A memorial was set up in a town square to honor the victims killed (AP)

Authorities in Uvalde, Texas, are being sued in a $27 billion class action suit filed on behalf of victims who suffered emotional and psychological harm as a result of the poor police reaction during the Robb Elementary School massacre, which killed 19 kids and two teachers.

According to the 59-page lawsuit, which was uploaded on classaction.org, the plaintiffs will be forced to face "indelible and forever-lasting pain".

It is worth noting that the lawsuit names the Uvalde Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety, the SWAT unit of the San Antonio Police Department, and the Uvalde Sheriff's Office, in addition to the US Department of Homeland Security. The defendants "fundamentally deviated from what they understood to be the well-established rules and standards for responding to an active shooter," as per the filing.

The document names as plaintiffs all students, student parents, instructors, and school support staff who attended or had children attend Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District's ("CISD") Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022.

Since the May 24 incident, the police have been heavily criticized by the public and the media for their failure to enter the classroom where a young man shot children and teachers with an assault rifle and waited for reinforcements for more than an hour.

A flashback

A nearly 80-minute hallway surveillance video has publicly shown, for the first time, the armed officers as fully armed, yet hesitant.

The video taken inside Robb Elementary School reveals law enforcement's perplexing passivity during the May massacre.

The Austin American-Statesman published a nearly 80-minute hallway surveillance video that revealed for the first time — with disturbing and painful clarity — a hesitant and haphazard tactical response by fully armed officers that the head of Texas' state police has condemned as a failure and some Uvalde residents have blasted as cowardly.

The police ran away

The footage from an inside school hallway camera shows the gunman entering the building with an AR-15-style rifle and includes 911 tape of a teacher screaming, "Get down! Enter your rooms! "Go to your rooms!"

Two officers approach the classrooms minutes after the gunman enters then flee amid gunshots. Minutes pass, and more gunshots are heard from the classrooms as other officers from various agencies approach. After more than an hour, a team eventually advances down the corridor, breaches the classrooms, and ends the massacre.