Background: Reggie Daniels pays his respects a memorial at Robb Elementary School, June 9, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas, created to honor the victims killed in the school shooting. (AP Photo/Eric Gay). Inset: Peter Arredondo booking photo (Uvalde County Sheriff’s Department).
Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, 52, the former chief of the school police force in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children and two teachers were killed in a mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in 2022, has been indicted by a grand jury on 10 charges of child endangerment and criminal negligence.
The indictment was reported first by the San Antonio Express-News.
In addition to Arredondo, former school police officer Adrian Gonzales has been named in the criminal indictment too and similarly faces child endangerment charges. Arredondo reportedly turned himself to Texas rangers on Thursday. Arredondo was briefly detained at the Uvalde County Jail and then released on $10,000 surety bond and a $10,000 personal recognizance bond. It is unclear when Gonzales was detained or released.
In a copy of the complaint released by the Uvalde County District Clerk on Friday and published in full by The Daily Mail, prosecutors allege Arredondo failed to determine there was an active shooter even after there were shots fired and was alerted that a teacher and children had been injured. Instead, prosecutors say he wasted precious minutes by calling for a SWAT team and issuing evacuation orders instead of responding to the shooter on the scene first.
Arredondo, prosecutors allege, let an active shooter “who was hunting and shooting” children continue his carnage repeatedly and ignored his active shooter training by “deciding and declaring to others to delay breaching a room occupied by a gunman at Robb Elementary School until classrooms were evacuated,” the complaint states.
He is accused too of failing to determine if a classroom door was locked, adding more delay. He allegedly didn’t provide keys or other “breaching tools” for classrooms that were locked and prosecutors say he established no “command center” while the shooting was ongoing, something that would have been of significant assistance to the Border Patrol agents who showed up to Robb Elementary School without clear information or direction.
It took more than an hour for anyone to confront the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, during the massacre. Ramos was eventually shot and killed by Border Patrol officers.
The grand jury indicted Arredondo in May but the records were not made public until Friday. He was put on administrative leave shortly after the 2022 shooting and then fired after the Uvalde School Board voted unanimously for his termination.
An attorney for former Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales Nico LaHood told Texas ABC affiliate KSAT on Friday that it is his position that he did not violate any school district policy or state laws but otherwise said it would take time to evaluate the allegations and underlying facts in evidence.
A Texas state senator who represents Uvalde, Roland Gutierrez, told the outlet the horrors of the shooting were a product of “gross incompetence by the Texas Department of Public Safety” and that the “top law enforcement agency in the State of Texas must answer for grave errors in judgment and for lying every single day to the public about how the massacre unfolded.”
“‘From falsely blaming a teacher for propping open a door to pinning the entire catastrophe on one ignorant officer, the Texas Department of Public Safety has done nothing in Uvalde but cover up for their abject failure,” he said, adding that “every single officer that stood down that day must be held accountable, from Pete Arredondo all the way to [Texas Department of Public Safety director] Steve McCraw.”
The grand jury was first convened in January.
A scathing incident review report by the U.S. Justice Department was published on the massacre at Rob Elementary School that same month.
Arredondo and Gonzales are the first officers to be criminally charged in connection to the shooting.
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