The mayor of Uvalde, Texas, blasted the media on Tuesday, calling it “chicken” for releasing surveillance footage that shows armed law enforcement officials standing outside a Robb Elementary School classroom for over an hour as a gunman fatally shot 19 children and two teachers.
“I want to go on the record. The way that video was released today was one of the most chicken things I’ve ever seen,” Mayor Don McLaughlin said at a city council meeting.
The mayor, who last month accused state authorities of releasing information about the May 24 shooting to make local law enforcement look bad, took issue with the public being able to see the footage before the victims’ families.
“This video needed to be released, but the families should’ve gotten to see it first,” he said. “It was very unprofessional, which I think this investigation has been, in my opinion, since day one.”
City Councilman Ernest W. “Chip” King III went a step further, calling the media “chicken shit.”
“They did that for ratings and they did that for money and that’s the only reason why they put that out there,” he said while specifically criticizing the decision to not edit out footage of the gunman or the sound of gunfire.
State Rep. Dustin Burrows (R) had announced earlier in the day that he planned to lead a private viewing and briefing of the footage on Sunday with the victims’ families. The footage would have been publicly released after that, he said.
Some attending the meeting expressed outrage at the footage’s release, saying it causes more harm to the victims’ families than good, while others confronted the mayor over why more information wasn’t available about the police response.
McLaughlin at one point got into a back-and-forth with two men who questioned his decision to criticize the media and not law enforcement.
The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety also said he is “deeply disappointed” about the video’s release on Tuesday but also condemned the law enforcement response, calling it in a statement “an abject failure.”
The 77-minute video, which was edited to omit the sound of children screaming and blur the face of a student, was released by the Austin American-Statesman and KVUE, offering a both stunning and disturbing recount of the attack by an 18-year-old local man.
The American-Statesman has defended its decision to publish the video, calling it a matter of public interest.
“Our goal is to continue to bring to light what happened at Robb Elementary, which the families and friends of the Uvalde victims have long been asking for,” said the paper’s executive editor, Manny Garcia, in an online editorial.
The editorial noted that there have consistently been “changing stories, heroic-sounding narratives proven to be false and a delay or in most cases rejection of media requests for public information by law enforcement leaders, public officials and elected leaders.”
“We are all aligned for the truth,” he said.