Exactly three months after a mass shooting at a Texas elementary school left 19 children and two teachers dead, the embattled police chief who oversaw its bungled response has been fired by the Uvalde school board.
Pete Arredondo, the top cop overseeing the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s force of six, was in charge of the nearly 400 local, state, and federal law enforcement officers who responded to reports of an active shooter at Robb Elementary School on May 24, but held off on confronting the gunman for some 77 minutes, according to an investigation by the Texas House of Representatives.
Arredondo’s termination “for good cause” was finalized at a Wednesday evening meeting held by the school board. The unanimous vote, which came after the board met in a closed session, followed vocal outrage by grieving parents who demanded Arredondo's ouster.
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The vote was met with a cheer from parents present, some of whom then quickly took up a chant: “We’re not done.”
The now-former chief himself was not present, with his attorney issuing a 17-page press statement less than an hour before the board was set to convene. In it, lawyer George Hyde painted his client—placed on administrative leave in June—as a victim and accused the board of not following proper procedure.
“Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him,” the statement read, “with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded.”
Arredondo, 51, was one of the first to arrive on the scene of the deadliest school shooting in Texas history. However, he failed to follow the district’s written active shooter plan, said a report issued by the Texas House committee. The protocols required Arredondo to “assume command and control of the response,” but he “failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander,” the report states.
“The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon,” it says, noting that the fiasco was not attributable to “malice or ill motives,” but rather, to “systemic failures and egregiously poor decision making.”
Arredondo and the others “failed to prioritize saving the lives of innocent victims over their own safety,” according to the report, which lambasted first responders for the “unacceptably long period of time” before taking any sort of decisive action.
On June 22, the school district put Arredondo on administrative leave, following the revelation that officers under his ostensible command could have stopped the killing within minutes of their arrival but didn’t.
The stunning abdication can be seen, in excruciating, moment-by-moment detail, in security footage taken inside the school that day. Moments after 18-year-old gunman Salvador Ramos entered the school unimpeded just after 11:30 a.m. on May 24, the first two responding police officers can be seen running into the school. But when Ramos fired an extended burst of gunfire, the cops ran away from the connecting 4th-grade classrooms where Ramos had started executing students with an assault-style rifle.
For more than an hour, dozens upon dozens of heavily armed police can be seen, variously, aiming rifles and handguns down the hallway in the direction of the classroom, talking among themselves, helping themselves to a squirt of hand sanitizer from a dispenser on the wall, and fist-bumping each other. None of them ever appear to make a proactive move to enter any classrooms to stop the bloodshed as children were still making desperate 911 calls.
Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw, whose agency had some 91 troopers among the 376 cops at Robb Elementary, called the video “horrifying evidence” of an “abject failure.”
But, even though Arredondo was theoretically the incident commander, he told the House committee that he did “not consider himself” to have been in charge that day.
“My approach and thought was responding as a police officer,” he testified. “And so I didn’t title myself.”
Arredondo at first floated a story about not breaching the classrooms earlier because he was waiting for a janitor to bring him a key. But the House report said Arredondo’s version of events was not true, and that “nobody ever checked the doors of Rooms 111 or 112 to confirm they were actually locked or secured. Room 111 probably was not.”
The search for a key “consumed [Arredondo’s] attention and wasted precious time,” the House panel said. Further, nobody created a diversion by the windows of the rooms where Ramos was picking off kids one-by-one, which the panel said wouldn’t have even been necessary “had responders remained focused on ‘stopping the killing.’”
There was “confusion” among officers as to whether the situation constituted an “active shooter” or a “barricaded subject,” which call for two different responses. Yet, as the House report said, “information that there were wounded victims in the rooms would have clarified the existence of an active shooter scenario.” Nicole Ogburn, who teaches 4th grade at Robb Elementary, escaped with her life that day by climbing to safety through a classroom window.
She previously told The Daily Beast that she “can’t not trust” her local police if she is ever going to be able to settle back into some sort of normalcy.
“OK, they made mistakes but they probably will never do that again…,” Ogburn said. “[Ramos] is the one who did this to everybody… He’s the one that caused this to happen.”
Others were pleased to hear that the school board was considering getting rid of Arredondo.
“This is a move in the right direction,” the Vincent Salazar, whose granddaughter Layla Salazar was killed by Ramos, told The New York Times last month when Arredondo’s termination seemed likely. “Let’s start with Arredondo, from the top, and work our way down.”
Last month, Arredondo stepped down from a City Council seat he won handily in a May 7 election. He was quietly sworn in on May 31, just a week after the massacre, and resigned on July 1, according to the Uvalde Leader-News.
“After much consideration, it is in the best interest of the community to step down as a member of the City Council for District 3 to minimize further distractions,” Arredondo said in a resignation letter to the City of Uvalde. “The Mayor, the City Council, and the City Staff must continue to move forward to unite our community, once again.”
