AUSTIN, Texas, USA — The chief of the Uvalde, Texas, school police failed to identify a shooting in progress, follow his training or make key decisions, delaying law enforcement’s response to stop a gunman who was “hunting” for victims and ultimately killed 21 people at Robb Elementary School, according to an indictment unsealed Friday.
Pete Arredondo was arrested and briefly booked into county jail before being released Thursday night on 10 felony counts of abandoning or endangering a child in the May 24, 2022, attack that left 19 children and two teachers dead. Former school resource officer Adrian Gonzales was also indicted on similar charges, the Uvalde Leader-News and San Antonio Express-News reported, but that charge has not yet been publicly disclosed.
Arredondo and Gonzales are the first officers to be criminally charged over the police response to one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, and the indictments by a Uvalde County grand jury follow two years of calls from some families for such action.
The first U.S. police officer to stand trial for allegedly failing to act during a campus shooting was a school police officer in Florida who failed to enter a classroom building or confront the perpetrator of the 2018 Parkland massacre. The officer, who has since been fired, was acquitted of negligence last year. A lawsuit by the families of victims and survivors is pending.
The indictment alleges that Arredondo, who was the commander at the scene of the shooting, delayed the police response despite hearing gunshots and being notified that children were injured in classrooms and that a teacher had been shot. Arredondo called a SWAT team, ordered the initially responding officers to leave the building and attempted to negotiate with the 18-year-old attacker, according to the indictment.
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