Pete Arredondo, the former police chief of the Uvalde, Tex., school district, says he has been “scapegoated” as the one to blame for the botched law enforcement response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, where hundreds of officers waited more than an hour to confront the gunman as children were lying dead and wounded inside adjoining classrooms. Arredondo and another former district police officer are the only two people to have been charged over their actions that day, even though nearly 400 local, state and federal officers responded and waited as children called 911 and parents begged the officers to go in, the Associated Press reports. “I’ve been scapegoated from the very beginning,” Arredondo told CNN. It marked his first public statements in two years about the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 students and two teachers, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.
Col. Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, identified Arredondo as the “incident commander” of a law enforcement response that included nearly 100 state troopers and Border Patrol . officers Even with the massive law enforcement presence, officers waited more than 70 minutes to breach the classroom door and kill the shooter. Scathing state and federal investigative reports on the police response catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems. A grand jury indicted Arredondo and former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales on charges of child endangerment and abandonment. The indictment says Arredondo didn’t follow his active shooter training and made critical decisions that slowed the police response while the gunman was “hunting” victims Arredondo said state police should have set up a command post outside and taken control. “The guidebook tells you the incident commander does not stand in the hallway and get shot at,” Arredondo said. “The incident commander is someone who is not in the hot zone.”
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