84. Craig Garnett: Uvalde’s Newspaper Publisher

Bob Rivard [00:00:03]:
Welcome to Big City Small Town, the weekly podcast all about San Antonio and the people who make it go and grow. I'm your host, Bob Rivard. This week's guest is Craig Garnett, the longtime publisher and owner of the Uvalde Leader News, the daily newspaper in Uvalde, a South Texas town of 15,000 people that became national news on 05/24/2022 when 18 year old Salvador Ramos opened fire in Robb Elementary School, killing 19 young children and two of their teachers and injuring 17 others. Small town newspapers have fared better than big city metros as businesses, but they're often known for skirting their community's biggest issues. Many such newspapers do not ask uncomfortable questions in the tightly knit communities they serve. Garnett and The Leader News should serve as the model publisher newspaper for how to show responsible leadership in the wake of such tragedy. While working to console the families of victims, including one of his own reporters who lost her daughter in the massacre, Garnett also used his weekly column to ask the hard questions and demand answers from local law enforcement in the school district about the events that tragic day in Uvalde. Infamously, 376 law enforcement officers from local, regional, and state agencies failed to confront the shooter for more than one hour while huddled in a hallway outside the classroom where Ramos carried out his mass killings.

Bob Rivard [00:01:34]:
Garnett's weekly column addressed the issue head on and demanded answers that have still not come from local or state authorities. Garnett himself, a gun owner like many in Uvalde, also questioned why a teenager had the legal right to buy military style assault weapons and unlimited rounds of ammunition. Challenging gun rights groups and advocates who have opposed calls for gun reform in the wake of such mass killings. Last month, Garnett was the subject of a profile of the New York Times that extolled his role in the community before and after the Robb Elementary school shooting that changed Uvalde forever. Craig Garnett, welcome to Big City Small Town.

Craig Garnett [00:02:14]:
Thank you, Bob. I'm happy to be here.

Bob Rivard [00:02:16]:
So tell us a little bit about yourself, Craig, before we talk about events in Uvalde. I know that you've been the owner and publisher or at least the publisher at the Uvalde Leader News since 1982. That is a long newspaper career. Are you from the city, or did you come there from somewhere else?

Craig Garnett [00:02:33]:
No. I grew up in, a small town in Oklahoma, southwest corner called Altus. I went to school in Texas. And during school, I met a I had a roommate, close friend, who had a ranch at Rio Frio, which is north of Uvalde.

Bob Rivard [00:02:50]:
Right.

Craig Garnett [00:02:50]:
And we would go out there on holidays and went out to go hunting and just enjoy the the outdoors. And I just fell in love with the area. The hill country is kind of, you know, hard to resist, particularly when you come from Oklahoma. And the only kind of trees we have are elm and tumbleweed, so it was just simply beautiful. Later after I graduated and then did some other things, I went to work for for the Star Telegram, in a management training position, then I went to the Kansas City Star.

Bob Rivard [00:03:21]:
That was in Fort Worth?

Craig Garnett [00:03:22]:
Yes. I went to Kansas City Star with the same program, publisher, stayed there for three years. And then I decided I wanted to come back to Texas and own my own paper because I didn't like the corporate scene very much. And I'd grown up in a small town. I found my way back to Texas, worked for Hartman newspapers in a couple of different places, ended up as publisher at the La Porte Bayshore Sun. Not a very pretty place. Lots of chemicals in the air. I feared for my newborn children.

Craig Garnett [00:03:51]:
So I began to look for a paper to possibly buy. This same friend that I, who had taken me to Uvalde to begin with to his ranch, happened to know the publisher in Uvalde, and she was looking for somebody to help her. She was a a widow. She was in her seventies, about my age now.

Bob Rivard [00:04:13]:
People from Uvalde will be listening in. Craig, what was her name?

Craig Garnett [00:04:16]:
Catherine Hornby. Right. Wonderful woman. The best editor I ever saw.

Bob Rivard [00:04:20]:
Oh, that's high praise.

Craig Garnett [00:04:21]:
Regardless of the newspaper, honestly. And she said, well, I don't I'm not selling you my paper, but I'll I'll take you on. And then maybe one day, you know, if you live up to what I'm looking for, we'll we'll we'll strike a bargain. Not a bargain, but a deal. So that's the way it the way it rolled. I went to work for her as general manager in '82. Five years later, she sold me 47% of the paper. And so then two years later, I I bought the remaining stock in the Leader News.

