Uvalde Family Demands ‘Accountability’ for Botched Shooting Response in Emotional CNN Interview: ‘I Want Them to Admit What They Did’
The family of 10-year-old Uvalde School Shooting victim Amerie Jo Garza gave an emotional interview to CNN — demanding transparency over the failed response to the massacre where 21 people lost their lives.
Amerie’s father, Angel Garza, her mother, Kimberly Garza, and her grandmother, Berlinda Arreola, joined CNN’s John Berman on Tuesday to discuss the 77 minute surveillance video retrieved from Robb Elementary School. Reports indicate the video shows police officers had an initial exchange of gunfire, but then they spent the next hour arming themselves instead of moving in on the classroom where the shooter went on his killing spree.
The police response to the Uvalde shooting has been broadly condemned as a colossal failure, and public figures are demanding the video’s release to address outstanding questions about the shooting. Asked for his thoughts about the video, Mr. Garza said that “it makes you angry. It makes you wonder what they were doing, why they didn’t do their job.”
As a parent, as a father, I have a job, and that’s to protect her. And they kept me from doing my job. They literally had the chance, and somebody tells you not to do something. But you have a moral obligation to do it. They told me not to go in, but I was still trying to go in and save them. They put me in handcuffs. It’s just disturbing that they can’t come up with the right explanation to us that they owe us. Because, I mean, that’s the least that we deserve.
Mrs. Garza’s voice was shaking as she followed up by speaking of how hard it is to go on social media after the shooting. She said that she learned more about the shooting where her daughter died through social media, rather than hearing directly from the authorities.
“I want accountability. I want them to admit what they did,” she said. “We don’t get answers. We don’t get calls like, you know, this is happening. Or, you know, we don’t get updates. We feel like we are the last people who know anything. We feel like when we find out things, it’s on social media.”
When Arreola spoke next, she called for the video’s release as a matter of “closure” for what happened inside of the school.
“They failed us. And to be honest, like there’s no exchanges that will justify them not going in,” she said. “Seventy-seven minutes is just way too long.”
Mr. Garza eventually got back in the conversation with an emotional lament that different agencies have tried to deflect the blame over the shooting instead of taking responsibility.
Nobody wants to admit they were wrong, bur daughter isn’t here anymore. So, we deserve to know what happened. We don’t know what she did in her last moments. We don’t know what will she was thinking any of that. So we deserve to know what happened. If you were wrong, admit that you were wrong. You cost kids their lives, adults their lives. This is one of the biggest mess-ups…in American history. And everybody is sitting here playing the blame game because they want to look like they were the ones that made a change…But there was just a lot of cowardly actions.
Watch above, via CNN.
