Uvalde Shooting Incident Commander Had No Radio, Official Says
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Pete Arredondo, chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police, did not have a police radio with him while in a standoff with the Robb Elementary School shooter.
An official with the Texas Department of Public Safety told the New York Times that Arredondo — as head of the school’s police department — was not eligible for a Uvalde Police Department radio. This impeded his ability to communicate with police dispatchers as he assumed the role of incident commander at the scene of the May 24 shooting.
The revelation comes after state senator Roland Gutierrez revealed that 911 calls being made by students inside the classroom with the shooter were going to city police but were not communicated to Arredondo, calling it a “system failure.”
The Texas DPS investigation revealed that up to 19 Uvalde police officers were in the school hallways and did not storm the classroom to remove Ramos — even as children were alive inside and calling 911 to plead for help — because Arredondo determined that Ramos had transitioned from an active shooter to a barricaded hostage-taker. One victim, Khloe Torres, called in at 12:10 and said “I don’t want to die, my teacher is dead, my teacher is dead, please send help, send help for my teacher, she is shot but still alive.”
Uvalde police dispatch had relayed that the classrooms were “full of victims at this moment” at 12:13, more than 45 minutes before the rooms were finally stormed by U.S. Border Patrol agents. Owing to the absence of information, Arredondo believed all children were dead and chose not to engage Ramos directly — a decision that attracted widespread criticism on the grounds that it led to the deaths of children inside during that time.
Instead of a radio, Arredondo had to use a cellphone to call and request tactical assistance. It is unclear whether other Uvalde police department officers present at the time, bearing police radios that were receiving transmissions from police dispatch, relayed the information to Arredondo as they waited.
The victims’ families will appear before Congress to testify on gun violence in America, in a high-profile hearing announced on Friday.
Representative Carolyn Maloney (D., N.Y.), chairwoman of the House Oversight Committee — who is currently running against Judiciary chairman Jerry Nadler (D., N.Y.) in a bitterly contested Democratic primary after redistricting — invited the families to testify before the committee. The hearing will address the “human impact of gun violence,” and is expected to be used by Democrats to make arguments for restrictions on gun ownership as part of a push by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D., Calif.) to do so.
In comments to the Associated Press, Maloney said that the “hearing is ultimately about saving lives, and I hope it will galvanize my colleagues on both sides of the aisle to pass legislation to do just that.” She also asked her colleagues to “listen with an open heart” as victims testify about the “darkest days of their lives,” a statement implicitly directed at Republicans on the committee who have opposed gun restrictions proposed by House Democrats.
The hearing will be held on June 8 and will include testimony from Miah Cerrillo, a fourth-grade student and survivor of the massacre. Cerrillo survived by acting dead and covering herself in her classmates’ blood as 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, the shooter, was engaged in a standoff with police for 50 minutes in her classroom. She was hit by a bullet fragment which had ricocheted into her back. A GoFundMe fundraiser to pay her medical bills has raised nearly half a million dollars. Other witnesses from the incident will include the parents of children killed.
It will also include testimony from Pamela Gendron, a civil engineer from Conklin, N.Y., and the mother of Peyton Gendron, a 20-year-old man who shot dead ten people and injured three in a racially motivated attack on Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo on May 14. Her son has been charged with first-degree murder and is under a federal hate-crimes investigation. The families of his victims will also participate in the hearing.
It is unclear whether the family of Ramos will be testifying before the committee. Ramos’s grandmother, Cecilia “Sally” Martinez Gonzalez, with whom he was living at the time, is recovering after being shot in the face by Ramos shortly before the attack on Robb Elementary School. As of this writing, Representative Maloney’s office has not responded to an inquiry from National Review on the subject.
The hearing comes as the school district has decided Robb Elementary School will be permanently closed, and that students will not return to the building. In an email to National Review, Anne Marie Espinoza, spokesperson for the district superintendent, said that plans are under way to “serve students at other campuses” in the future.
