Pete Arredondo, the police chief of Uvalde School District at the center of nationwide dismay and outrage over the official response to last month’s shooting at Robb Elementary School, has been placed on administrative leave, an official said Wednesday.
Arredondo’s status change is effective immediately, according to a statement sent to The Daily Beast. The statement was attributed to Dr. Hal Harrell, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s superintendent.
“From the beginning of this horrible event, I shared that the district would wait until the investigation was complete before making personnel decisions,” Harrell said. “Today, I am still without details of the investigations being conducted by various agencies.”
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“Because of the lack of clarity that remains and the unknown timing of when I will receive the results of the investigations, I have made the decision to place Chief Arredondo on administrative leave effective on this date.”
Harrell added that Lt. Mike Hernandez would be taking over Arredondo’s duties in the interim and that the district would “continue to seek qualified candidates” to fill the role on a more permanent basis over the summer.
No other information was immediately shared by the superintendent.
Arredondo’s administrative leave comes hours after his request to take a leave of absence from the Uvalde City Council, to which he was elected three weeks before the shooting, was denied.
He and other Texas law enforcement officials have faced criticism and questions over why it took authorities less than three minutes after the shooting began to enter the school building but more than an hour to get into two classrooms where the gunman was holed up with young children and teachers.
The May 24 shooting left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander, who decided to place the lives of officers over the lives of children,” Steve McCraw, the Texas Department of Public Safety’s director, said earlier this week. “The officers had weapons. The children had none.”
Arredondo has said he did not know he was the officer in charge on the scene that day, which runs contrary to both federal protocol and state authorities’ description of him as incident commander.
In an interview with the Texas Tribune earlier this month, Arredondo also claimed that a locked door and ring of more than two dozen keys stymied his attempts to get into the elementary school classroom quickly.
Reports swiftly surfaced to dispute the chief’s excuse, however, with the San Antonio Express-News notably reporting over the weekend that surveillance footage showed that police officers never attempted to open the door.
At a Texas Senate hearing on Tuesday, McCraw confirmed that the classroom doors could not be locked from the inside.
