Texas State Police Officer Fired Amid Uvalde School Shooting Fallout

Surveillance footage has shown that nearly 400 officers waited for 77 minutes as children were shot in their classrooms. State troopers were among the first batch of officers to arrive on the scene.

Body camera footage released by the Uvalde Police Department showed that one state officer, identified by the Texas Tribune as Maldonado, was outside the school within four minutes of the shooting. Local SWAT commander Sgt. Eduardo Canales’s body camera showed that he encountered Maldonado outside the building after the shooter had fired more than 100 rounds.

“Dude, we got to get in there,” Canales tells Maldonado in the video. “DPS is sending people,” Maldonado replies.

An internal record revealed that Maldonado told investigators he was focused on maintaining the perimeter of an external school building as other officers waited to confront the shooter. He was one of the seven state officers under internal investigation for the failed response.