UVALDE, Texas (Nexstar) — The Uvalde County District Attorney said Friday she doesn’t expect the Texas Rangers investigation into the Robb Elementary School shooting to be completed by spring “at the earliest,” or even longer.
It’s comes after the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety said in October that he expected part of the investigation to be completed by the end of 2022. DPS oversees the Texas Rangers.
The announcement was confirmed shortly after a source told KXAN Friday that the Texas Department of Public Safety was going to fire a Texas Ranger for inaction during the Uvalde school shooting.
“I can tell you that the Texas Ranger part of that investigation is gonna be concluded within two months, by the end of the year. The paperwork is going to go, the file is going to go to the [Uvalde] district attorney,” said Steven McCraw, the director of DPS, during an Oct. 25 commission meeting.
Christina Mitchell Busbee, the Uvalde DA, told Nexstar over email that she thinks it could take as long as a full year past when the shooting happened for the probe to be finished. A gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022.
“It is not uncommon for an investigation of this magnitude to take at least a year,” she said in an email.
Nexstar reached out to DPS numerous times to ask for an update on the timeline of the investigation’s completion but did not get responses.
Further delay in the investigation may impact what legislation gets introduced and passed, as state lawmakers returned to the Austin Capitol Tuesday.
In the immediate aftermath of the massacre, Gov. Greg Abbott resisted calls for a special legislative session to address gun violence and schools safety. He and other top Republicans often cited the need to wait until the full investigation was completed, in order to know what to legislate.
The deadline for lawmakers to introduce bills in this session is March 10. If the investigation isn’t completed until the one-year anniversary of the Uvalde shooting, any possible legislation that would spur from its findings would have missed that March deadline. Lawmakers are scheduled to gavel out for the next two years on May 29.