SAN ANTONIO — Nearly a full week after he pulled out a camping chair and started a "sit-out" on the Uvalde Police Department lawn, the father of Robb Elementary shooting victim Uziyah Garcia said he's ending his protest.
"All of my life I have wanted to be a dad and the best man I can be for my family," Brett Cross wrote Tuesday evening on X, formerly known as Twitter. "But being a good dad also means I have to be there for them. My family needs me home."
Cross began his protest on the morning of March 13, specifically demanding the firings of Uvalde Police Department Lt. Javier Martinez, Staff Sgt. Eduardo Canales and Detective Louis Landry. They were among the nearly 30 members of city law enforcement and personnel who responded to Robb Elementary on May 24, 2022, and were exonerated in a recent internal report conducted by Austin-based investigator Jesse Prado, despite that same report detailing significant training failures that exacerbated the shooting.
Cross started his protest a day after Uvalde City Council took no action on the report, fanning the flames of longstanding frustrations felt by relatives of Robb victims.
At that March 13 City Council meeting, Cross mentioned his plans to camp out at Uvalde PD, saying, "I am done asking, I am done begging, I am done pleading. I’m about to start taking actions into my own damn hands. Enough is enough. Y’all can expect to see me every day from the police station, from sun up to sun down.”
He went on to document his protest on X, beginning at 11:33 a.m. on March 13—the exact time that the first shots rang out at Robb. Subsequent posts showed Cross remaining outside police headquarters through stormy weather as well as signs reading "U.P.D. FAILED" and "Fire Them" in the grass. His posts receives thousands of "likes" and hundreds of comments.
Shortly before 6 p.m. on Tuesday – when he was approaching 151 consecutive hours outside Uvalde PD headquarters – Cross thanks supporters and shared that he was ending the sit-out, but not his demands for accountability.
"Even though I'm not outside UPD anymore, that won't make me any less of a thorn in their side," Cross wrote. "We won't stop until every person who failed us that day is held responsible for sitting idly by as our loved ones were slaughtered. The fight rages on."
This wasn't the first time Cross had conducted a sit-out demanding accountability from Uvalde authorities. In September of 2022, he and other families of the victims occupied the property of the Uvalde CISD administrative building to demand that the district remove all the school resource officers who responded to the shooting on that day.
Ten days later, Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District announced the suspension of the entire UCISD Police Department.