The Uvalde school district’s former police chief and one of his former officers have been indicted on felony charges of abandoning and endangering children for their roles in the law enforcement response to the deadly Robb Elementary School shooting in Texas in 2022.
Christina Mitchell, the 38th Judicial District Attorney, confirmed the charges against former Chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo and school resource officer Adrian Gonzales, the Uvalde News-Leader reported.
Arredondo turned himself in on Thursday, and Gonzales was expected to do so on Friday, she said. An official announcement would be made at that time.
Mitchell convened a grand jury in January to evaluate the response to the shooting, which saw 19 4th graders and two teachers murdered by an 18-year-old killer while dozens of police officers waited outside a classroom for more than an hour.
Arredondo was fired three months after the deadly shooting, and the rest of the district’s police force was suspended in October.
Gonzales was no longer working for the department as of January 1, 2023.
State and federal reports filed after the incident placed a wide swath of blame on law enforcement for their response to the shooting, as CrimeOnline reported. A Department of Justice report noted that local police — especially Arrendondo — acted with “no urgency” to set up a command post and assumed the suspect was locked inside the classroom rather than checking to see if that was the case. Arendondo didn’t even take his police radio with him to the scene because, he said, he thought it would slow him down.
A report commissioned by Uvalde city leaders earlier this year, however, cleared all local police of any responsibility whatsoever. Jesse Prado, the Austin-based investigator and former police detective who made the report, told the city council in his presentation that the locals acted quickly and appropriately.
Prado said the officers showed “immeasurable strength” and “level-headed thinking” as they waited in the school’s hallway for a decision to storm the classroom where the shooter was holed up with students and teachers, a decision that finally came more than an hour later when a border patrol tactical unit opened the unlocked door and went in.
Family members of the victims were angry at the report.
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[Featured image: Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, left, on the phone inside Robb Elementary/City of Uvalde via KHOU]
