UVALDE, Texas — Brett Cross was embraced by many on a recent Saturday in Uvalde.
“How did it feel to be home with the babies?” Christina Delgado asked Brett Cross after she hugged him.
She said this after his 10-day camp outside Uvalde CISD headquarters where he demanded that district police be held accountable for what happened on May 24.
“Like I said, I told them I wasn’t going anywhere and I’m proving it. Like I said, we waited 18 weeks for them to do what was right,” Cross said.
Brett Cross had a pair of handcuffs on his jeans that he was going to use if the protest went longer, but they weren’t needed because on Oct. 7 his demands were met — district leaders suspended all police department operations.
“They finally did the bare minimum, which is all that we’ve been asking for since the beginning,” Brett Cross said.
Brett and Nikki Cross fight for their son Uziyah “Uzi” Garcia, who was a kid full of love.
“And there’s no other way to describe it. He always waned to make people happy, he always wanted everybody to feel safe,” Brett Cross says.
Uzi wanted to be a police officer to help people, but that dream was shattered when he died at Robb Elementary.
“Y’all see pictures of them smiling and happy and everything. That’s not how they died, they were slaughtered it was a massacre,” Brett Cross said after a city council meeting earlier in the summer. “Do y’all know what a 10-year-olds casket looks like? Cause it’s not a pretty sight.”
All summer long, Brett Cross and many of the victims’ families have fought for accountability at marches, rallies, city council meetings and school board meetings.
“I know y’all are getting sick and damn tired of me, but I will come up every damn time,” Brett Cross shouted at the Uvalde CISD school board. “Our babies died, they were massacred.”
These families have bonded through tragedy, only they can relate to each other’s pain.
“We are in a club that we never wanted to be in and we want that access limited,” Brett Cross said. “We don’t want any other parents to have to join the club of burying their kid.”
They pushed for the termination of Uvalde CISD police chief Pete Arredondo, and the families said that was a difficult fight.
One school board meeting that was supposed to discuss Arredondo’s future had a recess that took three hours with no clear answer.
Brett Cross stormed off with frustration and looked at the media and asked them to attend the next meeting.
“Come out Wednesday, I’m [expletive] tired of this bull [expletive]” Brett Cross told the media.
Then three months after the shooting, Arredondo was fired.
It didn’t stop there.
The same Uvalde CISD police officers who were at Robb Elementary on May 24 were at the school board meetings every week while Brett Cross and the families called for them to be held accountable.
“It’s a slap in the face, you know, the same ones that run us through the metal detecting wands are the same ones that heard our children screaming and didn’t do nothing about it,” Brett Cross says.
Brett Cross took matters into his own hands and camped out in front of Superintendent Hal Harrell’s office.
Brett Cross spoke with Spectrum News 1 and checked his phone to see exactly how long he had been out there.
“Five days, 21 hours, three minutes,” he read off his phone.
It was him, a tent, some lawn chairs, and the support of his friends and family.
Strangers from out of town would spend the day with Brett Cross or donate food. Others just stopped by to show their support, like when George Rodriguez, grandfather of Jose Flores who lost his life at Robb, delivered pizza to Brett Cross and hugged him.
He was away from his family for 10-plus days, but his wife Nikki Cross says it was that love and support that fueled them.
“So It’s nice to not feel like I’m by myself in it or it’s just me and my husband and I’ve met some really wonderful people,” Nikki Cross says.
She was concerned for Brett Cross every night because he was met with many obstacles, including a gate that would prevent vehicles from going in and out of the back parking lot that he was camped out in.
“I mean, it shows you where their priorities are,” Brett Cross says. “School has already started, some fences but they are not complete. They would rather spend this time these past six days than to protect our children.”
A lot came out of this protest. On top of the suspended police activities, one Uvalde CISD police officer was fired, and Harrell is on the verge of retiring, but Brett says it’s not stopping there.
“Climbing ups the chain of getting accountability and transparency. Just one step at a time,” Brett Cross says.
He’s been called a hero by many, but he says he’s just a grieving father fighting for change.
“Left, right, middle whatever, we as a people have to show that we don’t work the government the government works for us,” Brett Cross says. “Same way with these school boards, same way at these city council.”
Twenty-one people, he says, will not die in vain.
“I’m doing this in his (Uzi’s) honor and his legacy so that he will have helped even more people,” Brett Cross says.