A Texas Republican incorrectly told Fox News that the Uvalde gunman had previously been arrested in 2018 for making a threat to shoot up the school in 2022.
Congressman Tony Gonzalez said he wanted confirmation on whether Salvador Ramos, the shooter, had been arrested while he was a minor for threatening a school shooting in 2018. On Friday, police confirmed that Ramos was not one of the minors arrested in 2018 for making a threat.
During a segment on the network, Mr Gonzalez claimed that the gunman was arrested in 2018 after telling others that he planned to carry out a shooting at a school when he was a senior in 2018.
"This wasn't hearsay. I got this late last night: 'The shooter was arrested years ago, four years ago, for having this plan for basically saying, for saying, you know, when I’m a senior in 2022, I am going to shoot up a school,'" Mr Gonzalez said.
The shooter's juvenile record has not been confirmed by police.
Mr Gonzalez described the 18-year-old as someone who “fell between the cracks.”
“Something fell between the cracks between then and now to allow this to happen. We need to shake out all the facts,” he said. “We need to figure out what happened. Where the holes are and we need to make sure it doesn’t happen again.”
Ultimately, Mr Gonzalez walked his claims back after realising he did not have definivitve evidence proving that the shooter was one of the minors arrested in 2018.
In a Twitter post on Friday, Mr Gonzalez shared a police statement acknowledging that two minors had been arrested in 2018 for threatening to carry out a mass shooting when they turned 18 in 2022. Due to their age, the names of the individuals arrested was not inlcuded in the statement.
“It is now unclear if the shooter was one of the two kids detained,” he wrote on Twitter. “If this was not the shooter, we need to find out who these kids are, where they are now, and if they were classmates of the shooter.”
As of the time of this story’s publishing, Mr Gonzalez has not made further statement regarding his mistake.
Mr Gonzalez went on to say that there is a “clear need for mental health resources in our community,” echoing the talking points of other Republican lawmakers in the wake of the shooting. During a press conference on Wednesday, Mr Abbott said that he spoke with officials from the region and from law enforcement and determined that mental health problems fuel mass shootings.
Texas Republicans under Mr Abbott slashed $211m in funding from the state department that oversees mental health services, and many mental health experts have pushed back against the conservative-driven narrative that mass shootings are a mental health problem, and not a problem caused by the widepsread availability of legal firearms.
