“The school will be demolished,” Mayor Don McLaughlin (R) of Uvalde, Texas, told city counselors during a contentious meeting Tuesday night, as his city continues to grapple with last month’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. “You can never ask a child to go back, or teacher to go back, in that school ever.”
McLaughlin’s plan, which he confirmed he’d discussed with the school district superintendent, is understandable; other mass shooting sites have been similarly razed or retrofitted in service of communal healing. In the case of Uvalde, however, the promise to demolish the site where 19 children were gunned down in their classroom comes amidst a struggle to even identify — much less inform the public of — why a contingent of heavily armed law enforcement officers seemingly chose to stand idly by while the shooting took place. Indeed, each new revelation about how police did and didn’t act that day seems to raise more horrifying questions than before, pointing at not only a massive cascading failure during the shooting itself, but a slapdash effort to cover up and shirk responsibility for what went wrong.
