"No one was hurt
. "
That's what Vincent Salazar remembers a school district official responding to when he asked if any students at Robb Elementary School had been injured following the May 24, 2022, shooting in Uvalde, Texas.
His 11-year-old granddaughter, Layla Salazar, would be one of the 21 fatalities of the massacre, but her grandfather would not know until several hours later.
"I asked him, 'Are there any children hurt?'
and he answered me 'no one was hurt,'" Salazar said this Thursday in an interview with Noticias Telemundo, after the Department of Justice published an extensive report in which it delved into the "cascade of errors" committed by the authorities in the response. to the attack in which 19 children and two teachers were murdered.
Salazar believes that her granddaughter "had already died" when she spoke that morning with the official at the civic center where they had arrived looking for news.
"He lied to us," she said, and "it was the only information we got."
That day her family waited at least 12 hours without official details.
At around 10:00 pm the authorities called them into a room and asked them for DNA samples.
Shortly afterward they confirmed that Layla was one of the victims, her grandfather said.
A mural honoring Layla Salazar in Uvalde, Texas.
Brandon Bell/Getty Images
Salazar's case is not the only one.
The Department of Justice report detailed that some relatives of the victims of the massacre believed for hours that their loved ones had survived, after authorities wrongly told them that they were safe or had been transferred alive to local hospitals.
Some families, like Layla's, "received incorrect information suggesting that their relatives had survived when they had not," the more than 500-page document stated.
In other cases, confirmation of death was reported to them "by personnel not trained to deliver such painful news."
[The Department of Justice denounces “cascading failures” in the police response to the Uvalde school massacre]
Deputy Attorney General Vanita Gupta revealed in a statement other details that she called "heartbreaking."
According to Gupta, the authorities not only failed to kill the attacker by extending the massacre for 77 minutes, but they also made a mistake in the way they communicated with the families: "we know that the pain — and the failures and errors — did not end. when officers finally entered the rooms and rescued the survivors."
A "chaotic" and "deeply painful" process
For some families, the first indication that their loved one had died was when they were told about the need for an autopsy, Gupta said.
Hours after the shooting, an officer told family members waiting for news, "that an additional bus with survivors was on the way and that was not the case."
Salazar said they waited for hours for her granddaughter — whom she described as a gentle, effusive and respectful girl, "an angel before she was an angel," she said — to get off one of the buses.
"My granddaughter never came, so we knew she wouldn't come home
," she lamented.
Gupta called the process of communicating and reunifying with families "chaotic" and "deeply painful."
The information people received was "unclear" and "contradictory," she said.
[The attorney general says bluntly that the police response to the Uvalde massacre "was a failure"]
The misinformation also spread to official social media accounts.
In a Facebook post, Gupta cited, authorities even told parents that "students and staff are safe in the building" and that the attacker had been detained.
None of the messages were corrected, said the official, who indicated that the errors were later reproduced by local and state officials.
On the right, Dora Mendoza, grandmother of Amerie Jo Garza, one of the shooting victims, in a file photo from May 26, 2022. CHANDAN KHANNA / AFP via Getty Images
"The questions that are not answered in this report are more important than the questions that have answers," said a representative of the victims' families who questioned the investigation in a press conference after the report.
For Salazar, the document—based on the review of 14,000 tests and 260 interviews, and included 273 recommendations—did not reveal "anything that we did not know."
["Their loved ones deserved better": Garland detailed police failures to Uvalde victims]
The families, he insisted, have no peace because now they must wait for a long judicial process still without defendants or a start date.
So far, five of the 376 officers who responded to the shooting have been fired, according to The Associated Press news agency.
Although the Justice Department report cites flaws in other areas of the process, it is not clear what sanctions have been contemplated or whether there will be future action.
Salazar does not know the name of the official who responded to him on the day of the massacre, although he knows that he presumably retired after the tragedy.
Noticias Telemundo reached out to the Uvalde school district for comment but, as of this article's publication, we have not received a response.
"The only thing I ask for is justice and for our children to be remembered," Salazar said.
NBC News reporter Suzanne Gamboa contributed to this article.