Pete Arredondo charged over police response

An indictment unsealed Friday accuses former Uvalde school police Chief Pete Arredondo of missteps that led to the botched response to an active shooter that killed 19 children and two teachers.

UVALDE, Texas — A 10-count indictment unsealed Friday accuses former Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo of 10 missteps that led to law enforcement’s botched response to an active shooter that killed 19 children and two teachers in May 2022.

Authorities took Arredondo into custody Thursday at the county jail, where he spent about 90 minutes before being released on bail.

A grand jury also indicted Adrian Gonzales, a former school district police officer whose role has been less public in the two years and a month since the shooting. He had not yet been incarcerated as of Friday, and the indictment in his case remains sealed.

The indictments are the culmination of a six-month grand jury investigation that included months of in-person testimony, including that of Texas Department of Public Safety Director Col. Steve McCraw.

The officers face up to two years in prison and a $10,000 fine if convicted of the criminal charges in state prison.

Arredondo accused of botched police response

The law enforcement response to the Robb Elementary attack — the worst school shooting in Texas history — has drawn national scrutiny, with Arredondo at the center of criticism.

Days after the shooting, McCraw identified Arredondo as the incident commander and said he wrongly treated the attacker as a barricaded subject rather than an active shooter, requiring immediate action to stop the shooting. shooter.

Instead, law enforcement waited, letting the shooter continue killing children in a classroom.

Investigators later discovered that the classroom door was never locked and there was no evidence that an officer attempted to open the door. The Uvalde school board, three months after the shooting, voted unanimously to fire Arredondo, who said he responded appropriately to the attack.

“Any allegation of a lack of leadership is completely misplaced,” Arredondo’s lawyer said in a statement the day of the board’s vote. “The complaint that an officer had to rush the door, believed to be locked, to open it without a shield capable of stopping an AR-15 bullet, without breaking the tools…amounts to suicide.”

Arredondo accused of failing to act

According to charging documents unsealed Friday, Arredondo is accused of failing to act to protect survivors of the attack, including Khloie Torres, who called 911 during the attack and asked for help. He also names Samuel Salinas, who has said in interviews that he “played dead” to survive the attack.

The indictment says Arredondo “failed to respond as instructed to an active shooter incident…thereby delaying the response of law enforcement officers to an active shooter who chased and shot one or more children in room 112 of Robb Elementary School.”

After being informed that children had been injured in the classroom, he ordered law enforcement to evacuate a wing of the school before confronting the 18-year-old shooter.

The indictment also accuses him of falsely trying to negotiate with the shooter and telling other officers that they should not enter the classroom until an evacuation had taken place. occurred.

The charges follow years of national scrutiny of the police response

The accusations follow two years of intense pressure on the families of many victims, who have repeatedly called for accountability. They also follow a damning report from the US Department of Justice, published in January, which noted “cascading failures” in the botched response by law enforcement.

“Due to a lack of leadership, training, and policies, 33 students and three of their teachers – many of whom had been shot – were trapped in a room with an active shooter for more than an hour while law enforcement stood outside,” the report concluded.

The indictments also represent another contrast to the initial false narrative of police heroism that authorities initially provided. At first, authorities said more children would have died if officers had not acted more quickly – a story that unraveled over the following weeks and months and was completely dismantled when the American-Statesman and KVUE-TV obtained 77 minutes of video of the outage.

This is the second and third time nationwide that a law enforcement officer has been accused of failing to act in a campus shooting. A jury last year acquitted former sheriff’s deputy Scot Peterson of child neglect and other charges for failing to confront a shooter at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., who killed 17 people.

He was the only armed police officer on campus when the shooting began in 2018. Legal experts said the case, if it had resulted in a guilty verdict, could have set a precedent by more clearly defining the legal responsibilities of police officers during mass shootings.

Uvalde County Prosecutor Christina Mitchell could not immediately be reached for comment. She cited the ongoing grand jury investigation for failing to release investigative information sought by victims’ families and news organizations.

Contributing: Minnah Arshad, USA TODAY; Niki Griswold, Luz Moreno-Lozano and Katie Hall, Austin American-Statesman; Reuters