactly happened at Robb Elementary School?

Shimon Prokupecz: The local police have stopped talking to us, now everything has to go to the DA after a week of them being pretty open about talking, whether they were providing bad information or good information, they were talking, but now they’ve completely stopped talking.

We’ve heard different reasons for it. The DA is claiming that she is in the middle of her investigation, I don’t know what she would be investigating because the gunman is dead.

So, I mean, is she investigating the actions by the police officers? I don’t, I don’t know if that’s true. We don’t know. But she claims there’s now, she’s now running her own investigation. And so, as a result of that, these officers are no longer allowed to speak to us.

How do you feel that lack of transparency is impacting the community? And also, how is that impacting your approach now to reporting the story?

It’s extremely challenging. Look, I’ve covered stories like this where there are investigations and the DA has its own thing going. So, you know, it’s understandable. You have an investigation and so you don’t talk. But that usually happens almost from the beginning or like a couple of days after there’s some general information that’s released and then you sort of say, okay, well, the DA is now investigating, let’s say, if there’s a suspect. You always get that in those cases where someone is arrested.

In this case, the problem is they spent days giving us bad information and they were talking freely about all the bad information. And then when we started confronting them on the inconsistencies and the bad information and how things weren’t making sense, they finally, somewhat, put a more accurate timeline and a more accurate story together that was not favorable to the police, wasn’t favorable to the investigation, and to what happened here.

And so all of a sudden after that, it’s like, okay, well now we’re no longer speaking, deferring to the DA.

That’s the problem here, because you don’t have days and days of bad information, usually in stories.

And then when all of a sudden, when things are looking bad and or not making sense, the investigators are identifying something different to talk about.

So that’s the difference in this story, compared to every other shooting story that I covered.

I was just in Buffalo before this and it was a completely different story. You had the police commissioner and the mayor and the FBI, everyone working together, and they gave one solid similar story to what happened. They gave a lot of information. And in that instance, you do have a suspect. You do know you will potentially have a criminal case right here.

You don’t have that [in Uvalde]. So, it just doesn’t make, that part to me, doesn’t make any sense. And so, of course, it’s raising a lot of suspicions.

Especially, I would imagine in the community that kind of lack of transparency makes local, the local sentiment feel that there’s something to hide?

Correct. And that’s the most important thing in all this. The town is — we’re still in the middle of funerals. They’re still not probably processing exactly what happened right there, dealing with the emotions. And they’re dealing with the feelings, which are horrendous and horrible.

And it’s the worst time to pay attention to the news. But in the end, these families are going to want to know what happened and the truth of what happened and a greater picture, really, for the country, but the greater picture also for law enforcement, because the mistakes that were made here were so gross that you can’t allow something like this to happen again.

And they’ve admitted those things. So that’s part of the story here. You have got to get to the bottom of what happened.

I’ve talked to law enforcement in other places, and usually, by now there are briefings done for other law enforcement agencies so that they know exactly what happened. Part of it is the sharing of information so that you prevent something like this from happening anywhere else.

And that hasn’t been done even in this case. So it’s just very strange.

Speaking of briefings, could we go back to last week to the presser with Steve McCraw. What was that moment like as journalists, including yourself, really pressured him to correct some of the timeline, correct the narrative. What was that experience like for you?

I honestly, you know, that question when I asked him about the officers being in the hallway for that hour, “what is it, what did they do? What exactly did they do?”

And then when he said nothing at that time, I was shocked. There was this feeling in my stomach that was very strange. I didn’t know how to respond to it because I was so shocked. So, the only thing I could say was why? But it was definitely like someone punched me in the stomach.

Everything just stopped in that second, because it was kind of my suspicion. That was kind of my feeling, what they were hiding, that they all stood around for quite some time in that hallway while the kids were calling 911.

Listening to him go through that timeline and to hear that there were kids begging for the police to come and rescue them all the way through 12:47, I think it was, I don’t recall the exact time, but it was just so shocking to hear.

It was just — it didn’t feel real. It just didn’t seem possible. And then the only thing that I could do is ask why, and then his explanation. There really was no explanation.

As someone who covers law enforcement, to hear him say that they were treating this as a barricaded subject, versus an active shooter, to me made no sense. Because a barricaded person is not posing a threat usually to anyone but themselves, themselves and the officers, the person is usually by themselves in a room. And there’s no reason to force your way in.

The person doesn’t want to come out. You try to negotiate, you try to talk to them. But there’s no threat of harm to life except their own life and the officers’ lives, so the officers usually just stay back.

But this situation we knew was completely different. I mean, he was inside this classroom with these kids still firing his gun. And the idea that they did nothing at that time, it was just, it was shocking.

And then we still don’t have a complete explanation because the key decision-makers, if there were any decision-makers, have not explained themselves.

To follow up, given the shifting narratives in that press conference, which some headlines described as “the most enraging press conference in American history,” what kind of advice would you give to other journalists in dealing with a situation like that, where you don’t know if you can trust the authorities and you need to get them to correct their own information?

I think just don’t be afraid.

I have gone through moments in my own career, many times, when I wasn’t sure if I should press ahead or whether I was in the right or wrong or whatever. But what drove me here is the curiosity and feeling that we weren’t getting the full story and that we weren’t getting the truth.

And so knowing that, feeling that, you just have to go with that, right? And push. Push with that. Always be courteous, always be forceful and know what you’re talking about, obviously, and do the research and know the information and just be armed with information.

