Uvalde Parents Sue School District, Former School Police Chief, Gun Manufacturer

People visit a makeshift memorial for the 19 children and two teachers killed in the May 24 mass school shooting sits in the town square in Uvalde, Texas, on June 21, 2022. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

Three parents of children who survived the May 24 Robb Elementary School massacre in Uvalde, Texas, have sued the school district as well as law enforcement agencies, the former school police chief, and an AR-15 rifle manufacturer.

Plaintiff Corina Camacho is the mother of a 10-year-old boy who survived, but was shot in the leg during the mass shooting that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers. Camacho’s son was in Classroom 112, which, along with adjoining Classroom 111, was where the murders took place.

Two other plaintiffs, Tanisha Rodriquez and Selena Sanchez, are suing on behalf of their children, aged 8 and 9, who were at Robb Elementary on May 24.

Lawyers from Los Angeles-based Baum Hedlund Aristei & Goldman filed the suit in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas on Sept. 28.

Uvalde officials faced harsh criticism after hundreds of local and state law enforcement officers waited for 77 minutes before federal officers entered the classrooms and killed the shooter. A report from the Texas state legislature blamed “systemic failures” and poor leadership for the response that may have contributed to the death toll.

In this photo from surveillance video provided by the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District via the Austin American-Statesman, authorities respond to the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on May 24, 2022. Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District/Austin American-Statesman via AP

The lawsuit alleges that Pete Arredondo, the school district police chief who was fired two months after the massacre, “failed to act, with deliberate indifference to the constitutional rights of Plaintiffs, and the rights of Plaintiffs under state law.”

In the same vein, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (UCISD) is also named in the lawsuit.

UCISD spokesperson Anne Marie Espinoza said previously that the district has engaged with Texas-based private investigator firm JPPI Investigations to “conduct an independent review of the Uvalde CISD Police Department’s actions” on May 24.

Espinoza didn’t respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

Another defendant is the City of Uvalde, named as the entity under which the Uvalde Police Department sits. Both the police department and Mariano Pargas, who was the acting chief of the Uvalde police department on the day of the massacre, are accused of failing to act.

The city of Uvalde responded to a request for comment on the lawsuit, saying “The city of Uvalde does not comment on pending litigation.”

A makeshift memorial sits outside Robb Elementary School, the site of a mass shooting on May 24, in Uvalde, Texas, on June 21, 2022. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

The third individual named in the lawsuit is Mandy Gutierrez, the principal at Robb Elementary School. “She had available resources so she could communicate the alerts to everyone. And she chose not to, even though it was at her fingertips,” said lead attorney for the plaintiffs Stephanie Sherman.

Sherman said she didn’t have a case for including the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office or the Texas Department of Public Safety but that could change once she has all the facts in the timeline.

The lawsuit may hinge around the alleged violations of the Fourteenth Amendment, which provides for equal protection under the law, adding that “nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.”

The Supreme Court has ruled that police officers or government agencies have no constitutional duty to protect an individual, unless they’re in a custodial situation such as prison, jail, or mental institution, where they’re unable to move freely.

Sherman told The Epoch Times that she will argue that the children at Robb Elementary were indeed in custody as they weren’t free to leave once law enforcement was on scene.

“Once they [police] start taking care of you, once they are engaged with you, like in this situation—and this applies to the school district and the police—once they take you in custody, so to speak, because the kids were not free to leave, they were in lockdown, the kids were in fact in custody,” Sherman said.

In addition, law enforcement officers outside the school were restraining and preventing parents from entering the school to rescue their children.

A Uvalde Police Department vehicle in Uvalde, Texas, on June 21, 2022. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

However, in 2020, an appeals court ruling upheld a prior decision around the Fourteenth Amendment argument that said Broward County officials didn’t have a “custodial” duty to protect the students during the mass shooting at Florida’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School.

“Plaintiffs suggest that the essential nature of a public school’s role and control over its students requires that schools provide protection and safety for their students. However, the suggestion that school attendance equates to the level of custody implicating a constitutional obligation to protect has been expressly rejected by the Eleventh Circuit,” the appeals court stated in its ruling.

Sherman said the lawsuit doesn’t put a figure on the amount of punitive damages the parents are seeking because it’s possible other parents will join the suit, and she doesn’t yet have all the information regarding the response failures.

Companies Being Sued

The Uvalde parents are also suing three firearms-related businesses: Georgia-based Daniel Defense, which manufactures and sells AR-15-style semi-automatic rifles; Oasis Outback, which is a firearms dealer in Uvalde; and Arkansas-based Firequest, an online supplier from which the Uvalde shooter bought an accessory that converted his semiautomatic rifle “into the equivalent of a machine gun.”

“Gun makers and sellers deliberately push their lethal weapons into the hands of unpredictable, emotional, and volatile young adult civilians knowing that it is needlessly reckless, absurd, and dangerous to the public,” the suit states.

The lawsuit names Motorola Solutions, Inc. as a defendant for providing the communication devices to police, which failed during the shooting.

“Their radios weren’t even working inside the school in some instances,” Sherman said.

A banner depicting the victims of the May 24 mass school shooting sits in the town square in Uvalde, Texas, on June 21, 2022. Charlotte Cuthbertson/The Epoch Times

The lawsuit also names defendant Schneider Electric USA, Inc. as the maker of the security door at Robb Elementary that failed to lock and allowed the shooter to gain access to the school.

Sherman said the lawsuit casts a broad net over multiple defendants, but that it’s “a big soup of problems.”

“It is a collective domino effect of bad decisions, conscious decisions, poor planning, lack of planning, and so many players involved,” she said.

“The horrors at Robb Elementary School were only possible because so many in positions of power were negligent, careless, and reckless.”

Sherman said such cases usually take up to three years.

“The first thing that will happen is, as soon as the defendants are served, they will file motions to dismiss,” she said.

If she successfully argues that especially high hurdle, the case will go to trial.