“I wanted to find out everything I could,” Craig Garnett said of his newspaper’s coverage of the shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. “I was in the worst job, but I was where I belonged.”
Credit...Christopher Lee for The New York Times

How Uvalde’s Newspaper Kept Going, Despite Unimaginable Loss

Craig Garnett, the publisher of The Uvalde Leader-News, opens up about covering a tragedy that was — and is — too close to home.

by · NY Times

Craig Garnett played many roles as he drove around Uvalde, Texas, in his white pickup truck.

He was a proud father, pointing to the stadium where his son played football before switching to golf. He was a local historian, describing how farmers sold angora fiber to be spun into mohair at a mercantile near the main drag. He was an amateur lepidopterist, gently waving away swarms of monarch and snout butterflies that were migrating through town for the second time this year.

But, approaching Robb Elementary School, where 19 students and two teachers were gunned down in their classrooms on May 24, 2022, Garnett slipped into the role he’s best known for, as publisher and owner of The Uvalde Leader-News.

Calmly, candidly, with a journalist’s eye for detail and a citizen’s disbelief, Garnett narrated the view: There was the drainage ditch where the shooter crashed his grandmother’s Ford F-150 before firing through the windows of the fourth grade wing. There was the door he walked through. The funeral home survivors fled to. The driveway where 376 law enforcement officers mobilized for 73 minutes before ending the carnage. The street where parents waited. The white crosses, one for each victim.

“Devastating,” Garnett said. He pulled away from the gated, partially boarded-up building in silence.

Garnett, 72, has lived in and written about Uvalde since 1982. He fell for its pecan trees, big sky beauty and the people who pile onto the bleachers at the Honey Bowl on Friday nights. His children graduated from Robb.

The lives of the children and teachers who died there would have unfolded on the pages of his newspaper — their softball victories and graduation ceremonies making way for wedding announcements and barbecue cook-offs.

Instead, Garnett and his 12-person staff reported on their deaths, a tragedy that reshaped their town.

While friends and neighbors were reeling, while lawmakers offered thoughts and prayers, the Leader-News staff put one word in front of the other, covering the shooting and mourning its seismic ramifications at the same time. They kept going when they learned that their colleague’s daughter was among the victims. They kept going when members of the national media went home. Their work is the subject of “Print It Black,” a documentary named for the paper’s front page the day after the attack.

Now Garnett tells this story in “Uvalde’s Darkest Hour,” coming out on Nov. 15. It’s a devastating account, showing how unthinkable loss rippled through a town of around 15,000, where degrees of separation are the exception rather than the norm. Picture “Our Town” for the emergency lockdown era, with a narrator who is infuriated rather than nostalgic.

“This community has been ripped to pieces,” Garnett said. “I want people to know that.”

May 24 — no year required, it’s Uvalde’s 9/11 — started like any other. Kimberly Mata-Rubio, a staff reporter and mother of five, came to work after attending end-of-year awards ceremonies at Robb. Pete Luna, the paper’s general manager, pored over pictures from a house fire. Garnett worked in his office above the newsroom.

At 11:30, the police scanner sounded the first alarm: Shots fired.

“I came down because the sirens started,” Garnett said. “It was just crazy.” Like his colleagues, he spoke of these events as if they were currently unfolding: “This is not like anything we’ve ever seen. It’s not a wreck, not a fire. This is something very intense.”

The shooter’s path is well-documented. He found a door that was unlocked. He walked into the school and opened fire. Law enforcement arrived. Communication was spotty, the chain of command unclear. Garnett’s minute-by-minute account might as well be accompanied by the painstaking thunk of a classroom clock, its second hand making a ceaseless sweep. Time stands still and also accumulates, horrifically, to the tune of terror and strafe.

Luna was the first member of the media on the scene that day. He took pictures and recorded video while friends and acquaintances became increasingly desperate to find their children. “We had a job to do,” Luna said. “We can cry later.” Eventually, he went on, “I stopped working and started being a friend.”

At the office, Garnett struggled to wrap his mind around what was happening. “This is Uvalde. We don’t do these things,” he said. “Then Pete came back. He said, ‘It’s bad, boss.’”

Mata-Rubio’s 10-year-old daughter, Lexi, was missing. She drove to the high school, the civic center and Uvalde Memorial Hospital. Her father went to San Antonio, 83 miles away, to check the hospitals there. After racing to another funeral home, Mata-Rubio finally took off her sandals and ran, barefoot, back to Robb.

“I just didn’t stop,” she said. “I was repeating in my head, like some ask of the universe, Please don’t take my baby. Please don’t take my baby.”

She sat on the curb outside the building where, only a few hours earlier, Lexi had won an award for good citizenship.

That night, hours after her colleagues received unconfirmed reports, Mata-Rubio learned that Lexi had never made it out of Robb.

“It goes dark from there,” she said.