But most of all, I think just if you feel that something isn’t right, just go with your gut and just keep asking questions until you get the answers you feel are needed or that certainly the community deserves because that wasn’t happening.

We kept getting different stories. So, at some point, you get the sense that something isn’t right and you just have to push for it and you got to push them and make sure that they tell the truth.

And I think the main thing to me, it’s always been just get at the truth. But also just push when you can, push when you have to, push when you know something isn’t right. Push. Keep pushing till you get the answers.

And, if you can get them to do it in that kind of a setting — publicly at length for the world to see.

That’s where it should be done because a lot of times they want to hide and not come out so publicly. But when you get them in that moment and you just keep pushing, it’s like you just never know what’s going to happen. And I felt that we were just not getting a complete picture of what happened here.

I like that. “Don’t be afraid.” You know, it was very apparent watching the press push McCraw, you included of course, that that tactic really did yield the information that the country needed. I’m just curious what your thoughts are as headlines from Uvalde and Buffalo become less frequent. What do you see as your role as a journalist, who was there and interacted with the community, in keeping attention focused on the story?

In this story, I feel we still don’t have the full story.

I feel that the role of journalism should always be, obviously, to hold people accountable and not allow them to hide behind whatever excuses they use. In this case, it may be that there’s a DA investigation, but when for weeks after the people who are talking and then all of a sudden they don’t like the narrative that’s out there now they decide they don’t want to talk, you have got to keep pushing.

And look, we’re hitting walls now. Honestly, it’s just getting much harder to do this. But this is what they want.

And I think we can’t just let it go and we just have to keep pushing, pushing, and pushing. And hopefully, somewhere there’s a breakthrough. You push hard enough, long enough, maybe, hopefully, that happens.

I think that’s the thing with all these stories. You don’t give up.

In the Buffalo situation and some of these other mass shootings, it all becomes about this community and the grieving that communities are facing and the loss that they’re facing.

In Buffalo, it’s a tough community because they’re so underserved, from the food issues there to the economic issues there that you hope they get the help that they need.

It’s sad that it took a mass killing at a supermarket for that to happen, but that is a community that is in need in many, many ways.

And I think this community it’s the same thing. There are funerals still going on and are going to go on for at least another two weeks.

So of course we have to be respectful of that side of things and that side of the story.

Given how there are just so many different dimensions to both Uvalde and Buffalo, have the past two weeks changed your mind or evolved your thinking at all about how the media should be covering these events?

Skeptical. Be more skeptical. And just be very skeptical of initial stories when things don’t add up. I think that’s the most important thing. And that I will tell you, for me, that certainly has been the way I’ve been operating here.

In Buffalo, there was certainly some certain skepticism about missed signs. In these mass shootings, there are always signs that the kid was having problems at home, the kid was having problems at school.

Who knew what? And when did they know it? And what did they do about it? In these shootings, that’s one of the things when I cover it, that’s how I go in.

Because when I did the Michigan school shooting last year in Oxford. We had a similar issue because we knew at that school police did not do everything they were supposed to do and eventually, we got to the bottom of it.

Again there were indications that there were things that could have prevented that. There were things here that potentially could have prevented what happened or could have, let’s say, made things better.

So that’s the thing. Just be skeptical. I just always go in not believing the initial story, maybe even the second story, and just keep asking questions and wondering and being curious, curious about whether something like this could have been prevented.

Were there signs here somewhere along the way that this could have been prevented?

One last question. What do you think are the final big unanswered questions regarding Robb Elementary School. 

There is still a lot of focus on the hour, obviously, who was running the show in that hour when the officers went away and basically did nothing, as far as we’re told, by state police.

We are missing some nuance in the decision making and some color of that decision making and the play-by-play of what was going on in the hallway.

But also, in the last day or two, what’s become very important is knowing more about what went on in the beginning. In any of these incidents of active shooters, law enforcement will say the first few minutes are the most critical because you don’t have a lot of time to make decisions, you don’t have a lot of time to take action.

And there was a period of probably about 6 minutes in the beginning, from the time the 911 call happened to the time the gunman entered the school. I want to know more about what was going on at that time.

There was a school officer who wasn’t at the school. We don’t know whether that person was supposed to be at the school, but [the shooter] comes on the scene, climbed the fence, and then obviously gets into this door that’s unlocked.

That’s the other question. Why was that door unlocked? Was there a maintenance issue? Was it that it just did not lock? So that’s the other big question.

And obviously, this school officer, were they supposed to be there or not? That’s because in Buffalo, just to give you an example, there was a security guard, a former police officer who was armed and shot at the gunman.

The gunman is heavily protected. He’s got all this protective ballistic gear on him.

But because the security guard shoots at him — and really does nothing, he doesn’t injure him — he slows him down and that saved lives.

Even if it only slows him down by 10 seconds, that allows the police 10 extra seconds to react to get there. We don’t have that in this situation.

We have a story of officers going into the building. The guy fires at them. We hear the officers were grazed. We don’t know exactly what their injuries were. And then they retreat. They fall back. We don’t know why they did not go back.

So in those few minutes, there were about seven officers here who were in the school, but the minute the gunman fires at them, they retreat.

We don’t know why. That is another thing to me that’s unanswered. And who else was here? What other senior leaders were here? Why are they pinning everything on this one school chief of police, who runs a six-person police department? That’s a lot, a lot of questions.