UVALDE, Texas (KXAN) — The Texas Department of Public Safety confirmed it was investigating an incident after a video posted on Twitter showed a DPS trooper shoving a Uvalde mother whose child was a victim in the Robb Elementary mass shooting.
The video shows Ana Rodriguez, Maite’s mother, walking up and banging on the door of Flores Elementary School in Uvalde to pick up her son to participate in a national gun violence school walkout protest that was planned to protest gun reform, according to the man who filmed the video, Brett Cross.
NewsNation affiliate KXAN has lowered the audio in the video below because it contains profanity.
According to the video, when the DPS trooper opened the door to the school, he at first prevented Rodriguez from walking in to check her son out by grabbing her arm and shoving her out of the school.
Later in the video, the trooper said he already warned Rodriguez she could be under arrest if she continued. He did eventually let her inside after saying “if she can do it quietly.” He went onto tell Cross “you don’t even know the story.”
Cross also provided images of Rodriguez’s arm after the incident, which you can see below:
The community of Uvalde wanted to protest gun legislation after the May 2022 mass shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead. The protest also follows the deadly school shooting at a private school in Nashville in March.
A special committee formed after the Uvalde mass shooting met last week to consider 17 bills aimed at enhancing school safety.
School districts across Texas largely support the sweeping new security requirements under consideration in the legislature, but some witnesses at a late March hearing on school safety stressed one thing: they need the money to implement them.
House Bill 3, the legislature’s primary school safety bill, would fund these safety improvements by giving districts at least $10 per student in average daily attendance and $15,000 per campus. The Legislative Budget Board estimates this could cost the state about $293 million over the next two years.