Pedro “Pete” Arredondo started out as a 911 operator, responding again and again to calls from people in Uvalde, Texas desperately needing help when seconds could mean the difference between life and death.
He should now end his career by resigning as chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department for failing to take action while children placed nearly a dozen 911 calls for help while locked in adjoining classrooms, both their teachers and 19 classmates dead or dying.
Each one of those calls required more nerve and courage than the chief supposedly in charge demonstrated. Each involved dire risk undertaken with the faith that the police would immediately respond.
ADVERTISEMENT
If this former 911 operator turned chief was unaware of those calls, a quick check would have told him that kids were calling for help even as at least 19 cops under his immediate command stood outside the classroom door.
“Please send the police now,” a child begged after placing a half dozen previous calls over 44 minutes, the first of them 33 minutes after the killer entered the classroom and more than 30 minutes after the cops pursuing him should have been ordered to enter.
By stepping down today as quickly as he should have responded on Tuesday morning, Arredondo could signal to the grieving families that he is holding himself responsible for a police failure that numerous other law enforcement commanders have termed “disgusting.”
He has so far sought only to save himself from added shame by taking down his Facebook page on which he proudly announced on March 22 that his department had “hosted ‘Active Shooter Training’ at the Uvalde High School.”
“Our overall goal is to train every Uvalde area law enforcement officer so that we can prepare as best as possible for any situation that may arise,” he said at the time. “We have hosted several of these courses and plan to continue to do so. I would like to thank UCISD Officers.”
Since the 1999 mass shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado, the most basic tenet of such training has been to immediately engage and neutralize an active shooter before more people die.
The Texas Department of Public Safety says Arredondo was the incident commander at Robb Elementary School on Tuesday and should have applied that essential principle. But he had still not given the order to move in an hour and 17 minutes after the killer entered classrooms 111 and 112.
A police officer walks near the makeshift memorial for the shooting victims outside Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas.
CHANDAN KHANNA / AFPA girl who survived by covering herself with a friend’s blood and playing dead would later say that she was able to hear the police talking in the hallway outside her classroom and wondered why they were not entering to end the horror. At least one of the 911 calls was placed by a child so brave that she made it on a phone dropped by her slain teacher. Arrendondo had still not summoned the nerve to act when a group of Border Patrol Agents decided that they had waited long enough for the order to enter. They got a key to the classroom door and did what Arredondo should have commanded in the first minutes.
More than an hour elapsed after the killer should have been neutralized. And any trauma doctor will tell you that blood loss is the most common cause of death of gunshot victims. Two of the children rushed to nearby Uvalde Memorial Hospital died, including 9-year-old Jacklyn Cazares. There is a question whether they might have been saved. The same could be asked about the 18 youngsters and two teachers who died at the scene, bleeding out while Arredondo hesitated.
Meanwhile, a growing number of increasingly frantic parents gathered outside the school, held at bay by responding officers. One mother reportedly was handcuffed after insisting police do something.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting, Arredondo held a press briefing.
“At 11:32 AM this morning. there was a casualty incident at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas,” he began. “The school has children that are in second, third and fourth grade. I can confirm right now that we have several injuries, adults and students. And we do have some deaths.”
He spoke with the somber tone of a professional commander whose cops had done all they could.
“The suspect is deceased at this point,” he went on. “Families are being notified and we are providing services to them. We had numerous law enforcement officers and agencies that assisted with the safe release for those students.”
Unless Arredondo is oblivious beyond reason, he must have known by then that the point at which the killer died would become an issue, along with his failure to provide the families with the service they most needed by sending in those numerous law enforcement officers. He must have been aware that the students had been safely released only after a team from one of those agencies, the Border Patrol, became fed up with his inaction.
But he actually posted a video of his press appearance on his now vanished Facebook page. Earlier postings announced his election on May 7 as the representative from District 3 to the Uvalde city council. The election was held in the town’s civic center, where the Robb parents would gather to await news of their children. The tally shows that 67 percent of the vote out of a field of four candidates went to the affable hometown hero known as “Pete” who had become chief of the schools police in April of 2020 after his predecessor was alleged to have pulled a gun and threatened a man in a bar.
The onetime 911 operator had actively sought to become chief and he had parlayed that into becoming a council member-elect, a testament to police-community relations such as many jurisdictions would envy. It was also proof of the respect he received from the citizenry as well as the four members of his department. He was content enough at 50 years old that the biggest concern he expressed on Facebook was a post saying “ISO good pool cleaner.”
But then the bill came due with Tuesday’s shooting. And how could Arredondo as a chief and a council member help lead Uvalde through its grief when the whole town knows he did nothing while kids called again and again for help?
Arredondo did not respond to messages left on his office voicemail and his cell phone inquiring whether he feels his actions have been unfairly characterized. The messages also inquired whether he is contemplating resigning.
Somebody who should be considered as the new chief is Border Patrol Officer Jacob Albarado, who is the father of a second grader and the husband of a Robb teacher. Albarado had been off-duty and sitting down for a haircut at a Uvalde barbershop when his wife texted him that there was an active shooter. He arrived moments later along with the barber, who brought along a shotgun. Albarado led an evacuation of other parts of the school, and those who reached safety included his wife and daughter.
The one way Arredondo can help the town in which he was raised is to step down from both positions. Maybe he can do penance by returning to taking 911 calls and dispatching help immediately to those who desperately need it, in time to save lives.