Craig Garnett [00:04:51]:
But I hadn't found a way out since.

Bob Rivard [00:04:54]:
Well, from 1982, I would say to almost the great recession of two thousand and seven and eight, newspapers were in high cotton. Profits were good, business was good, circulation, advertising created the kind of business environment that you could really do journalism. And, I wonder if, if if the traditions, Craig, that, that I see under the Leader News under you were traditions that you picked up from, missus Hornsby, or was the paper, a sort of one kind of style when you bought it and you transformed it over time into, another kind of newspaper?

Craig Garnett [00:05:36]:
By the time I got there, they had begun to do a lot more reporting. Prior to that, they kinda just skimmed the surface. They didn't staff, you know, city meetings or school board meetings or county meetings all the time. It was sort of intermittent. Missus Hornby had had tried to change that and had done an excellent job of becoming more expansive in their coverage. I I wanted to take it a little farther and do some more sort of, you know, stories that had more a little more in-depth, side to them as it were. And so we did that to some extent. We kind of I had some ideas to reorganize the paper a little bit, and that happened.

Craig Garnett [00:06:18]:
But we never you know, Bob, we didn't we weren't doing investigative reporting by any stretch. You know, we were simply doing what I thought was a credible job of covering all the all the institutions that that deserve to be looked at. As time went on, some things came to pass. We had a bunch of we had some issues over water, ongoing issues with Edwards.

Bob Rivard [00:06:41]:
I remember those.

Craig Garnett [00:06:42]:
Water rights. You remember that very well, and efforts afoot to build a pipeline through Uvalde, and we took a pretty hard stance against that. We took some other positions on issues that were, I guess, counter to some community newspaper's desire to be upfront. But there was nothing at the level of what happened, you know, on May 24.

Bob Rivard [00:07:06]:
Well, before we come up to the present day, you'd you also had another challenge, I suppose, or opportunity or maybe both in that citizen number one of you, Aldi, was the former, governor Dolph Briscoe and the largest landowner in Texas. So that's a sort of larger than life figure that you had in your small town, and probably factored into your coverage over the years.

Craig Garnett [00:07:27]:
You know, he he was amazing. He was an incredible philanthropist. He he was the biggest supporter of our paper you you you could possibly ask for. He would say, I want a half page in that paper every week, you know, and that's what's gonna happen. And because he and missus Hornby, and Harry Hornby, her husband, had been the closest of friends. And so that carried over into my relationship. I'm not saying that I had the same relationship that the Hornbys did, but he would he was always welcome and always availed himself of any any opportunity to call and give his opinion about what we were or were not doing. Almost never a criticism, though.

Craig Garnett [00:08:07]:
So it was it was a wonderful feeling to have him, you know, in our on our side.

Bob Rivard [00:08:13]:
Well, he was my first governor in Texas, and, I share your fondness of him and had many good visits to Uvalde when he was there at the bank in in the day. But let's come up to the moment in 2022. Craig, were you on your way to work, or were you already at work, or how did you find out what was going on?

Craig Garnett [00:08:31]:
No. We were all at work. I was in my office. The newsroom is right below my office, just my circumstance. And, you know, the sirens were the first, you know, was the that was the bellwether that things were not well. I mean, you've never heard so many sirens in the city. And then the helicopters began to circle, and our scanner was blowing up. And, you know, it was I mean, just by virtue of the noise, you knew something extremely unusual was happening.

Bob Rivard [00:09:07]:
Did you immediately sort of get in touch with your editor, and and and I assume that person was deploying anybody and everybody on the staff?

Craig Garnett [00:09:17]:
She she was at lunch, and, so I was in the newsroom with the rest of the staff, and we were listening to the scanner and and trying to make heads or sense of it, heads or tails, I guess. And, it was a domestic shooting, was the way it started, and that's what everybody thought it was, you know, or a bailout, you know, where somebody, you know, that's transporting immigrants crashes or stops and gets out and everybody runs. That'd been going on. We'd had, like, 200 of them in the first part of the year. So and that led to school shutdowns all the time. So there was, at first, this sense that it was a a shooting at a home, domestic thing, and then the suspect probably fled to the area of the school and maybe was had was hiding in that in somewhere in the periphery. Our photographer, Pete Luna, got there about it was about twelve, I think, maybe a little after. The shooting was 11:33.

