The victims of the Uvalde school shooting have filed a $27bn lawsuit against 376 officials from state, police, school and law enforcement agencies.
The class action lawsuit filed in federal court in Austin, Texas on Tuesday, said that officials waited over an hour to confront the shooter inside the fourth-grade classroom.
On 24 May, 21 people were killed after Salvador Ramos opened fire inside Uvalde’s Robb Elementary School, in one of the deadliest school shootings in the country.
The lawsuit seeks damages for those who have sustained “emotional or psychological damages as a result of the defendants’ conduct and omissions on that date.”
The suit has been filed by school staff and representatives of minors who were present on campus at the time of the shooting.
It claims that instead of following previous training to stop an active shooter, “the conduct of the three hundred and seventy-six (376) law enforcement officials who were on hand for the exhaustively torturous seventy-seven minutes of law enforcement indecision, dysfunction, and harm, fell exceedingly short of their duty bound standards”.
A separate $6bn lawsuit was also filed by a group of survivors against Daniel Defense, the company that made the gun used by Ramos and the store where he bought the gun.
While the manufacturer has not responded to the suit, CEO Marty Daniels, at a congressional hearing earlier this year, called the shooting and others like it “deeply disturbing”.
But he said mass shootings are local problems to be solved locally.
Earlier this week, Sandra Torres, a mother of 10-year-old who died in the shooting filed a federal lawsuit against police, the school district and Daniel Defence.
The suit has been filed amid little closure and few answers about law enforcement’s 77-minute wait at the school hallway instead of confronting the gunman.
In October, Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety acknowledged mistakes made by officers, but said his agency “did not fail” Uvalde.
Additional reporting by agencies
