Uvalde School Police Chief Resigns from City Council
Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo says he has resigned from his role as a Uvalde city councilman, according to a new report.
Arredondo, who was on-scene commander during the Robb Elementary School shooting that left 19 students and 2 teachers dead, told the Uvalde Leader-News on Saturday that he has stepped down from his role as a District 3 councilman.
“After much consideration, I regret to inform those who voted for me that I have decided to step down as a member of the city council for District 3. The mayor, the city council, and the city staff must continue to move forward without distractions. I feel this is the best decision for Uvalde,” Arredondo told the paper.
“As we continue to grieve over the tragedy that occurred on May 24th, we pray for the families involved and our community,” he added. “Uvalde has a rich history of loving and supporting thy neighbor and we must continue to do so. In speaking with other communities that have had similar tragedies, the guidance has been the same . . . continue to support the families, continue to support our community, and definitely, to keep our faith.”
Arredondo was placed on leave from his role as school district police chief last month 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.
James Gagliano, a retired FBI supervisory special agent who served on the FBI’s Hostage Rescue Team and as a senior SWAT team leader, told National Review in a recent interview that the police response in Uvalde represented a “colossal failure of the incident command system.”
“The ICS is put in place to make certain that local, state law enforcement and federal law enforcement understand how they fit together — the symmetry, the synergy,” he said.
“Why was a police chief of a six-member school-district police department left in charge as the on-scene commander as long as he was?” Gagliano said. “I would argue a sergeant or lieutenant from a larger police department, whether it’s the Department of Public Safety in Texas or another local police department with a bigger department probably has more experience in training.”
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.
Arredondo’s resignation from his city council role comes after he failed to show up for a special city council meeting on Thursday. He previously missed a special emergency council meeting on June 7 and a special council meeting on June 21.
After a councilmember misses three meetings, a special election can be called and the member can be voted out. However, the June 7 emergency meeting would not have counted toward that total, according to KSAT News.
Arredondo was sworn in just days after the Robb Elementary School shooting.
