Uvalde Mayor Accuses DA of Cover-Up in Robb Elementary School Shooting Investigation

Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin accused District Attorney Christina Mitchell of being involved in a cover-up and called on her to resign in a letter published on Wednesday.

This accusation comes in the wake of the city suing to get access to law enforcement records associated with the May 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 21 people dead, 19 of whom were children.

In the letter, McLaughlin explained that the city had hired Jesse Prado, an outside investigator, to look into the controversial actions of the city’s police department on that spring day.

The initial police response to the Uvalde shooting has been widely criticized, as local law enforcement officers waited outside of a classroom instead of attempting to breach the room.

The mayor wrote that he believes Mitchell is being evasive and not providing records to the city because her chief investigator, Shayne Gilland, was one of the officials at the school during the shooting. 

McLaughlin claims that Mitchell has not given Prado access to the information necessary for the investigation.

“Mitchell has refused to provide the city with all the information Mr. Prado has requested, resulting in the City filing suit against her in her official capacity to obtain the necessary information for Mr. Prado to complete the City's administrative investigation,” McLaughlin wrote in the letter. 

The city of Uvalde initially sued Mitchell in December 2022, in an effort to gain access to body-cam footage and incident reports related to the mass shooting. McLaughlin claims that the initial lawsuit was dropped because Mitchell told the city that she would cooperate with them.

“She failed, once again, to keep her word,” McLaughlin wrote in the letter.

In July 2022, Mitchell told the Uvalde Leader-News that she chooses to refrain from commenting on anything related to the investigation because she did not want to endanger the investigation. 

“All I am ethically permitted to say is that there exists an investigation by the Texas Rangers, with the assistance of the FBI, into the mass shooting at Robb Elementary.”