Uvalde police chief Pete Arredondo NOT cooperating with school shooting investigators
The Uvalde school district’s police chief Pete Arredondo, who took a call to wait for more resources rather than taking an action against the gunman sooner, has stopped cooperating with state investigators for over two days now, the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS) said.
Texas officials investigating the response to the shooting are willing to continue talking to the police chief at Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District. But he has not responded to a follow-up interview yet, according to DPS.
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.@TxDPS: “Uvalde Police Department and Uvalde CISD Police have been cooperating with investigators. The chief of the Uvalde CISD Police provided an initial interview but has not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with the Texas Rangers that was made two days ago"
— Aaron Katersky (@AaronKatersky) May 31, 2022
Col McCraw, director of Texas Department of Public Safety, has accepted that the law enforcement officers took more than an hour to break into the classroom as children kept on calling 911 begging for help when Salvador Ramos, 18, was inside the classroom. Ramos used an AR-15-style assault rifle to kill 21 people inside an adjoining classroom while police waited in a corridor outside as per the direction of Arredondo. At least 19 officers were in a school hallway but didn’t act quickly enough to stop the teen. Admitting that Arredondo's decision was wrong, McCraw said that the chief believed the gunman was barricaded in a classroom and that the students were not at risk.
Ironically, according to a piece of information from the Texas Commission of Law Enforcement obtained by CBS News, Arredondo took active shooting training in December 2021, just a few months before the massacre. He successfully completed an eight-hour course on school-based active shooter situations at Southwest Texas Junior College. And well, this one wasn’t the first active shooting response course he’s taken in recent years.
The CBS further reported, based on records, that Arredondo, who’s been the police school chief since 2020, took the same course in August 2020 and a 16-hour training session on ‘Terrorism Response Tactics – Active Shooter,’ in June 2019.
The police chief, despite his training, has been massively criticized for mislabeling and his approach to handling the situation inside the school during the mass shooting in Uvalde.
This is the deadliest US school shooting in years, prompting President Joe Biden to denounce the US gun lobby and promise to end the cycle of mass shootings.