DPS Dodges Transparency in Uvalde—Again

By reinstating Texas Ranger Christopher Ryan Kindell in early August, Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) Director Steve McCraw seems to have once and for all sidestepped a public reckoning over his agency’s role in the botched law enforcement response to the deadly May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde.

McCraw fired Kindell more than a year ago, accusing him of failing to meet department standards in responding to the active shooter who killed 19 students and two teachers in 2022. But as long as Kindell’s appeal of his termination was ongoing—the ranger has been on paid leave pending the outcome—McCraw faced the specter of a public hearing and potential scrutiny of high-ranking DPS officials, some of whom the U.S. Department of Justice says also violated state policy on the day of the shooting.

On August 2, McCraw suddenly—and without hearing Kindell’s appeal—reversed the firing and sent the ranger back to work. In doing so, the longtime head of DPS avoided having to explain his original decision in an open meeting before the governor-appointed Public Safety Commission, which oversees the state police. Meanwhile, DPS is appealing a judge’s order requiring the state police to release records related to the shooting.

“The agonizing experience this blame shifting has been for the victims’ families in Uvalde is unacceptable,” former Rangers Chief Chance Collins, who said he believes Kindell should never have been fired in the first place, wrote in a text message to the Texas Observer. “Accountability is one of the core values of DPS and it is time the Public Safety Commission held everyone accountable that contributed to this unjustified action and unnecessary anguish.”

DPS didn’t respond to questions for this story. A department spokesperson shared with reporters a letter McCraw sent Kindell, in which the director cites a Uvalde grand jury’s decision not to indict the ranger as a factor for his reinstatement.

“This is very confusing,” former DPS Commander Patrick O’Burke told the Observer. “We’re going to take responsibility, but we’re not responsible. We’re going to punish a couple people, but we’re not going to punish them. We’re not going to release the information to let others reach that conclusion.”

Ninety-one DPS personnel, including two captains and a major, were among the nearly 400 law enforcement officials who responded to the 2022 shooting in Uvalde. McCraw and Governor Greg Abbott initially praised their response as brave and effective.

As details leaked out in the ensuing days and months, however, state officials scrambled to explain why the shooter was left in a classroom with wounded and dying children and teachers while police officers huddled in the hallway. A host of reports in the wake of the shooting have described a chaotic scene as law enforcement agents swarmed the school but waited more than an hour to confront the shooter, even as 911 dispatchers relayed urgent pleas from children inside the classrooms. Just days after the shooting, McCraw falsely accused a teacher of leaving a door propped open, permitting the shooter to enter the school, and placed blame for law enforcement failures on former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo. But by August 2022, McCraw promised an internal review, telling CNN: “Every one of our officers will undergo scrutiny by the DA and an internal investigation—just because they didn’t violate the law, doesn’t mean they acted appropriately based on our policy.”

McCraw eventually told DPS’ inspector general to investigate seven officials, according to records the agency provided the Observer in response to requests under the Texas Public Information Act. Four of them were exonerated, and their names have not been made public. In August 2022, former Trooper Crimson Elizondo, who had been suspended pending the outcome of her investigation, resigned. Two months later, McCraw sent a termination letter to former DPS Sergeant Juan Maldonado, who retired rather than fight his firing. Also in fall 2022, DPS suspended Kindell, the only Ranger assigned to Uvalde, telling him he was under investigation for his response to the shooting.

The Rangers are a division of the state police who primarily serve as major crimes investigators in rural areas of Texas where law enforcement doesn’t have a lot of resources or training. Kindell’s suspension created problems for criminal cases unrelated to the Robb shooting that he’d investigated for 38th Judicial District Attorney Christina Mitchell, the prosecutor for Uvalde and Real counties. Mitchell pushed DPS for an explanation, and in September 2022 DPS Inspector General Phillip Ayala wrote Mitchell a letter trying to assuage her concerns. Ayala wrote that the “investigation does not include any apparent misconduct or matters related to Ranger Kindell’s integrity.”

But one of Ayala’s own investigators seemed to contradict that a month later by filing a complaint against Kindell accusing the Ranger of incompetence, according to records obtained by the Observer. At the time, Mitchell, who didn’t respond to questions for this story, said she was concerned DPS hadn’t followed its own policies when it suspended Kindell.

McCraw fired Kindell last January based on the recommendation of the same inspector general who’d vouched for the ranger’s integrity a few months prior. The ranger’s response to the shooting “did not conform to department standards,” McCraw wrote in the termination letter. “As a Texas Ranger, you are expected to overcome conflicting information and accurately assess the tactical situation. … You took no steps to influence the law enforcement response toward an active shooter posture.”

Under DPS policy, Kindell had 10 days to request a meeting with McCraw to challenge his termination. If McCraw decided to go through with the firing after that meeting, Kindell was entitled to a hearing before the Public Safety Commission. The hearing would be open to the public, and the details of DPS’s response to the shooting would likely be put under a microscope in front of reporters. Kindell requested the meeting, but instead of granting the meeting and hearing his appeal, McCraw essentially kept the ranger on ice for 19 months.

