Uvalde School Officials to Consider Firing District Police Chief Arredondo on August 24

The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District trustees will meet in a week to deliberate whether to fire the school police chief, who allegedly presided over the district’s security when a gunman stormed an elementary school in May and massacred 19 students and two teachers.

On Tuesday, the officials picked August 24 as the date for a hearing to consider the future of Pete Arredondo’s employment. The day before, school board members agreed to recruit outside attorneys to aid the judgment process, the Texas Tribune reported. Arredondo, who was placed on leave after the incident, also resigned from his post as Uvalde city councilman in July.

Since the shooting, speculation and anger have intensified over the allegation that the police on duty delayed, at Arredondo’s direction, breaking into the classroom to neutralize the gunman. Many law-enforcement officers involved in the response said they believed Arredondo was the on-scene commander during the tragedy. The police chief refuted both claims in June.

Arredondo told the Tribune that he spent more than an hour in the hallway of Robb Elementary School, urgently requesting tactical gear, a sniper, and keys to get inside the fourth-grade classroom where Salvador Ramos was firing on the students and faculty with an AR-15.

Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw said in May that responding officers didn’t immediately face Ramos because “the on-scene commander at the time,” who he said was Arredondo, “believed that it had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded subject” and reportedly ordered officers to stand down. McCraw said Arredondo mistakenly thought Ramos had barricaded himself without posing additional threat to other children and that he had time to call reinforcement officers and equipment for a “tactical breach.”

Arredondo previously told the Tribune that he and another group of officers tried to open the doors to the classrooms where they suspected Ramos was but that the doors were reinforced and impenetrable.

In late June, McCraw testified before a state senate committee that the on-scene commander “chose to put the lives of officers before the lives of children.” He said law enforcement had a large enough presence at Robb Elementary School to have thwarted the gunman within three minutes but failed to act promptly due to misguidance.

“The only thing stopping a hallway of dedicated officers from entering room 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander,” McCraw added.

The final 77-page report from the committee released in July concluded that the law-enforcement response at the scene was riddled with “systemic failures,” specifically stalling, crisis, and confusion as to who was in charge.

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