Two Texas law enforcement officials highlighted in a Justice Department report for their inaction during a 2022 school shooting have won their primaries.
Uvalde County Constable Emmanuel Zamora and Sheriff Ruben Nolasco won their respective Republican primaries on Tuesday, The Texas Tribune reported. Zamora won with 64% of the votes against his Republican challenger; Nolasco won with 39% of the votes, beating out three other GOP challengers.
Both officials were involved in the failed police response to the May 24, 2022, school shooting at Robb Elementary that left 19 students and two teachers dead. In a Justice Department report released in January this year, Zamora and Nolasco were named as leaders of responding agencies who failed to act. The report detailed the multiple failures of law enforcement on that day, including police officials’ lack of urgency to respond to an active shooter.
The report was particularly critical of Nolasco, saying that he “did not seek out or establish a command post, establish unified command, share the intelligence he learned from both relatives, nor did he assign an intelligence officer to gather intelligence on the subject.”
In a report by the Tribune released in March last year, the publication revealed that officers waited for more than an hour to confront the gunman, in part because the officers feared for their safety.
“We weren’t equipped to make entry into that room without several casualties,” Uvalde Police Department Detective Louis Landry said in an interview with investigators that was obtained by the Tribune.
Kassandra Chavez, the parent of a child who was shot and wounded during the attack, expressed her frustration with Zamora and Nolasco’s wins in a post on Facebook Wednesday morning.
“I’m so sorry baby boy the system won again tonight...these men that didn’t have the balls that day don’t deserve to be holding a badge yet others say they do!!” she wrote, according to CNN’s Shimon Prokupecz, who shared Chavez’s post on X, formerly Twitter.