Craig Garnett [00:10:12]:
And, his first reaction was that it was somebody who was hiding, not somebody who was targeting children. And in the newsroom, we were making calls to everybody we could of course, you can imagine there was no law enforcement answering. There was nobody answering. Nobody at the school system would pick up a phone. Nobody at the county, city level. They were all consumed with trying to find out themselves what was going on.

Bob Rivard [00:10:41]:
Wow. When did you find out what was going on?

Craig Garnett [00:10:46]:
It was about it was, say, I think, twelve something that we figured out that there was a shooter in in the school itself, maybe a little earlier, and still no concept of the the level of violence that was being inflicted on children. Even Pete Luna, our photographer, when he got back to the paper about one, I asked him what had happened. And he said there was a shooting, but he didn't know how bad it was. He didn't reckon it was as severe as it as it turned out. But that realization, you know, just landed like an atomic bomb. And the first word, little after one, was that the shooter was down. I'm sorry. He was in in custody, and he actually was dead.

Craig Garnett [00:11:47]:
That was the first you know, in hindsight, that was kind of the first indication that law enforcement maybe wasn't going to be exactly forthcoming with with facts.

Bob Rivard [00:11:59]:
About what happened. As I said at the outset here, there were hundreds of law enforcement personnel from local state agencies that responded, over, the immediate, aftermath of the of the 911 call, and yet, most of them stayed huddled on with uncertainty and somewhat leaderless in the hallway of Robb Elementary School while the shooter remained inside the classroom area where the devastation occurred.

Craig Garnett [00:12:31]:
The, the 376 lawmen represented 23 agencies. The bulk of them were outside. There were 15 to 19 in the hallway, give and take. It never got to be a whole lot more than that simply because of space. It's not a very big area. That hallway is not super long or super wide. That building is isolated sort of from the rest of the classroom. So those people were concentrated in that building while all the support was outside, pushing back parents and other concerned relatives, keeping them separated from the actual building itself.

Bob Rivard [00:13:13]:
And they were obviously extremely distraught over the welfare of their own children inside and unable to do anything. I can't imagine a more helpless feeling for a parent.

Craig Garnett [00:13:23]:
Yeah. Well, that that part was so so horrifying when you interviewed those people and listened to what their angst how anguished they were with the fact that these people with guns on weren't doing anything.

Bob Rivard [00:13:37]:
Craig, you you've written about the fact that the sort of nonresponse that that led to that interminable space between the initial call and and finally, the shooter being, killed. I wonder if, if people in Uvalde rallied around you for calling out law enforcement. I know that the sheriff or the police chief, Pete Arredondo, lost his job, ultimately was sued. Maybe somebody at the Department of Public Safety finally had their head roll, but by and large, I think you would agree with me that there has not been the kind of accountability from law enforcement or the state leaders that we would have expected and and deserve, the people in Uvalde deserve. Has the city embraced you on that point, or has it divided Uvalde forever over those that agree that, you know, it was a terrible law enforcement response and those that don't wanna address that issue?

Craig Garnett [00:14:33]:
There there's a marked division in thinking about that, and and you have to understand that so many in Uvalde have relatives who are in law enforcement, and others had children at Robb. So you had this bifurcation based on, you know, interest. I think probably more people rallied at the end of the day to support law enforcement in the city institutions that we were trying to probe for information. And I think, you know, people we had our supporters. We still do. And I'm extremely happy and grateful for them. We have as many others who, maybe more, who don't like what we did and still don't like the fact that we still print stories about it. I mean, that it's, it's it's we're rubbing salt in the wound.

Craig Garnett [00:15:18]:
You know? So

Bob Rivard [00:15:20]:
I thought you did a remarkable job on the empathy side of covering the families of the victims, the funerals, of, navigating the incredible, national media invasion that occurred and and continued for an interminable amount of time afterwards. Yeah. And just with your limited resources, a 12 person staff in a in a small town newspaper, you really rose to the level in my in my view, and that probably is traced somewhat to your big metro newspaper training earlier in your career.

