AUSTIN, Texas – Roland Gutierrez is stuck.
He’s stuck in a very specific moment. The San Antonio state senator who represents Uvalde is watching videos for the first time of the horror that unfolded at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.
Gutierrez watches as the attacker comes into frame, tosses his hair and enters two classrooms. The gunshots ring out. He watches for 77 excruciating minutes as state, local and federal police are stalled in the hallways, with the occasional loud reports of more shots from an 18-year-old’s newly purchased AR-15.
It’s a moment that has fueled Gutierrez to demand that state lawmakers address guns. A moment that led him to file a slate of legislation placing new restrictions on firearms. A moment that led the two-term Democrat to become one of the fiercest allies of the Uvalde victims’ families.
It’s also a moment that has led him to the end of a biennial legislative session where he has engaged in open defiance of the Senate’s powerful leader, been shut down, told to be quiet and watched all of his efforts to do something about the Uvalde shooting at the Capitol end in failure.
“I see myself stuck in this moment with these videos of dead kids,” Gutierrez told The Dallas Morning News. “And I see nobody advocating for them. It’s got me stuck.”
“I just go places and I see people move on with their lives,” he added. “But I don’t understand how in the world people don’t make the connection that this should be affecting all of us.”
Defeated but defiant, Gutierrez has emerged as the rare member of the Senate willing to go against the grain in a chamber that prides itself for its decorum. On multiple occasions, Gutierrez has tearfully addressed the other 30 members and lieutenant governor, pleading for the conservative dominated body to take some action on gun restrictions.
At every turn, he has been rebuffed. Yet the 52-year-old immigration lawyer has seen his star rise during a session that has taken an emotional toll. He is now reportedly considering a possible challenge against Republican Sen. Ted Cruz in 2024.
Deep immersion in Mexican culture
Gutierrez was born in San Antonio to a Mexican immigrant father and a mother from South Texas who died while he was a baby. His father remarried a Mexican immigrant woman creating a family he described as a “Mexican Brady Bunch.”
He was raised on the west side of San Antonio in a working class immigrant community. But his father’s job as an insurance salesman provided his family with more luxury than most, and he was educated in local private schools.
Gutierrez attended St. Mary’s University of Law and began practicing law as a criminal defense attorney. He was driven in part by a childhood that included deep immersion in Mexican culture and numerous trips to visit his father’s family in the small town of General Zuazua near Monterrey.
He moved into immigration law and maintains a small practice focusing on deportation and asylum cases.
Gutierrez caught the politics bug while working on the 2000 campaign of longtime friend Rep. Trey Martinez Fischer, who leads the House Democratic Caucus. The following year, Gutierrez ran for San Antonio City Council, losing by 136 votes in a run-off.
“I wanted to try to add some value and change some things in our community,” he said.
He then ran unsuccessfully to be a Bexar County Commissioner in 2004 before winning election to the San Antonio City Council in 2005. He campaigned on a platform that emphasized funding essential services. “I ran on speed humps, curbs and sidewalks,” he said.
He became a state representative in 2008, running unopposed to succeed Robert Puente, who retired from the Legislature and now runs the San Antonio water utility.
Gutierrez remained in the House until he ran for Senate, narrowly defeating a Republican incumbent in a district that stretches from southern San Antonio to Big Bend National Park. He quickly ruffled feathers in the Senate, suing the state over redistricting, partnering with then-fellow freshman Democratic Sen. Sarah Eckhardt in a legal fight that led to a perfunctory redo of the process during this session.
He won reelection in 2022, beating a Republican challenger by nearly 11 percentage points and making him the senator that would represent Uvalde when the unspeakable happened.
May 24, 2022
On the morning of May 24, 2022, Gutierrez took his children to school. He trekked north on Interstate 35 to Austin, where he was set to host a political fundraiser that evening at a private club two blocks from the Capitol grounds.
He was at lunch downtown when he was notified of the shooting. Gutierrez called Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw, who confirmed that an incident had happened and that a child was dead.
