The former police chief of the school district in Uvalde, Texas, who oversaw the response to the a 2022 elementary school shooting that left 21 people dead, including 19 childrenis in custody on charges of child endangerment, the Uvalde jail said Thursday.
Pete Arredondo, 52, was brought in by officers and is accused of abandoning and endangering a child, the arrest said.
The accusation was first reported by San Antonio Express-News.
The Uvalde Jail confirmed Arredondo was being booked into the facility Thursday afternoon.
At the beginning of this year, the Department of Justice released a 600-page report who said poor coordination, training and enforcement of “active shooter” protocols among Uvalde police officers who responded to the Robb Elementary School shooting on May 24, 2022 led to a “failure” in their response.
Instead of continuing to attack the armed 18-year-old – who was locked in a classroom with 33 students and three teachers – the agents retreated after an initial burst of gunfire and did not “immediately and continuously advance to eliminate the threat”, the the department said.
Police officers were wrongly taught that active shooters — or gunmen who federal authorities define as someone who “actively” kills or tries to kill others — “can easily escalate into a hostage crisis,” the report says.
More than 70 minutes passed between the time officers arrived at the school and the time the shooter was confronted and killed. In addition to the 19 students, two teachers were shot dead and another 17 were injured.
State lawmakers in Texas previously reached a similar conclusion such as the Department of Justice, with a 2022 report that stated that law enforcement and the school district’s response were plagued by “systemic failures and grossly poor decision-making.”
Arredondo, described in the Justice Department report as the de facto commander at the scene, was among the officers who faced administrative punishment for their response.
Arredondo was fired by the Uvalde school board last year. At the time, his lawyer described the former chief as a victim of the shooting and said his firing was an “illegal and unconstitutional public lynching.”
This story first appeared in NBCNews. with.
This article was originally published in TODAY.com
