UVALDE, Texas – Brett Cross, the father of a child who was killed in a mass school shooting, was arrested Monday morning in Uvalde, according to the Uvalde County Sheriff’s Office.
Uvalde police officers responded to the Uvalde Justice Center to assist in the arrest of a man at 10:43 a.m.
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The police department stated that its officers acted as an assisting agency in the incident and was not the primary agency that was investigating or filing charges against Cross.
Cross was arrested on a class B misdemeanor for Disrupting Meeting or Procession. He was released on a PR bond earlier Monday afternoon.
On May 24, 2022, an 18-year-old gunman entered the Robb Elementary School and killed 19 students and two teachers.
One of the victims was Uziyah Garcia, Cross’ 10-year-old nephew. Cross was also Uziyah’s legal guardian.
He has been protesting ever since the shooting for the suspension of the five school district police officers who were at Robb Elementary on the day of the deadly shooting.
Hundreds of officers who responded to the shooting waited 77 minutes to breach the classrooms, where a gunman used an AR-15 rifle to indiscriminately shoot students and teachers in two adjoining fourth-grade classrooms.
The U.S. Supreme Court has consistently held that officers do not have a constitutional “duty to protect,” even if they have been trained to do so. And even if the Uvalde grand jury decides to indict officers, prosecutors would then have the difficult burden of proving beyond a reasonable doubt that the officers were under a specific legal duty to act and that in failing to act they caused a specific harm, according to the Texas Tribune.
The U.S. Justice Department’s report found failures in leadership, command and coordination at the scene of the shooting. The biggest error, the report stated, was that officers wrongly treated the situation as a barricaded subject incident instead of an active shooter, despite evidence to the contrary.
Several officers resigned or were fired in the months following the shooting. Pete Arredondo, former chief of the school district’s police department, was fired by the school board in August 2022. He was one of a handful of officers named in the DOJ report.