It had been about 90 minutes since the gunman first walked into the school.
“In my mind, I assumed that this was some kind of weird domestic violence thing,” Gutierrez said.
He continued to make calls to the Texas Education Agency, Gov. Greg Abbott’s office and again to DPS, as the death toll continued to rise. About 90 minutes before his fundraiser was scheduled to begin, he made his way to the venue, the Austin Club, and canceled the fundraiser.
It was a warm night in Uvalde by the time Gutierrez and a staffer arrived in the city of 15,200 residents about 80 miles east of San Antonio.
First, they drove by the shooter’s home and then headed to a makeshift reunification center at the city’s civic center.
There, families of victims had gathered on the lawn of the property, splitting off into small groups, some huddled in prayer.
Gutierrez saw several people that he would come to know closely in the following year. He couldn’t find the bravery to approach them.
“You can’t just go up to them and say, ‘I am your senator, what can I do?’ It just didn’t seem right to me,” he said.
“And I was scared,” he added. “I don’t know. It was a mess.”
By 10 p.m., the cries began.
Families had given samples of their DNA. It was being matched with the bodies of 9, 10 and 11-year-olds so mangled by bullets, they were unidentifiable by those tests and items of clothing.
“Every 10 minutes, somebody was told, and you would just hear wailing like you’ve never heard before. Loss and pain like you’ve never heard. I hear it in my head to this day,” he said.
The aftermath
On the Friday after the shooting, Gutierrez was near Robb Elementary. He was listening to a radio broadcast of Gov. Greg Abbott was speaking at a news conference across town at Uvalde High School.
Gutierrez grew angry.
It was becoming more clear that the police response to the shooting was at best flawed, and at worst cost lives. The public began to learn of the 77 minutes that elapsed between when police arrived and when the shooter was killed.
From Gutierrez’s perspective, the governor was deflecting questions, trying to focus the press briefing on state aid that would be provided to victims of the shooting.
Gutierrez and his staff drove a couple miles across town to the school, where the senator confronted Abbott, demanding on live television that he call the Legislature in session to address the shooting.
“I was just furious and I went over there and I got in their face,” he said.
Abbott never called a special session. But over the next few days, the initial narrative about the shooting continued to unravel. Each day seemed to bring with it a new piece of misinformation that needed to be corrected; that a teacher left a backdoor to the school propped open, that police first confronted the shooter outside the school, that police were outgunned and lacked equipment needed to breach the classrooms.
“This thing wasn’t just about failure,” he said. “It was absolutely about lies, and messaging obfuscation and blaming and pointing fingers at everybody else but the Department of Public Safety.”
It wasn’t until several days later that Gutierrez gained the courage to speak to the victims’ families, approaching Kimberly Rubio, the mother of 10-year-old Alexandria “Lexi” Rubio, who was killed at Robb Elementary.
It was a brief conversation, but one that would bind the two. Over the following weeks and months, Gutierrez would speak to dozens of Uvalde residents whose children were killed or injured in the shooting.
Families like the Rubios, the Matas and others would become organizers themselves, at Gutierrez’s suggestion, and became tireless advocates for gun restrictions at the Capitol.
Gutierrez organized near weekly media events to keep the press’ focus on legislative efforts to pass new gun restrictions.
During their repeated visits to the Capitol, Gutierrez’s office became a safe space for the families between committee hearings, long hours spent waiting to testify.
“We could not navigate this place without him,” Rubio said. “He should be a model for all politicians.”
Jerry and Veronica Mata, parents of another victim, Tess Mata, called him a “blessing from above.”
“He has been there for all the families,” Jerry Mata said. “If it wasn’t for him, we wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.”
Their efforts crystallized around the “raise the age” bill that would prohibit anyone under 21 from purchasing an assault style rifle like the one used in the shooting. Had it been law before the shooting, it would have prevented the 18-year-old shooter from legally obtaining an AR-15 in Texas days after his birthday.