“Those first days, none of us slept,” Garnett said. The staff flocked to the wood-paneled newsroom, where an antique grandfather clock sits alongside photos of the paper’s editors dating back to 1898. “We tried to organize ourselves to push on. Twelve-hour days. Saturdays. We couldn’t leave.”

Even before learning the final death toll, Garnett knew that Uvalde was irrevocably changed — its name a new kind of noun, alongside Columbine, Newtown and Parkland.

“No longer was this the home of Cactus Jack and Matthew McConaughey,” he said. “It was now a mass shooting city.”

Garnett’s team, most of whom had been at the paper for a decade or more, had to find a way to articulate the shift while digesting it themselves.

“I can’t imagine having been placed in a situation like this with a better group of people,” he said. “We could work together without even talking. We would read each other’s body language and thoughts and move in sync like a school of fish.”

Luna’s pictures — around 270 in all, plus a dozen videos — showed students climbing out of windows, running, weeping and bleeding. Bodies on stretchers. One clip showed a group of parents, waiting for children who had died. At no charge, The Leader-News released 26 of these images to the media; they appeared alongside coverage of Uvalde across the world.

And, of course, the world came to Uvalde.

In his book, Garnett describes reporters arriving at the Leader-News office. “They greeted us as if we were fraternity brothers,” he writes, “except that many could not get the name of our paper straight. No, it was not The Uvalde News-Leader. We were The Uvalde Leader-News, as we had been for eight decades.”

While Garnett and his staff grew frustrated with out-of-town journalists showing up at funerals, Mata-Rubio, still in shock, began to piece together what had happened from the questions she was asked during interviews.

“They asked, ‘What about the failed police response?,’” Mata-Rubio said. “The first time we understood something was wrong was through the media. Imagine if there hadn’t been a spotlight.”

She recalled a trooper, caught on body cam video released months later, speaking to a fellow officer outside the school: “If my son had been there, I would not have been outside,” the trooper said. “I promise you that.”

Some communities coalesce around a crisis; Uvalde isn’t one of them. The town split into two camps: Those who felt that the police had done their best, and those who felt they’d waited too long.

Through it all, the staff of The Leader-News kept writing. “My wife would say, Are you writing about Robb again? And I’d say, Yeah,” Garnett said. “We’ve got to tell this story. It’s the only way.”

As Garnett attempted to make sense of his own anger and disbelief, Mata-Rubio’s loss served as a “super accelerant.” He hired her as a receptionist when she was 21. He encouraged her to try her hand at reporting. He watched her children grow up. And on his 70th birthday, he went to Lexi Rubio’s funeral.

Garnett started keeping a journal, something he’d never done before. “I had to write a record of what happened here,” he said. “I had to put it on paper.”

About six weeks after the shooting, Garnett realized he was writing a book. He interviewed survivors. He interviewed the justice of the peace who, in the absence of a county coroner or medical examiner, was responsible for identifying bodies. He spoke with parents. The mayor. Medical personnel. Police officers. The city registrar, whose job it was to make sure the cemetery remained a tranquil place to mourn.

When he contacted literary agents in New York City, he was told that “school shooting books don’t sell.” He found an agent in Austin who sold the book to Texas A&M University Press. Proceeds will go to the Robb School Memorial Fund “whether I sell one or a million” copies, Garnett said. The point is the written record.

Still, he added, “There’s no closure.” The investigation is ongoing; the community remains divided. Some residents have objected to a makeshift memorial in the town square and to the 21 murals painted on the sides of local buildings, one for each victim. They want to “move on.”

Walking with Garnett through Uvalde’s downtown, it was clear that he’d spent a lot of time in front of these paintings. He pointed out the details — Amerie Jo Garza’s Chick-fil-A French fries, Eliahna Torres’s cat, Rojelio Fernandez Torres’s T-shirt. It says “Difference Maker.” The murals help Garnett remember and mourn, although he’s quick to point out that his job is to cover the loss; the worst of it doesn’t belong to him.

Lexi Rubio’s mural appears on the side of the building next door to The Uvalde Leader-News, where her mother still works. She beams out over a parking lot, forever 10, wearing a cowboy hat and surrounded by butterflies, one for each sibling.

Kimberly Mata-Rubio is now an activist for gun reform, traveling around the country telling Lexi’s story. But the paper is “home away from home,” she said. “Everybody is family.”

That afternoon, a staffer's half-eaten birthday cake sat on a table by the back door. It was decorated like an American flag, with strawberries for stripes and blueberries for stars.

Mata-Rubio had yet to read “Uvalde’s Darkest Hour,” but she believes it will be a book people turn to, decades from now, for a definitive account of what happened in Uvalde.

“I know Craig’s writing,” Mata-Rubio said. “I know what he’s capable of.”

It’s hard to imagine a last word on this subject — not in this town. But, on Oct. 8, Uvalde school trustees approved a name for the school that will replace Robb. It will be called Legacy, and the vote was unanimous.

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