UVALDE, Texas – The Austin area investigator hired by the City of Uvalde in July 2022 to conduct an independent investigation into the Robb Elementary shooting has no active shooter response training.
Texas Commission on Law Enforcement records obtained by KSAT 12 News found Jesse Prado had no active shooter training while he was with the Austin Police Department for over 20 years.
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Prado’s investigation, which was originally supposed to take between 60-90 days to complete, cost the City of Uvalde more than $100,000.
In the report presented at a special city council meeting on March 7, Prado said none of the Uvalde Police Department officers who responded to Robb on May 24, 2022, did anything wrong and he called for each of them to be exonerated.
Those findings spurred outrage amongst the families of victims and survivors, as well as several members of the Uvalde City Council.
TCOLE serves as a regulatory agency for all law enforcement bodies in the state of Texas. According to its website, TCOLE “establish(s) minimum standards relating to competence and reliability, including education, training, physical, mental, and moral standards, for licensing as an officer, county jailer, or public security officer.”
According to an article published in February in the Texas Tribune, in 2023, a law change in Texas “mandated that all officers, not just school police, take 16 hours of active shooter training every two years.”
Prado was with the Austin Police Department from 1989 until 2013, according to records obtained by KSAT. In that time it was not required for officers to go through active shooter response training.
Following his retirement from APD, Prado began his career as a private investigator and started his company JPPI Investigations LLC. According to its website, JPPI Investigations typically looks a handful of topics including divorce child custody, criminal investigations, civil cases, corporate investigations and missing persons.
A scathing report from the Department of Justice into the Robb Elementary School shooting analyzed a slew of failures that occurred on the day of the tragedy. During his visit to Uvalde, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland made it clear that law enforcement agencies should prioritize active shooter training.
“Had law enforcement agencies followed generally accepted practices in active shooter situations and gone right after the shooter and stopped him, lives would have been saved and people would have survived,” Garland said on Jan. 17.
When reached for comment via email about his lack of training, Prado responded with “No comment.”
Read more reporting on the KSAT Investigates page.
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