Craig Garnett [00:15:53]:
I I hope so. I I mean, I journalism to me is the is the root of the newspaper business, the media business. It's not advertising, unfortunately, that makes keeps the doors open, but my first love is is journalism. And, I you know, we and that was true of my staff. And they they simply put into practice what we had been engaged in for decades, which was covering our community thoroughly and fairly. And we were all of the same mind about it. So it it was a it was it was great it was great teamwork. You know, I on the other hand, I understand people who have law enforcement relatives.

Craig Garnett [00:16:35]:
You know? I I wrote a column early on that it it didn't it didn't feel good to me to criticize them because we've been such big supporters of the men in blue over many decades. But it was too obvious what happened not to question whether these people actually did what they were called to do.

Bob Rivard [00:16:56]:
How would you describe the city to somebody coming to visit today, in the aftermath? Now we've had two and a half years, since the massacre. That's not that much time really. Sutherland Springs, well, the worst mass shooting in the history of Texas happened, even closer to San Antonio in 02/2017. A little bit different there because, the killer was very quickly, you know, he was down. Mhmm. There was there was somebody there who was quietly heroic and taking him on. A local resident who was a firearms instructor wounded him and which led to a chase that the, killer took his own life. So it was less complicated in that respect than the sort of law enforcement, nonresponse that you've already had to wrestle with and you you've had to cover.

Bob Rivard [00:17:48]:
And I just wonder in the aftermath of all that, how is the city finding its way forward? Is it something that people don't talk about?

Craig Garnett [00:17:56]:
It it's less and less a subject of of of debate or concern and talk even. I mean, people it's always there. It's underlying everything, and it will be that way for decades to come. It will be a part of Uvalde's culture. But people are making efforts to continue with their lives. Kimberly Rubio, who works for us still, is is, she's at work every day. She's on the advertising side now.

Bob Rivard [00:18:25]:
She lost her daughter.

Craig Garnett [00:18:26]:
She lost her daughter, Lexi, and Kimberly. But her she keeps Lexi's voice voice alive is through advocacy. She was in Washington last week. She'll be in Washington again this week.

Bob Rivard [00:18:40]:
Doing what?

Craig Garnett [00:18:41]:
With other other families, groups from Newtown and and, Parkland who have joined forces to be to speak for sensible gun laws. And that sort of advocacy is her path to healing.

Bob Rivard [00:18:56]:
We're gonna talk about efforts, unsuccessful efforts today to get political leaders to engage in gun reform in the wake of these mass shootings. But first, I wanna ask you about your thoughts on the press conference that state leaders had in the immediate aftermath that was led by governor Abbott, lieutenant governor Dan Patrick was there. Everybody was there. Senator Cornyn and others. The gubernatorial candidate, Beto O'Rourke, famously crashed the party and confronted the governor about this and his, refusal to engage in in sensible gun reform. And I would just say for those listening, you and I are both the same age. We're both hunters. We both own guns, but I think we're both strong advocates for gun reform who don't believe that disturbed individuals or young men and others should be able to get their hands on military style assault weapons and unlimited amounts of ammunition, particularly when they their past behavior has indicated that they're not stable or not mentally, sound Mhmm.

Bob Rivard [00:19:59]:
Or that they're angry and prone to violence. But, that has not led to anything tangible whatsoever on the state or federal level in the way of gun reform. And I I wonder how you covered that press conference in the aftermath and and whether so many people that are so strongly gun rights advocates, second amendment advocates in in Texas, how they responded in your community to to that coverage.

Craig Garnett [00:20:25]:
You know, our state rep at the time, Tracy King, put forth a, a bill to raise the age from 18 to 21, and there was quite a wonderful discussion about that at the state level. That's after the obviously, after that press conference you're talking about. But Tracy said he he told us, he said, you know, the year before I or year the the session before, I couldn't have felt this way. But he said after seeing what happened in my community with an 18 year old buying these weapons, these two weapons, and 2,000 rounds of ammunition.

Bob Rivard [00:20:56]:
And nobody's saying anything.

Craig Garnett [00:20:57]:
Saying anything.

