By Daniel Trotta and Kanishka Singh

(Reuters) -Uvalde’s mayor is disputing a report about the May 24 school shooting that said a police officer awaiting a supervisor’s permission to fire his rifle missed a chance to take out the shooter who went on to massacre 19 children and two teachers.

But the director of the Advanced Law Enforcement Rapid Response Training Center (ALERRT) stood by his organization’s findings on Friday, saying they were based on multiple statements given to state investigators by the officer in question and corroborated by his supervising officer on the scene.

Don McLaughlin, the mayor of the Texas town of 16,000, did not disclose his source of information in his statement contesting the ALERRT report. McLaughlin did not respond to a Reuters request for him to elaborate.

The Texas Department of Public Safety commissioned ALERRT, of Texas State University, to conduct the review after the law enforcement response to the Uvalde shooting came under harsh criticism.

Public and official outrage has focused on the widely reported detail that as many as 19 officers waited more than an hour in a hallway outside the classrooms where the children were slaughtered before a U.S. Border Patrol-led tactical team finally made entry and killed the shooter.

In addition, according to the ALERRT report, an Uvalde police officer armed with an AR-15 rifle had a chance to take out the shooter on the school grounds from a distance of about 148 yards (135 meters) but held his fire while waiting for permission to shoot. As a result, he missed his chance as the suspect entered the school building.

The Uvalde mayor disputed that finding.

No Uvalde police officer saw the shooter before he entered the school on May 24, McLaughlin said in a statement.

“A Uvalde Police Department officer saw someone outside, but was unsure of who he saw and observed children in the area as well. Ultimately, it was a coach with children on the playground, not the shooter,” the mayor asserted.

Pete Blair, the executive director of ALERRT, said the officer made multiple statements to Department of Public Safety investigators that he asked for permission to shoot the suspect, who was being pursued because he had already fired on a business across the street and entered school grounds.

The officer’s version was corroborated by his supervisor, a sergeant at the scene who also gave a statement to state investigators, Blair said.

That sergeant was busy attempting to get citizens to clear the area, Blair said.

“That was the reason for his delay in responding to the request for permission,” Blair said. “I’ve never heard anything about this gym coach before.”

The report concluded that the officer would have been justified in firing on the suspect, but also said that “if the officer was not confident that he could both hit his target and of his backdrop if he missed, he should not have fired.”

The officer was concerned an errant shot might penetrate the school wall and harm children, the report said.

The 26-page report was based on school video, video taken by others from outside the school, officer body cameras, radio logs, testimony from officers who had been at the scene, and statements from investigators, the training center said, adding that the report should not be considered definitive or final.

While much of the police response was recorded, the events disputed by the mayor so far have not been found on video, Blair said.

(Reporting by Daniel Trotta in Carlsbad, Calif., and Kanishka Singh in Washington; editing by Jonathan Oatis, Caitlin Webber and Leslie Adler)

By Randi Love

(Reuters) – Hundreds of giant African land snails have turned up on Florida’s Gulf Coast, officials said on Friday, threatening to destroy a vast array of plants and trees, and posing the risk of transmitting a rare type of meningitis to humans.

The snail, native to East Africa, is one of the most damaging in the world, eating at least 500 different types of plants, tree bark, and even paint and stucco on houses, the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website said.

The gastropod, whose shell can grow to the size of a human fist, often carries a parasite known as rat lungworm that can transmit a type of meningitis whose symptoms include muscle aches, headache, stiff neck, fever and vomiting.

More than a thousand of the creatures have been collected in the Tampa suburb of New Port Richey in Pasco County, officials said. All of those tested as of Thursday were not carrying the rat lungworm parasite, Greg Hodges, assistant director of the state’s Division of Plant Industry, said at a briefing.

State officials first detected the infestation on June 23.

Officials stressed the importance of not touching nor ingesting the snail to prevent infections.

“Most importantly, do no eat them. This is not a snail to be put on butter and oil and garlic. This is not something you want to touch. This is not something you want to eat,” Florida Department of Agriculture Commissioner Nikki Fried said.

To eradicate the snails, the state has placed an area of the county around New Port Richey under watch and will treat all properties within the zone until the snails are eliminated, the department’s website said.

The treatment with metaldehyde, a pesticide used to control snails and slugs, will take 18 months, and the area will monitored for two years after the last snail find.

