Matthew McConaughey returned to his hometown of Uvalde, Texas, on Friday to soothe those still grieving after the school shooting on Tuesday.
The 52-year-old actor made a visit to the personnel of the Uvalde school district and was photographed with them in their offices.
Kay McConaughey, a teacher at St. Philip’s Episcopal School in Uvalde, turned 90 in January and lived with her son during the epidemic.
Her school, which McConaughey attended, is only a mile from Robb Elementary, where 19 children and two teachers were murdered on Tuesday.
McConaughey did not address the public during his visit, but was accompanied by Republican Representative Tony Gonzalez, who thanked him for coming.
‘Thank you Matthew for helping to heal our community,’ Gonzalez tweeted on Friday.
‘Your visit brought so many smiling faces to Uvalde. See you soon my friend.’
Earlier, Gonzalez shared photos of McConaughey in the school offices.
‘Appreciate Uvalde native Matthew McConaughey helping us heal,’ he said.
‘This week was a solemn reminder that evil exists in the world, but we will never let it break us.
‘We’ll unite to be an even more powerful reminder that love never fails & together we can change things.’
Gonzalez, a staunch defender of the Second Amendment, has previously tweeted with pride about blocking gun control measures.
McConaughey’s own views are more nuanced: while he was weighing up a run for governor, which he called off in November, he was diplomatic about his position.
In March 2018, he addressed the gun control March For Our Lives in Austin, where he lives, and said he supported restrictions on who could buy firearms.
A month later, McConaughey says he supports some gun control but fears the youth-led March For Our Lives movement could be ‘hijacked’ by those hoping to eliminate all guns in the United States.
On Wednesday, McConaughey once again said there needed to be change.
‘As Americans, Texans, mothers and fathers, it’s time we re-evaluate, and renegotiate our wants from our needs,’ the actor said.
‘We have to rearrange our values and find a common ground above this devastating American reality that has tragically become our children’s issue.
‘This is an epidemic we can control, and whichever side of the aisle we may stand on, we all know we can do better. We must do better.’
Federal officers arriving on the scene of the Texas school shooting were told by the local police chief not to go into the building, according to a report, but after a maddening 30 minutes overruled him and stormed the site.
Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District, had stopped at least 19 officers from breaking into the school as the gunman opened fire for at least an hour, according to Steven McCraw, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The first 911 call was received at 11:28am, and it swiftly became clear that the school was under serious attack: units from across the region dashed to the site. They included the elite border patrol tactical unit BORTAC, and ICE’s Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), who were on the scene between noon and 12:15pm.
The units were told by Arredondo to wait, and not enter, according to two senior federal law enforcement officers, who spoke to NBC. McCraw said that Arredondo mistakenly believed the gunman was cornered, and no longer a threat.
At first they obeyed, the sources said.
But after 30 minutes, in desperation, as children were repeatedly ringing 911 from inside their classes and begging for help, they began making a ‘stack’ formation to enter the building.
They needed a key to open the door – it remains unclear why – and the gunman emerged from a classroom closet firing at the tactical agents entering the room, a U.S. Customs and Border Protection official told The Washington Post.
The gunman was shot dead at 12:50pm by a member of the border patrol, who was wearing only a baseball cap – which was shredded by bullets.
Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Chief Pete Arredondo was in charge and mistakenly thought there were no other kids alive in the room once the shooter had barricaded himself inside
The revelation about the officers being held back came shortly after the governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, expressed his fury at the conflicting and inconsistent version of events being given by law enforcement.
Abbott, who on Wednesday said the officers charged into the building and did everything they could, said he was lied to.
‘I was misled,’ Abbott said on Friday, addressing a press conference in Uvalde about Tuesday’s shooting at Robb Elementary School which saw 19 students and two teachers murdered by Salvador Ramos, 18, who was eventually shot dead by cops.
‘I am livid about what happened. I was on this very stage two days ago, and I was telling the public information that had been told to me in a room just a few yards from where we are write now.
‘I wrote hand notes in sequential order.
‘When I came out on that stage and told the public what happened, it was a recitation of what everyone told me.
‘As everybody has learned, the information I was given turned out – in part – to be inaccurate.
‘I am absolutely livid about that.’
Abbott said that law enforcement leaders must ‘get to the bottom of every fact, with absolute certainty.’
He said it was ‘inexcusable’ that families may have suffered from inaccurate information, and ordered law enforcement to ‘get down to every second what happened, and explain it to the public – but most importantly, to the victims.’
Abbott on Wednesday had defended the actions of the police and other local officials, emphasizing their heroics and insisting they prevented the situation from being far worse.
Yet questions have been rapidly mounting about the actions of law enforcement – in particular, why they waited outside the school for an hour while Salvador Ramos, 18, was free inside the building to murder 19 children and two teachers.
Initially police said that Ramos was wearing body armor and was confronted by an armed guard: on Thursday, they admitted that neither of those facts were true.
They said Ramos was barricaded in a classroom, but it emerged on Wednesday night that the authorities had to get a key to open the door – leading to urgent questions as to why they didn’t break it down.
And they said the delay in entering the school was because they were waiting for negotiators – an excuse that Tucker Carlson, the avowedly pro-law enforcement Fox News host, ridiculed on Thursday night.
Officials admitted on Friday that nearly 20 officers stood in a hallway outside of the classrooms during the attack, believing any potential victims inside were already dead.
‘Of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision,’ Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw said at a news conference.
The on-site commander ‘was convinced at the time that there was no more threat to the children and that the subject was barricaded and that they had time to organize’ to get into the classroom, McCraw said.
McCraw said there was a barrage of gunfire shortly after Ramos entered the classroom where they killed Ramos but that shots were ‘sporadic’ for much of the 48 minutes while officers waited outside the hallway.
He said investigators do not know whether or how many children died during those 48 minutes.
Ramos entered the classroom and locked the door at 11.34am.
In the first few minutes, he fired more than 100 shots inside classrooms 111 and 112.
He carried on shooting ‘sporadically’ until 12.21pm, and it wasn’t until 12.50pm that police eventually gained access to the classrooms with a key from the janitor.
Throughout the attack, teachers and children repeatedly called 911 asking for help, including a girl who pleaded: ‘Please send the police now,’ McCraw said.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, from where I am sitting now – of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision. There is no excuse,’ McCraw said.
A law enforcement official who spoke anonymously to The New York Times said that the border patrol agents who arrived on the scene had been puzzled as to why they were being told not to enter the school and engage the gunman.
McCraw asserted that Pete Arredondo, the district chief, made a miscalculation in assuming the active shooter situation had become a barricade event.
Arredondo, 50, become the focus of backlash from parents wondering if their children could have been saved.
Arredondo, who was born in Uvalde and was elected to city council just days before the massacre, has had an unremarkable career as a cop.
He started his law enforcement career as a 911 dispatcher for Uvalde’s town police department in 1993, and over the course of the next 20 years, worked his way up to eventually assume the role of assistant police chief at the department in 2010.