Bob Rivard [00:20:58]:
These two different weapons within days of each other?

Craig Garnett [00:21:00]:
Days of turning 18. Yeah. 2,000 rounds of ammunition. The kid has a disability, has learning disability, speech disability. He's flunked out. He's a ninth grader, although he's a senior year. You know, where's the special special education component in all this? And why is somebody not I mean, he's all over the Internet talking about what he's gonna do and all telegraphing these things.

Bob Rivard [00:21:23]:
That's another remarkable issue, Craig, is how much, how disconnected law enforcement is in general from the kind of clues or evidence that's so readily available to to every teenager in the in the town from social media accounts.

Craig Garnett [00:21:38]:
Yeah. And but who monitors that? The all these friends are like, you know, oh, he's just acting out. You know, this isn't serious. So but back to Tracy, you know, he got he got closer than anybody in a long time to getting something. But at the end of the day, it was didn't even get to the calendars committee. They they killed it. But, I mean, they on that committee were all convinced that this young man would not have carried out this crime if the law had said twenty one years. Because he waited, and he tried to get his parents, not his parents, but his relatives to buy him weapons.

Craig Garnett [00:22:10]:
They wouldn't try to get friends. He was gonna follow the law despite the fact that he was prepared to step on the law. So and that's one of the things that I think Kimberly and her group, Lives Robbed, have really pushed for us that raised the age, at least.

Bob Rivard [00:22:29]:
Did your state representative ever talk to you in the aftermath of that failed legislative initiative and and give you his, you know, his analysis of why, his fellow Republicans refused to go along?

Craig Garnett [00:22:42]:
I see. It's just in in trans in transcedence over gun laws. You know? It's it's not it's the slippery slope. You know? If you take one step in the direction of conceding, you're gonna slide into the loss of the total second amendment. It's it's they can't let that happen. And Tracy said he said, you know, look, and you vowed to hit these my constituents said, you know, Tracy, I'm a, you know, I'm a conservative. I'm a gun owner, but you're right about this age thing. So that's some concession.

Bob Rivard [00:23:14]:
So Robb Elementary School obviously was never occupied again after after, you know, the fatal shooting, and the community came together to build a new elementary school that I don't think is open yet but will be soon. I know H E B here in San Antonio. Of course, H E B is in Uvalde too, gave $10,000,000 to that to that effort. What's the status of the going forward of how there's going to be a new school and I guess Robb Elementary,

Craig Garnett [00:23:44]:
Bob was is, Bob's still considered a crime scene, because of pending lawsuits. And so it has not been released back to the district. The new school will open, I believe, fall of next year. It's almost paid for. I think they've got some $5,000,000 or something left to raise of a $60,000,000 price tag. H E B gave 10,000,000, which is incredibly generous, and other people have stepped up, and that's much appreciated in our community. We would like I say we. My I I would like one day to see maybe that as the locale of a permanent Rob Memorial.

Craig Garnett [00:24:25]:
I mean, it's it's it's sacred space, and to take it down and put up something that reflects on these children, well, I think would be appropriate.

Bob Rivard [00:24:35]:
Yeah. It seems like it ought to become a a park where people can reflect on the past and

Craig Garnett [00:24:41]:
Mhmm.

Bob Rivard [00:24:41]:
And indeed the future of the city, but that's yet to come. How does it change the newspaper, Craig, and you as a publisher? Are you as a business, I mean, newspapers have been through so much in this country, but small town newspapers have been somewhat inoculated against the larger trends, not completely. But as a going concern today and as a community asset and institution that's widely respected. Is that all still in play in Uvalde?

Craig Garnett [00:25:12]:
Well, to use your metaphor of inoculation, I think I need about four or five more of those shots like COVID because our our business model is is, you know, not not great compared to well, it's like the rest of the country as you point out. Just to give you some measures, some comparison, twenty years ago, our circulation was 6,600. Today, it's about 2,500. So in the aftermath of Rob, we saw quite an increase in our e editions or digital editions simply because people had curiosity about what was happening happening. But now it's we're kind of over that, and so it's it's kinda it's just a it's a gradual slide.

Bob Rivard [00:25:52]:
You have a paywall.

