A former Warrington Township supervisor and 27-year veteran of the Pennsylvania State Police is part of a team helping the U.S. Department of Justice review the highly controversial response to last month’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas., that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
Mark Lomax, 62, has an extensive law enforcement background, including his tactical operations experience for the United Nations in Liberia and West Africa.
“We’re going to do a review of before, during and after the incident, and develop and produce an after-action report,” said Lomax during a phone interview from Uvalde, Monday.
“We’re going to provide a comprehensive overview,” Lomax said, intended to offer “new recommendations for the betterment of law enforcement response and prevention in the future.”
He said he expects to be working with the nine-member team that includes the former chief of the Sacramento, Calif., police department, a deputy chief who worked at Virginia Tech, the sheriff in Orange County, Fla., an FBI unit chief, a clinical psychologist, a news media professional and others throughout the week and then return to continue working in a few weeks.
Attorney General Merrick Garland said the review will be “comprehensive, transparent and independent.”
“We will be assessing what happened that day. We will be doing site visits to the school, we will be conducting interviews of an extremely wide variety of stakeholders, witnesses, families, law enforcement, government officials, school officials, and we will be reviewing the resources that were made available in the aftermath,” said Garland, in a statement.
In the weeks since the May 24 tragedy, state and local officials have given conflicting reports about what happened that day when the shooter was inside the building for some 80 minutes. It took 1 hour, 14 minutes, and 8 seconds from when police made entry into the school to the time they confronted the gunman and killed him, according to the timed log.
The director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, Col. Steven McCraw, called the response “an abject failure.”
Authorities there have stopped releasing any information to the public.
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