On Thursday, the Justice Department released its report on the police response to the tragic shooting that took place at Robb Elementary School in May 2022, which claimed the lives of 19 students and two teachers. Key takeaways from the 575-page report are that the victims “experienced unimaginable horror” and “witnessed unspeakable violence” as a result of the lack of courage and “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy, and training,” per CNN's reporting, and that officers failed to recognize an active shooter situation and react sufficiently.
In an interview with CNN anchor Jim Acosta following the release of the report, Miguel Cerrillo, a parent of a child who survived the shooting and still has trouble sleeping at night because of what she witnessed that day, says that the new confirmation of the ways in which cops failed to protect the students, combined with the fact that he and his family still live across the street from the school in Uvalde, Texas and are made to feel less than welcome there, keeps the nightmare of the event fresh.
According to Cerrillo, his and other families associated with the school have been experiencing daily harassment from local police "because they know that the truth was going to come out, and they didn’t want us here."
"It’s hard for us every day to see these officers still in the street patrolling and still harassing us every day for no reason," he says. "They’re just pulling us over for no reason."
When asked by Acosta what he'd like to tell these cops, Cerrillo stated, "The officers here — I really believe, including the chief of police, that is in charge still — I really believe that you should get the whole police station fired because they left. They left us. They left my kid. And not only my kid, but several kids in the classroom to die."