It is unclear how the snail made its way to Florida, but the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s website said is a common hitchhiker on cargo or illegally imported by people for the purpose of food or as pets.

It is the third time that the giant African land snail has been found in Florida. In the 1960s, it took $1 million and 10 years to eradicate. In 2010, a second infestation took another decade and $23 million to eradicate.

If the snails turn up beyond a core concentration in the New Port Richey area, it may take longer than expected to eradicate the pest, state officials said.

(Reporting by Randi Love in New York; Editing by Sandra Maler)

By Mica Rosenberg and Ted Hesson

NEW YORK/WASHINGTON – Four employees from U.S Customs and Border Protection (CBP) have been referred for disciplinary review over their treatment of Haitian migrants who they sought to push back across the Rio Grande using horses last September, CBP officials said on Friday as the agency released a more than 500-page report on a widely filmed and photographed incident.

CBP Commissioner Chris Magnus said at a press conference the disciplinary process related to the Sept. 19 incident was ongoing and did not identify the employees.

Reuters witnesses at the time saw mounted officers wearing cowboy hats blocking the paths of migrants, and one officer unfurling horse reins resembling a lariat, which he swung near a man’s face as he carried a bag of food across the Rio Grande river to a makeshift encampment in the United States. The images triggered a strong nationwide backlash and calls for an investigation.

Magnus added the report said no migrants were struck with the reins that agents were photographed swinging in their direction. But the report outlined the agents’ inappropriate behavior toward Haitians, including yelling profanity and insults related to a migrant’s national origin, and using unnecessary force against migrants attempting to reenter the United States with food.

The investigation found one agent on horseback grabbed a man and spun him around in a widely photographed incident, which took place near a sprawling riverside encampment in Del Rio, Texas that had formed after the rapid arrival of thousands of Haitian migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to the report, one agent “acted in an unsafe manner by pursuing the individual he had yelled at along the river’s edge forcing his horse to narrowly maneuver around a small child.”

The incident originated, the report found, when Texas’ Department of Public Security (DPS) officials also on the scene asked for assistance from Border Patrol. A lack of clear command lead to the agents to inappropriately follow DPS instructions to prevent migrants from crossing the river back into the United States.

Migrants were frequently crossing into Mexico to bring back food and supplies that were scarce in the makeshift encampment.

Advocates and migrants suing the government over their treatment during the incident said the Haitian man depicted in the widely seen photos described the mounted officer grabbing his neck and only releasing him when the horse was about to trample him.

He called the experience humiliating in a court filing.

“We are already taking steps to ensure a situation like what occurred in Del Rio doesn’t happen again,” Magnus said during the news conference.

MANY EXPELLED

Of the roughly 15,000 Haitians who arrived at the U.S.-Mexico border in September, about 8,000 were rapidly expelled in the weeks that followed under a COVID-era order known as Title 42.

The findings come as U.S. President Joe Biden, a Democrat, has grappled both operationally and politically with a record-number of attempted crossings at the southwest border with Mexico. Republicans have criticized Biden for trying to reverse some of the hardline immigration policies of his Republican predecessor former President Donald Trump, while some members of Biden’s own party said he is not doing enough to protect vulnerable migrants.

U.S. Border Patrol apprehended nearly 223,000 migrants at the southwest border in May, the highest monthly total on record. Haitians made up about 7,700 of that figure, with several thousand more attempting to cross at ports of entry without valid permission.

On Thursday, Texas’ Republican Governor Greg Abbott said he had authorized the Texas National Guard and state authorities to “apprehend” migrants and transport them to the border at a port of entry with Mexico. In a statement, the state’s National Guard said it is “working with our interagency partners to respond to illegal immigration.”

Abbott’s order was the latest in a string of immigration crackdown measures in the state, which earlier included busing migrants out of state to destinations like Washington D.C.

Magnus said that CBP had “a shared interest” with Texas “in maintaining a safe orderly humane immigration process” at the border but said that problems arise when any state “takes unilateral actions.”

CBP recently said it would investigate whether anyone from the agency sold unofficial commemorative coins that depict the widely publicized photograph of the incident that was under investigation. Magnus said in an earlier statement that the “hateful images” on the “deeply offensive” coins angered him and distracted from the essential work of the Border Patrol.

(Reporting by Ted Hesson in Washington and Mica Rosenberg in New York; Editing by Aurora Ellis and Diane Craft)