It’s been a little over a week since the shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed at Robb Elementary School. While the entire nation is reeling, the tragedy is hitting Latinos particularly hard, as they see the names and the photos of victims who look and sound like them. That’s added a complicated layer of grief and trauma onto the community, says Maria Maldonado Morales, a clinical social worker at Texas Children’s Hospital in Houston. The shooting in Uvalde isn’t the first to target Latinos in the country — or even in Texas. The 2019 shooting at a Walmart store in El Paso, in which 23 people died, was also racially motivated. “It’s not only the loss of life, the loss of safety, but I think the community that we feel as sort of Latinos in the United States adds a layer of frustration, of sadness, of anger even,” Morales says. “The clients that I see – I work with primarily Latino students in school settings – and many of them have said … these kids look like me. This could have been me, or this could have been my family, or this could have been us.” — What the Shooting in Uvalde Has Meant for the Latino Community
Uvalde report: 400 officers but ‘egregiously poor’ decisions Nearly 400 law enforcement officials rushed to a mass shooting at a Uvalde elementary school, but “egregiously poor decision-making” resulted in more than an hour of chaos before the gunman who took 21 lives was finally confronted and killed, according to a damning investigative report released Sunday. The nearly 80-page report was the first to criticize both state and federal law enforcement, and not just local authorities in the South Texas town for the bewildering inaction by heavily armed officers as a gunman fired inside a fourth-grade classroom at Robb Elementary School.