It took what many would call too long, but the Uvalde school board has voted to terminate Pete Arredondo.
On Wednesday, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (CISD) chief of police was fired via unanimous vote. The moment landed exactly three months after a dearth of police action allowed for the murder of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School.
Following the decision, cheers rang out.
As noted by the New York Post, Pete — who wasn’t present at the hearing — is the first officer to be let go in light of the atrocious job done on May 24th.
And some might not call it a “job” — there was very little performance that day, as a horde of armed men seemed to only loiter as the most innocent among us were audibly slaughtered.
Arredondo, 50, has been chastised for failing to order officers to act sooner the day an 18-year-old shooter carried out the horrific attack.
Officers waited for more than an hour to engage the shooter and tend to injured victims who later died at or on the way to hospitals.
Are more firings to follow? That remains to be seen.
Meanwhile, Pete’s lawyer insists he’s gotten a raw deal:
His attorney called the termination hearing an “illegal and unconstitutional public lynching” in a 17-page statement released earlier Wednesday.
…
Arredondo, who has been on unpaid leave since June 22, has disputed being the person at the helm of the more than 400 local, state and federal officers who responded to the shooting. However, a report released by state lawmakers said he was in fact the person in charge.
Courtesy of the report:
The Uvalde CISD’s written active shooter plan directed its police chief to assume command and control of the response to an active shooter. The chief of police…failed to perform or to transfer to another person the role of incident commander. This was an essential duty he had assigned to himself in the plan mentioned above. The void of leadership could have contributed to the loss of life as injured victims waited over an hour for help, and the attacker continued to sporadically fire his weapon.
A tactical team eventually entered the classroom — the door of which had never been locked — and put to rest the gunman.
As for Pete’s denial of responsibility, here’s more from The Texas Tribune:
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. “I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”
…
“Not a single responding officer ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put themselves at risk to save the children,” Arredondo said. “We responded to the information that we had and had to adjust to whatever we faced. Our objective was to save as many lives as we could, and the extraction of the students from the classrooms by all that were involved saved over 500 of our Uvalde students and teachers before we gained access to the shooter and eliminated the threat.”
According to Pete’s legal team, he demands the school board immediately reinstate him — complete with back pay and benefits.
Concerning his absence at the hearing, per the Post, his attorneys said he “did not feel safe.”
If only such a consideration had been made for nearly two dozen victims on May 24th.
Only one other officer who responded to the…shooting has faced disciplinary action. Uvalde Police Department Lt. Mariano Pargas, who was the city’s acting police chief on the day of the massacre, has been placed on leave.
-ALEX
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