Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo insists he took the steps he thought would best protect lives at his hometown school.
and “decapitated.” Some children were identifiable only by their clothes and shoes.
Arredondo’s explanations don’t fully address all the questions that have been raised. The Tribune spoke to seven law enforcement experts about Arredondo’s description of the police response. All but one said that serious lapses in judgment occurred. To Arredondo, the choice was logical. An armed killer was loose on the campus of the elementary school. Every second mattered. He wanted both hands free to hold his gun, ready to aim and fire quickly and accurately if he encountered the gunman.
Almost immediately, Arredondo teamed up with a Uvalde police officer and began checking classrooms, looking for the gunman. Arredondo remembers the gunman fired a burst of shots from inside the classroom, grazing the police officers approaching from the north. Some of the bullets pierced the classroom door, and others went through the classroom wall and lodged in the wall adjacent to the hallway, where there were other classrooms. The officers on the north end of the hallway retreated after being shot, but they weren’t seriously injured and returned shortly after to try to contain the gunman.
Texas Department of Public Safety officials and news outlets have reported that the shooter fired his gun at least two more times as police waited in the hallway outside the classrooms for more than an hour. And DPS officials have said dispatchers were relaying information about 911 calls coming from children and teachers in the classrooms, begging the police for help.because he did not have his radio and no one in the hallway relayed that information to him.
He said he never considered himself the scene’s incident commander and did not give any instruction that police should not attempt to breach the building. DPS officials have described Arredondo as the incident commander and said Arredondo made the call to stand down and treat the incident as a “barricaded suspect,” which halted the attempt to enter the room and take down the shooter. “I didn’t issue any orders,” Arredondo said.
Lights in the classrooms had also been turned off, another routine lockdown measure that worked against the police. With little visibility into the classroom, they were unable to pinpoint the gunman’s location or to determine whether the children and teachers were alive. “I’ll be very frank. He said, ‘F— you. I’m not leaving this hallway,’” Hyde recounted. “He wasn’t going to leave without those kids.”
Robb Elementary did not have a modern system of locks and access control. “You’re talking about a key ring that’s got to weigh 10 pounds,” Hyde said. At 12:50 p.m., as the officers entered the classroom, Arredondo held his position near the south classroom door in the hallway, in case the gunman tried to run out that door.
Officers are trained never to abandon their radios, their primary communication tool during an emergency, said Ijames. That Arredondo did so the moment he arrived on scene is inexplicable, he said. Nichols, who teaches classes on active-shooter responses, said he understands the instinct for command staff to want to confront a gunman themselves. But he said commanders must not lose focus of their role in an emergency.
Bruce Ure, a former Victoria police chief, said drawing conclusions about police conduct during the shooting is premature since the authorities have not completed their investigations. He said he believes Arredondo acted reasonably given the circumstances he faced. Ure, who as an attendee was wounded in the hand during the 2017 Las Vegas concert shooting that killed 60 people, acknowledged the post-Columbine wisdom that immediately confronting shooters is paramount. But he said the scene inside Robb Elementary presented a “perfect storm” of an active shooter barricaded with hostages.
In a stunning reversal at a news conference the next day, the DPS regional director for the area, Victor Escalon, Hyde said Arredondo did not issue any orders to other law enforcement agencies and had no knowledge that they considered him the incident commander. With no radio and no way to receive up-to-date information about what was happening outside of the hallway, Hyde said, another one of the local, state and federal agencies that arrived at the scene should have taken over command.
Hyde said Arredondo participated in multiple interviews with DPS in the days following the shooting, including a law enforcement debriefing the day of the attack and a videotaped debriefing with DPS analysts and the FBI the day after. Hyde said Arredondo is open to cooperating with the Rangers investigation but would like to see a transcript of his previous comments.
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