Craig Garnett [00:25:53]:
Yes. We have a paywall for our digital for our website. We have a, a daily update, which is a digital it's an email that goes to over 2,000 subscribers. It's been a wonderful thing. It's it's it's sort of the bridge for us between print and maybe a whole digital product. But, yeah, I mean, just the newspaper, as I say, the newspaper business model, at our level, is gonna be dependent on an acceleration of the digital transition and more philanthropy. And we got a press forward grant last month, which was incredible.

Bob Rivard [00:26:33]:
Now explain to listeners what a press forward grant is both in size and origin.

Craig Garnett [00:26:37]:
Press forward is an organization that came about within recent years to, supplement small papers with grants, whether at the first round, which we were part of, there were 200 papers selected in the country. Each of us got a hundred thousand dollars.

Bob Rivard [00:26:54]:
Wow. Is this like a national philanthropic effort?

Craig Garnett [00:26:57]:
Yes. The Miami Foundation is the holder of the funds. And we were selected out of 900 applicants. So it was such a wonderful boost to us to have this. And the money was given in the in a sense of no real restrictions to be used as part of your general fund, if you will. It wasn't based on a particular project, or hiring x number of people. It was simply to get us over the divide.

Bob Rivard [00:27:27]:
Well, you know in 2012, I started the Revard Report, a digital publication here in San Antonio as the continuing decline of print media occurred at the Express News and really in big cities all over the state and in the country. And there are now hundreds of nonprofit digital news sites in The United States and including here that's now called the San Antonio Report. But many of them struggle financially particularly since the pandemic. And, in most communities of any size, there are far fewer journalists at work, than there were, let's just say, in the eighties and nineties and early two thousands. And I guess eventually, we're going to see that same transition occur in smaller communities and you're already obviously in the middle of that and preparing for it or seeking grants and so forth. Can you envision a day when you would turn the Leader News into a nonprofit and pursue that kind of business model of, you know, becoming entirely dependent upon donors, members, and philanthropic gifts?

Craig Garnett [00:28:37]:
I don't foresee that happening on my watch, fully nonprofit. It's a there are many, many, hurdles to that, many strings attached, boards to be considered, a lot of directives

Bob Rivard [00:28:48]:
It's not easy.

Craig Garnett [00:28:49]:
From people. It's not easy. I've been advised that you'd be better off to be a for profit with philanthropy on the side. We did create a nonprofit, Uvalde Leader News Foundation. So so that's

Bob Rivard [00:29:01]:
a vehicle where people can give charitable donations and get their tax deductions.

Craig Garnett [00:29:05]:
Exactly. While we remain for profit.

Bob Rivard [00:29:07]:
Because most most foundations and philanthropic organizations will not give directly to a for profit organization. But if if you do have a, you know, a nonprofit arm, that creates a a pathway.

Craig Garnett [00:29:19]:
That's exactly why we prepared it. And, you know, of course, for profit is a misnomer in the newspaper world disease. I think the New York Times is probably the only paper making money, and they have, you know, 10,000,000 digital subscribers.

Bob Rivard [00:29:35]:
Well, it's a challenge. And, you and I are both 72 so I don't have any hesitancy to ask you the old age questions. But, do you have a plan, a succession plan in place and do you see where the leader news will be five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now?

Craig Garnett [00:29:53]:
Bob, I don't have a plan. I thought I was gonna, you know, circle that concept at one point, but things changed. And I I just wanna create that hand off, and I'm I don't know what that looks like, honestly. I I know it's philanthropy. I know it's more community engagement in terms of support, but that's you know, that can be sort of counterintuitive also. If you think about asking people for money in your community, you know, crowdfunding, and you're writing things they don't like

Bob Rivard [00:30:26]:
Believe me, I've been there.

Craig Garnett [00:30:28]:
What you understand?

Bob Rivard [00:30:29]:
But it's interesting. You in a way, you need the next young Craig Garnett to come along who wants to live, in in a a wonderful part of the state, a good community, and and, and take the reins over the way you did, so long ago.

Craig Garnett [00:30:46]:
Well, he probably well, I'm not gonna say that. He

Bob Rivard [00:30:48]:
or she.

Craig Garnett [00:30:49]:
He or she would be welcome. And if they're out there, please call me.

