Uvalde School Board Fires District Police Chief Pete Arredondo
The Uvalde school board voted unanimously Wednesday evening to fire district police chief Pete Arredondo over the botched police response to the shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
Officials around the nation have questioned why it took 77 minutes for police to breach a pair of adjoining rooms where a gunman was mercilessly slaughtering fourth-grade students and their teachers.
The board voted to fire Arredondo, who was the on-scene commander, during a closed session meeting on Wednesday. Several members of the audience applauded when the board announced the decision, according to CNN.
Arredondo was not in attendance; his attorney, George Hyde, wrote in a 17-page press statement issued less than an hour before the meeting that the disgraced police chief has received death threats and therefore did not feel safe attending the meeting.
“Chief Arredondo will not participate in his own illegal and unconstitutional public lynching and respectfully requests the Board immediately reinstate him, with all backpay and benefits and close the complaint as unfounded,” the statement said.
Hyde argued that firing Arredondo would be illegal because a letter from the district suspending him without pay was not an official “complaint” as required by law to consider termination.
Arredondo was placed on leave from his role as school district police chief in June after the Texas Department of Public Safety director Steve McCraw called the police response to the shooting an “abject failure.”
McCraw testified before a state Senate committee last month that Arredondo was “the only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers” from entering the adjoining fourth grade classrooms where the shooter was mercilessly slaughtering students and their teachers.
He said Arredondo “decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” arguing that law enforcement had a large enough presence at the scene of the shootings to have stopped the 18-year-old gunman within three minutes if the on-scene commander had not kept officers from entering the rooms.
Uvalde schools superintendent Hal Harrell had called for Arredondo’s termination.
Police officers with rifles gathered in the hallway outside the classroom for nearly an hour while the gunman, armed with an AR-15-style rifle, carried out his attack.
Arredondo previously told the Texas Tribune that he and another group of officers tried to open the doors to classrooms 111 and 112 but that the doors were reinforced and impenetrable.
While reports have indicated police were waiting for a master set of keys to enter the classrooms, an officer said a Halligan bar, an ax-like forcible-entry tool, arrived eight minutes after the shooter entered the building, according to McGraw. Authorities did not use the tool, which was not brought into the school until an hour after the first officers entered the building, and instead waited for keys, according to a Texas Tribune report.
McGraw said the classroom door could not be locked from the inside and testified that the officers never tried to see if the door was unlocked.