Gutierrez’s bill to raise the age never advanced in the Senate. In the House, it was voted out of a committee, but failed to ever be called to the House floor before a legislative deadline.
Gutierrez would have one last chance to pass the law.
Stonewalled in the Senate
It was about 8 p.m. last Thursday at the Capitol.
Gutierrez was standing at his desk in the Senate chamber. He was speaking again about the moment he watched the horrific footage from the scene of the Robb Elementary School shooting.
The videos, he said, were contained on a 2-terabyte drive DPS gave him only after he signed a non-disclosure agreement. While some of the footage has been published through media leaks and a hallway camera was released by a House investigative committee, the footage he described has never been seen by the public or most of his fellow senators.
“You’ve never seen so much blood in your life,” he told them.
Up for debate was a non-controversial bill that aligned Texas gun laws related to straw purchases with federal law. Democrats in the chamber tried unsuccessfully to attach other gun restrictions to the bill – a red flag law and 30-day waiting period for people under 21.
Gutierrez was last up and was trying to attach the “raise the age” law to the bill.
“It’s probably the last opportunity that we’re going to have to be able to do anything in this building that would make it a little harder for people to access militarized weapons or weapons of any kind,” he said in an emotional address to the floor.
At the outset of the session, Gutierrez announced a slate of Uvalde legislation flanked by several family members of children killed in the shooting.
He proposed a Uvalde victims fund, red flag laws, ammo restrictions and a law that would have prevented the Robb Elementary School shooter from legally obtaining the AR-15 he used in the massacre – the “raise the age” bill.
None of his bills, even ones unrelated to the shooting, were granted a committee hearing, denying them one of the first procedural steps a bill must traverse at the Capitol before it can become a law.
Gutierrez said Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick had told him he would not allow any of his gun restrictions to advance. The senator said he is being retaliated against by a lieutenant governor that holds an iron grip on the Senate.
Patrick’s office did not respond directly to emailed questions about whether the lieutenant governor retaliated against Gutierrez for his pro-gun control slate of legislation or his outspoken rhetoric.
“Sen. Gutierrez knows that if bills do not have the votes to move, they will not move,” Patrick spokesman Steven Aranyi said in an email. “All 31 Senators, who file over 2,000 bills every session, know that. Lt. Gov. Patrick never told Sen. Gutierrez that he would not permit his bills to move.”
Martinez Fischer, the head of the House Democratic Caucus and a close friend to Gutierrez, said he has faced repercussions this session.
“He’s given up his career, he’s given up his reputation,” Martinez Fischer said in a press conference following the shooting at the Allen Premium Outlet mall.
San Antonio Republican consultant Luke Macias said Patrick has created an “environment where Democrats know if they aggressively push back against his conservative agenda, and if they try to aggressively push a liberal agenda through the Senate, it will have consequences.”
On the Senate floor, Gutierrez tried once again on Thursday.
Like before, a procedural objection shut him down. Gutierrez appealed, but was again blocked after Mineola Republican Sen. Bryan Hughes motioned for it to be tabled. Eight Democrats sided with Patrick.
After the vote, a visibly upset Gutierrez addressed the Senate. He shook as he spoke, dropping his iPhone at one point.
“I’m sorry to you all the way I have behaved this session,” he said. “I am angry as hell. And I see these kids when I go to bed at night. I see them in the morning when I wake up.”
“I get what you guys have to deal with back home, and I get that you have to go and run for office,” he said. “And you just gotta tell those people to go to hell and you’re here to protect kids. That’s all that matters.”
The bill passed unanimously without Gutierrez’s amendment. Afterwards, senators congratulated its author, Houston Republican Sen. Joan Huffman. But many went over and embraced Gutierrez. Gutierrez then walked out of the chamber as the Senate concluded its business for the day.
The Senate then adjourned in honor of the eight students and two teachers killed in the 2018 Santa Fe High School shooting. It was the five-year anniversary.