Bob Rivard [00:30:52]:
Alright. So if anybody wants to get into the newspaper business, it's it's how to take a great fortune and make it small.

Craig Garnett [00:30:59]:
Yeah, well that's right, but the rewards are incredible.

Bob Rivard [00:31:02]:
One of the questions I wanna ask you, Craig, is and here I am outside inviting you onto my podcast and showing an interest, but people in Uvalde may wish that people like me would just go away and stop talking about, the Robb Elementary School shooting. What was the impact of the outside world on Uvalde? Was it overall positive, all of the media attention? You know, we just talked about that enormous HEB gift. Was the outside philanthropic efforts? Did the families benefit directly in a way that helped them through their periods of grief, and financial instability that was caused in turn by this, or or was the outside attention more negative?

Craig Garnett [00:31:49]:
The philanthropic attention was overwhelming. Our fund, received 23,000,000.

Bob Rivard [00:31:58]:
Now talk about our fund.

Craig Garnett [00:32:00]:
Well, the, we've had a a number of them to get to dig it together. We rise fund, also called the Uvalde Resiliency Fund. They're and I'm not

Bob Rivard [00:32:10]:
Who organized that?

Craig Garnett [00:32:12]:
We had a we had a group of people locally who decided that this needed to be done early on, And they got in touch with people at the federal level who do this, and they came out, talked them through the the planning, how to set it up. And, so we weren't reinventing the wheel. I mean, this kind of thing had been done at Sandy Hook, Parkland, and other places. Mhmm. And the outpouring in response to that, the they raised the the payout was larger than for any other mass shooting in US history, the payout per person. And we hate to use that term, but it was. And so

Bob Rivard [00:32:53]:
This this was direct financial support to

Craig Garnett [00:32:55]:
the family? Direct financial support to the family. And the committee members drew a circle around Rob, and they said, okay. It's everybody who was in the fourth grade wing who was wounded or killed or died died or wounded. And then it was people who were outside who were traumatized. And, anyway, there were there were concentric circles of to measure the impact on each individual, and the funds were allocated based on that position in the shooting.

Bob Rivard [00:33:20]:
And has that process been completed Yes. For all practical purposes?

Craig Garnett [00:33:23]:
It was completed the November after the shooting.

Bob Rivard [00:33:25]:
Can you give me an estimate of what kind of, funds the families who actually lost a child received?

Craig Garnett [00:33:31]:
We don't know.

Bob Rivard [00:33:32]:
Oh, I see.

Craig Garnett [00:33:33]:
Yeah. That was all kept, and I certainly understand the reasoning.

Bob Rivard [00:33:37]:
I wanna ask you about the 17 wounded people because in mass shooting, those that are wounded just they remain this anonymous group of who were they? Were they children? Were they teachers? Were they custodians? Who who were the 17 people and and how did they fare?

Craig Garnett [00:33:56]:
That well, there were actually 10 who were children in the classrooms. That survived. That survived. Those who were in the rooms with the shooter have struggled immensely. Many of them are not back in school to this day. Many of them are still getting therapy. I mean, you can understand. You know? So and the others who were wounded tended to be people who may have injured themselves climbing out of windows, you know, glass cuts, those kids in the other rooms that weren't directly impacted by the shooting, by the bullets.

Craig Garnett [00:34:33]:
So the focus has kind of been on the those who were in the classrooms.

Bob Rivard [00:34:38]:
That's a lot of families in total.

Craig Garnett [00:34:40]:
When you consider the the circle of each family, it's enormous, and friends. Yeah. Well,

Bob Rivard [00:34:47]:
for listeners today, is there anything that that you would tell people listening that they can do or should do? Or perhaps it isn't something for the people of Uvalde as much as it is to advocate for gun reform or

Craig Garnett [00:35:01]:
That's my message. You know, think about your children in school. Think about your friend's children in school, and think about what would happen in your community if somebody, as disturbed as this man was showed up one day. How would you want that to play out? And to start with, you don't want that person to be carrying a weapon of war with unlimited ammunition. You want that person to have been under a microscope before he was allowed to buy anything. So sensible gun laws save lives. We know that. We know it would have saved Uvalde children.

