The School Board of Uvalde, Texas, United States, unanimously voted Wednesday to dismiss school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who was supervising when a fatal shooting occurred in May at the which 19 children and two teachers died.
In an hour-and-a-half meeting, council members decided to dismiss Arredondo, who has received widespread criticism from parents and community members for his slow response to the shooting at a local school.
Arredondo had already been removed from his post as chief of police for the Uvalde school district on June 22, although he did not resign and still held the official title.
Arredondo’s dismissal came just a day after Texas Department of Public Safety director Steven McCraw testified before a state Senate committee and said Arredondo made “terrible decisions” during the massacre.
According to McCraw, there were enough police officers to respond to the shooting just three minutes after the perpetrator, Salvador Ramos, entered the school through a door.
However, armed officers waited in the hallway for 77 minutes while the gunman carried out the massacre in two of the classrooms.
The US government is investigating the police response and it remains to be seen why it took so long for officers to confront the gunman.
In this sense, the investigation should provide more details on the communication between the different police forces.
Arredondo, who was the head of the police force responsible for schools in Uvalde, tried to defend himself in an interview with the Texas Tribune newspaper, in which he said he did not know he was in charge of responding to the shooting and had assumed that another police force had taken responsibility.
The Uvalde shooting is the second deadliest school shooting in the past decade in the US, after the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook High School in Newton, Connecticut, where 26 people were murdered.
#Uvalde #Police #Chief #Fired #Criticism #Shooting #Response