Uvalde Police Chief Resigns Nearly 2 Years After School Massacre
Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez submitted his letter of resignation Tuesday, the police department in South Texas confirmed to HuffPost. His resignation is effective April 6.
The resignation comes a few days after an independent investigator found that the Uvalde Police Department acted in “good faith” on May 24, 2022, when a gunman entered Robb Elementary School and killed 19 children and two teachers. Victims’ families were outraged at the report.
Rodriguez was on vacation in Arizona on the day of the shooting, leaving Lt. Mariano Pargas as the acting police chief. Nearly 400 law enforcement officers from local, state and federal agencies responded that day, and yet it took 77 minutes to confront and kill the teenage shooter. The law enforcement response was called an “abject failure” by the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, which reported the results of its investigation a month after the shooting.
In his resignation letter, Rodriguez said: “I want to express my deepest appreciation to all of my colleagues and team members for their unwavering support, professionalism, and dedication to our shared mission ofserving and protecting the community. It has been a privilege to work alongside such talented and committed individuals, and I will genuinely miss our collaborations and camaraderie.”
The letter did not mention the mass shooting. Rodriguez did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
Brett Cross, whose 10-year-old son was killed, posted a video on social media questioning why Rodriguez resigned two years after the shooting.
“But I will say this,” Cross said. “We will not stop and his resignation should not put on hold anything else. The city still needs to fire those officers that were there. And if they don’t, then we keep pushing.”
Few people have been held accountable for the mass shooting. Pete Arredondo was fired as the Uvalde school district police chief in August 2022. Arredondo was widely seen as the incident commander during the mass shooting, according to an active shooter policy that he helped write, but Arredondo later said he didn’t consider himself to be in charge.