Bob Rivard [00:35:39]:
That's a good place to stop. Craig Garnett, owner and publisher of the Uvalde Leader News. Thanks for coming on to Big City Small Town.

Craig Garnett [00:35:46]:
Thank you for having me, Bob.

Bob Rivard [00:35:51]:
Welcome to The Last Word, my weekly commentary on life and work in San Antonio and Texas. The busy streets of Manhattan and New York City are more than 1,800 miles distant from San Antonio, but the targeted killing last week of Brian Thompson, the chief executive of UnitedHealthcare, set off a social media storm with many mostly anonymous posters asserting that the killing allegedly committed by an aggrieved young man who felt cheated by the insurance industry, was justified. Few things unite Americans these days, but our shared dislike and distrust of health care insurers is one widely held view most of us share. The antipathy is easy to chart. Companies like UnitedHealthcare post annual income in the tens of billions of dollars. Critics say those profits and multimillion dollar compensation packages to Thompson and other industry executives are derived from company practices that include slow walking approvals of medical treatment and routine denials of medical procedures, prescription drug coverage, hospital stays, and other care. If the allegations are correct, 26 year old Luigi Mangione of Maryland, the product of a wealthy family, an Ivy League education, and a promising tech career, grew frustrated with health care approvals or reimbursements after a back injury sidelined him with injuries both physical and psychological. He carefully plotted his attack on Thompson, who was in New York City for an industry conference, using a three d produced handgun and silencer to ambush his victim on a busy Manhattan block while concealing his identity from the time of his arrival in New York to his departure and disappearance that very same day of the shooting.

Bob Rivard [00:37:45]:
Our family, including our two adult sons and their partners, gathered for dinner this week and engaged in a robust conversation about the use of violence for political reasons. It's never okay, you might argue. Really? Stephen Willeford, a Sutherland Springs resident and former firearms instructor, was lauded as a quiet hero in 02/2017 after he shot and wounded Devin Kelley, who was trying to escape after killing 26 people and wounding twenty two others at the First Baptist Church service in the small community. No one protested Willeford's actions in the wake of the worst mass shooting in the state's history. And state sanctioned killings are actually not uncommon these days. Would it have been wrong for someone in Syria to stop the country's longtime dictator, president Bashar al Assad, from escaping to Russia after his twenty year reign of fear ended, one that led to the arrest, torture, and disappearance of tens of thousands of Syrian citizens? How about Israel's recent targeted killings of Hezbollah leaders in Lebanon or the decision by Trump administration in 2020 to assassinate Iranian Revolutionary Guard commander, Qasem Soleimani, in a missile attack in Iraq. People can sympathize with the plight of Mangione and millions of other Americans whose medical and health care issues are made worse by insurers who routinely deny services and reimbursements. It's an industry that has driven many medical professionals out of business because of those low reimbursements.

Bob Rivard [00:39:25]:
The United States is a world power with the greatest economy, but it also is the Western democracy with the worst health care system, where the quality of available care often depends on an individual or a family's net worth and their ability to fight seemingly indifferent for profit health care companies. A brazen daylight killing on a busy New York street will not change that. Social media trolls might praise the dirty, hairy kind of violence allegedly plotted by Mangione, but for me it was just one more reminder of how easy it is for a disturbed individual in this country to get his hands, yes, his hands this is overwhelmingly a problem with young men, get his hands on a firearm and ammunition, and wreak havoc and violence. The only thing that surprised me was the decision by New York state authorities to charge Mangione with second degree homicide. I would have expected a charge of first degree murder, a premeditated act carried out in the course of other crimes, which in New York would make it a capital offense. Once again, in my opinion, violence has accomplished nothing except tragedy. That's my last word for the week. Thank you for listening, and please share this episode with friends and colleagues at work.

Bob Rivard [00:40:49]:
And please check out our new YouTube channel where we are starting to post videos of some of our events and episodes. A special thanks to our sponsor, Western Urban, building the city our children want to call home, and Geekdom where startups are born and nurtured into new businesses. Shouldn't you be a member? Special thanks to our production team, producers Ashley Bird and Maura Bobbitt with Blooming with Bertie, and Erica Rempel, videographer and content creator, and Alfie de la Garza of Sound Crane Audio. We'll see you next week.