On a recent visit to Uvalde, Shimon Prokupecz could feel the Texas community before he’d even fully arrived. “As we’re driving in, I could tell, you know. You’re on that long road into Uvalde and…I could start to feel it. I could start to feel the sadness,” the CNN correspondent said. “It’s normal life,” he says. A new normal, where “you can’t go a block without seeing a kid’s face” or “a cross” or “something that reminds you of what happened.” The school is now closed but remains standing, as do the memorials erected for the victims. “The murals of all of the kids, different kids [who] died that day, are just everywhere.”
It’s been a year since a shooter killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in one of the deadliest school shootings in US history. The tragedy is not only in the lives lost but those that could have been saved had police acted sooner. We now know that members of law enforcement—376 total, from multiple agencies, arrived at the scene of the shooting—could have potentially stopped the shooter within three minutes and were equipped to do so; instead, amid a breakdown in communications and leadership, and despite 911 calls from children inside of the classroom, they waited 77 minutes to act.
We know this, and many other things about what went wrong in Uvalde, thanks to the unrelenting work of journalists like Prokupecz. Texas officials tried from the start to contain the disastrous revelations, seemingly releasing what little information they did when conflicting timelines or leaks left them no other choice. Given the lack of transparency, media outlets took on an outsized role, trying to get answers for the community and holding law enforcement accountable over their botched response. “Throughout this last year doing this story, it just has seemed that it was me and my team and CNN going to these families and saying: Here’s the information we’ve uncovered. We want to share it with you. We’re about to do these stories, but we want to tell you first,” Prokupecz said.
At times that has meant CNN, rather than the authorities, being the first ones to show families footage they didn’t even know existed, like of their children on a bus to the hospital, covered in their classmates’ blood; or of body camera footage from the moment they were rescued from a classroom full of bodies. It’s a “rare and unique position that we are in, that we can give these families some of the answers that they were seeking,” he said. It’s also a “painful” one, he added, in which he’s had to ask himself, “Is this right? Is it appropriate?” (The Uvalde shooting also kicked off a debate in the journalism community about what the public should see in the aftermath of a mass shooting, and whether coverage needs to be more graphic to better reflect the horrors of gun violence.)
Throughout the past year, local news outlets, such as the Texas Tribune, San Antonio Express-News, and Austin American-Statesman have stayed on the story, as well as major networks like CNN and ABC, the latter of which kept a team in Uvalde for a year. But given the spate of mass shootings in America, the national media tends to swoop in for a few days before turning to the next tragedy, with grim milestones, like a one-year anniversary, providing an opportunity for news outlets to take stock. CNN is spotlighting Prokupecz’s work in a special Uvalde-themed episode of The Whole Story With Anderson Cooper, airing Sunday; ABC is airing its own two-hour documentary two days earlier, It Happened Here: A Year in Uvalde.
“I’m one of these people at CNN who parachutes in,” Prokupecz told me. “I cover the law enforcement response—here’s what happened—and I do live shots, and I kind of leave once the story’s over.” Days before the shooting in Texas, he’d been in Buffalo, New York, covering the supermarket shooting that left 10 dead. But in Uvalde, “because the authorities here just played games from the beginning and didn’t want to release all the information,” he decided to stay, and to start covering the victims. As he told his bosses at CNN at the time, “This is the only way we’re going to be able to figure out exactly what happened here.”
Courtesy of CNN.
A few days after the May 24 shooting in Uvalde, as Memorial Day Weekend approached, network news crews started packing up to leave. “Everybody was on the way out. We left too,” said Prokupecz. He remembers, once back, having conversations with his bosses and discussing his return. “He knew immediately something was off about the emergency response and we knew we had to stay in Uvalde. We used our resources to remain on the story,” said CNN CEO Chris Licht, whose first day was only a few weeks before the shooting. “Us leaving is exactly what the authorities there wanted,” Prokupecz said. “Sadly I have found, this is how Texas operates. They know the media has an expiration date.”
When Prokupecz returned a week later with his producer, Matthew Friedman, they were stonewalled: The Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) was running the investigation but “wasn’t returning any of our calls,” and the DA “wouldn’t answer any of our questions.” But “things started to change,” said Prokupecz, with a confrontation between CNN and then police chief Pete Arredondo, the incident commander who has since been fired for the response he oversaw that day, in which he dodged questions about the shooting. (Arredondo has claimed he didn’t consider himself the person in charge and assumed someone else had taken control of the police response.) “We’re like, we need to keep going,” Prokupecz recalled.
The story really started to crack open during a trip to Uvalde later in the summer. Prokupecz and Friedman, his producer, had heard that families were going to meet with them. This time they decided not to bring a camera. “It was just going to be us two as people, as humans who want to know more about the community and want to know more about these families,” he said. It was on this trip when he met and heard stories from the families of the deceased and the survivors, including teacher Arnulfo Reyes, and when Uvalde mayor Don McLaughlin accused DPS of “a cover-up” during an interview with CNN. “That started to unravel things,” said Prokupecz, noting how unlikely the sit-down was to begin with. “This is a guy who’s very Republican, gun rights, was a Trump supporter at the time, would never speak to CNN.” But because of the work CNN was doing, “the mayor and I connected,” said Prokupecz. McLaughlin went on to give CNN first access to body camera footage bringing police inaction into sharper view, and with help from other sources who approached CNN with information, “we wound up getting pretty much the entire case file.”