DPS blamed Mitchell, whose grand jury investigation dragged on until this June, for the hearing’s delay. In January, DPS said McCraw would not hear Kindell’s appeal “until the Uvalde County District Attorney has finished her investigation and the grand jury has made a decision on criminal charges.”

But McCraw had other reasons to be wary of a hearing before the Public Safety Commission. The Rangers’ top brass ultimately answers to McCraw, but records obtained by the Observer show that last year the division’s leaders objected to Kindell’s firing. In a public hearing before the commissioners who oversee him—and who just last year gave him a $45,000 annual raise—McCraw was likely to have his decision-making called into question by law enforcement officers who are revered by many state leaders like lawmen in a western novel.

Collins, the former Ranger chief, said he would have testified on Kindell’s behalf.

“Terminating an employee and publicly humiliating them for two years should … be based upon facts of a competent investigation rather than concerns of political optics,” said Collins, who retired in September 2022. “As a proud DPS retiree, I can say the even deeper concern here is that when times are tough and consistency in leadership is the healing expectation of our citizens and employees, it is missing at DPS.”

A public airing of the events of May 24, 2022, might have also drawn attention to the actions of high-ranking DPS personnel.

The federal Justice Department review of the response to the shooting reported that no law enforcement official, including Kindell—the report only identifies him as “Ranger 1” but the description of his actions makes his identity clear—“effectively questioned the … lack of urgency” by police on the scene. The Justice Department also criticized other, unnamed DPS “senior leaders” on scene for not setting up a command post to coordinate between the multiple agencies responding to the shooting. Immediately after police, led by a specialized unit of the federal Border Patrol, finally killed the shooter, top state police officials added to the confusion, according to the report.

“[T]he TXDPS regional director, and some other officers, walked past the law enforcement officers bringing injured and deceased victims out of the classrooms and entered classrooms 111 and 112 with no identifiable purpose or action, therefore compromising the crime scene,” the DOJ report states, adding that the DPS officials who wandered through the crime scene violated agency policy by not filing a report afterward.

“How did you single out the people you singled out for administrative punishment, because wouldn’t others be just as culpable?” asked O’Burke, the former DPS commander. “For whatever policies they say the ranger violated, wouldn’t others have done the same thing? I don’t know how you thread that needle.”

In June, the Uvalde grand jury handed up felony child endangerment charges against only two officers: Arredondo and former UCISD Officer Adrian Gonzales. This gave McCraw an out. Despite the DPS chief’s statement nearly two years ago that his employees would be held to departmental standards regardless of whether their conduct constituted a criminal violation, McCraw ultimately cited the lack of criminal charges for why he reversed his decision to fire Kindell. Mitchell had “reviewed all law enforcement officers who responded to the attack on Robb Elementary School, and no action was taken on officers employed by the Texas Department of Public Safety,” McCraw wrote in his letter to Kindell. “Further, she has requested that you be reinstated to your former position as a Texas Ranger in Uvalde County.”

That’s not how internal disciplinary proceedings work, said O’Burke. Kindell “could have done absolutely nothing criminally wrong and still done something wrong administratively,” O’Burke said.

“Kindell, and this is my opinion, was made to be a scapegoat,” former Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin, who earlier this year co-authored a report tracking McCraw’s contradictory statements and accusing him of trying to escape responsibility, told the Observer. “[But] I’m not condoning any law enforcement officer that was there, because in my honest opinion, there was a failure of leadership across the board.”

By avoiding a public hearing, which might have examined the decision-making of high-ranking DPS officials, McLaughlin said, McCraw is preventing the type of deep dive that might actually shed light on what went wrong.

“Why not lay your cards on the table?” asked McLaughlin, who’s now running for the Texas House as a Republican. “If you made mistakes—you know, in my opinion, there’s no question mistakes were made that day—own up to them. These families deserve answers. This community deserves answers, and to still withhold information to me is wrong.”

In his letter reversing the firing, McCraw also wrote that he “decided to alter my preliminary decision based on a review of the completed Texas Ranger criminal investigation,” which formed the basis for Mitchell’s criminal cases, and “an internal review of the actions of Texas Department of Public Safety Officers who responded to the attack.” That leaves the impression that McCraw overrode the DPS inspector general’s conclusion based, at least in part, on an investigation by Kindell’s fellow rangers.

“It doesn’t matter who investigates what,” said Jesse Rizo, whose niece Jackie Cazares was killed in the shooting and who now serves on the Uvalde school board. “To me, what they don’t want is a tarnished record, a tarnished badge. Not only that, there’s not that much anger and movement anymore. … They know that it’s dying down.”

Rizo said that he hopes the eventual release of additional records by the agencies that responded to the shooting—the City of Uvalde was recently the first to abandon the fight to keep documents secret—as well as public trials of Arredondo and Gonzales will shed more light on what happened more than two years ago.

“Hopefully you’ll be able to hear the story at the trial about why there was such a massive failure,” Rizo said. “I think justice is coming. It just takes a little bit.”