A grieving father is camping out in front of the Uvalde Police Department to demand police officers be fired for their failures during a 2022 school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers.
An independent investigation commissioned by the city found that the officers acted in "good faith" and they should be exonerated for any wrongdoing. The city council was expected to address the findings during a meeting Tuesday but instead said they needed more time to review the report, KSAT reported.
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son Uziyah Garcia was murdered in the mass shooting at Robb Elementary, wants the city council to formally reject the independent investigation.
During Tuesday's meeting, Cross told the city council that he was "done asking, done begging, done pleading," and said he was going to act.
On Wednesday at 11:33 a.m. -- the same time the gunman began shooting at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022 -- Cross began his protest outside the police department.
"I didn't fight before Uzi was gone, so that is one of my biggest regrets," Cross told HuffPost. "I have to continue to fight to make sure that this becomes a better place for my other children."
Cross said he wants to see officers Javier Martinez, Louis Landry and Eduardo Canales, who were among the first to arrive at Robb Elementary, be fired for their failures during the massacre. He spent Wednesday night sleeping outside the police department on a cot, and continued his protest Thursday morning.
"No longer can we sit by and allow these people to get away with it," Cross said in a video posted to X. "Their thin blue line backing each other and putting a job over morality and over children's lives is done. No more. And I will be here until I can no longer be here, which means I will have to be dead. Or until they fire these officers. Enough is enough."
The independent investigation contradicts a scathing report released in January by the U.S. Justice Department, which outlines several critical failures by police. The federal report indicates it took officers 77 minutes to enter the room where the active shooter was armed with an AR-15.
"For 77 agonizing, harrowing minutes, children and staff were trapped with an active shooter. They experienced unimaginable horror," the report states. "The survivors witnessed unspeakable violence and the death of classmates and teachers."
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The DOJ report examines "the multiple failures in the response to the shooting," including the breakdowns in leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training that contributed to those failures. It describes the responding officers' most significant failure as not treating the incident throughout as an active shooter situation and using the available and sufficient resources and equipment to push forward immediately and continuously to eliminate the threat.
This is the second time Cross has protested in the form of camping out. In September 2022, he gathered with others outside school district offices to demand that the district's police officers were suspended while they were being investigated. After 10 days, the district gave in and the officers were suspended.
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