Cody Smith, the mayor of Uvalde, Texas, announced his resignation Monday, effective immediately.
“I want to thank members of the Uvalde community for their thoughts and prayers during my ongoing recovery from unexpected medical issues I have experienced in recent weeks,” Smith said in a news release on Monday. “After much consultation and prayer, I have decided to resign as mayor of the City of Uvalde to focus on my health. It has been a great honor to serve the city and community I love, and I have great confidence that Mayor Pro-Tem Everardo Zamora will serve with honor until the next mayor is elected on Nov. 5, 2024.”
The resignation comes a day before a scheduled City Council meeting. Victims’ families were hopeful that council members would announce whether they’ll accept a report from Jesse Prado, a private investigator and former police detective from Austin, Texas, but in a statement to HuffPost, the Uvalde city council said they wouldn’t address it. Prado said in his report that the police officers who responded to the 2022 mass shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers acted in “good faith.” Parents of the victims were outraged by the report and demanded that the City Council denounce it.
At a March 12 council meeting, Smith told Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old nephew died in the mass shooting, that the City Council needed more time to decide whether they would accept or reject Prado’s investigation.
“Enough is enough,” Cross, the legal guardian of Uziyah Garcia, told the City Council at March’s meeting.
One day after that meeting, Cross began a protest outside the Uvalde Police Department headquarters to demand that Officers Javier Martinez, Louis Landry and Eduardo Canales be fired for their failings during the mass shooting. Martinez, Landry and Canales were three of the first law enforcement officers to respond to the shooting. Cross ended his protest after six days.
Cross wrote on social media on Monday that the news of Smith’s resignation was “disheartening.”
“I thought Cody was on the right path of starting to communicate with us, and I felt he was actually going to work with us to better Uvalde and to get justice and accountability,” Cross wrote. He said he was curious if the resignation coincides with the City Council meeting on Tuesday.
Smith was elected in November 2023 after Don McLaughlin resigned in July 2023 to run for a seat in the Texas House of Representatives, winning the Republican primary last month. Kimberly Mata-Rubio, whose 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, was killed in the Uvalde mass shooting, ran against Smith for mayor but lost.