By The opinion
Jun 27, 2024, 9:53 PM EDT
A Texas grand jury indicted former Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo and one of his officers on Thursday for their botched response to the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School. which resulted in the murder of 19 children and two teachers in 2022, US media reported.
Thus, Arredondo, 52, was arrested after being accused of abandoning and endangering children at school at the time of the attack, the San Antonio Express-News reported, marking the first arrest on charges in the massacre.
Uvalde authorities confirmed that The school police chief at the time of the attack on May 24, 2022, was booked into jail Thursday afternoon.
Arredondo was fired three months after the tragedy for the poor response to the shooting by treating shooter Salvador Ramos, 18, as an “entrenched subject.”
The former boss has always defended his actions by ensuring that he did his duty.
Former police officer Adrián Gonzales was also named in the indictment, which represents the first criminal charges filed in the wake of the school massacre.
The U.S. Department of Justice released a report last January that found that the “lack of urgency” by law enforcement officers responding to the shooting led to “cascading failures” that led to the massacre.
The federal investigation identified a wide range of problems, including lack of preparation and leadership, as well as poor communications by officers.
Officers wrongly treated the situation as if a suspect was holed up, even as children and teachers called police for help, the document said.
The report echoed the findings of the Texas House investigation, which in 2022 found “systemic failures” between law enforcement and school safety protocols that took 77 minutes to apprehend Ramos.
At least 376 officers from different law enforcement agencies responded to the scene, including about 100 from the Texas Department of Public Safety.
The allegations come nearly six months after the Justice Department released a damning report in January on law enforcement’s response to the mass shooting, pointing to a series of “cascading failures” by the police chief and others.
The 600-page report described poor coordination, training and execution of “active shooter” protocols among Uvalde officers who responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022, leading to a “failure” in their response.
Instead of continuing to engage the 18-year-old gunman, who was holed up in a classroom with 33 students and three teachers, the officers retreated after an initial burst of gunfire and did not “immediately and continuously advance to eliminate the threat,” the department spokesperson said.
Officers had been wrongly taught that active shooters “can easily escalate into a hostage crisis,” the report says.
Additionally, in May, family members of the victims of the Uvalde school shooting reached a $2 million settlement with Uvalde.
Keep reading:
• Two years after the massacre in Uvalde, Biden insists on restricting assault weapons
• City of Uvalde to pay $2 million to family members of school shooting victims
• Uvalde police chief resigns after report on Robb Elementary shooting is released