Pete Arredondo, chief of police for the Uvalde (Texas) school district, has been suspended from employment and salary, after a month of the massacre at Robb Elementary School, which killed 19 children and two teachers, and a critic who it is becoming more and more due to the police action that he directed, when he chose to delay the confrontation with the gunman Salvador Ramos.
In a statement, Hall Harrell, superintendent of the Uvalde school district, said that the educational entity will wait until the investigation into the tragedy of May 24 is concluded. "Today we still lack details about the investigation being conducted by various agencies," he noted. "Due to the lack of clarity and the ignorance of the time in which the events took place, and pending the results, I have made the decision to put Chief Arredondo on job suspension, effective as of this date," he said in that text dated this Wednesday.
State security officials insisted that Arredondo was in charge of the operation. He said the opposite, that he did not consider himself the chief in command of the operation and that he was only one of the first to respond.
No further information about his suspension was released, except that Lt. Mike Hernandez will take over his duties until the district resolves the Arredondo situation and the search for a candidate for that position begins.
Three days after the massacre, Colonel Steve McCraw, director of the Texas Department of Public Safety, already stated that Arredondo had made a bad decision not to immediately go after the gunman. An hour and 17 minutes had to pass before federal border patrol agents entered the double classroom in which Ramos barricaded himself, and killed him.
There were several dozen uniformed men in the corridor, but Arredondo's order was to wait for the agents to receive equipment and protection. Outside, the parents made several attempts to enter the aggressor themselves and scenes of great tension were experienced.
Every day there are more reports of the disastrous operation. One of the last is that the door to that classroom wasn't even locked.
The police response to the gunman who carried out the massacre was "an abject failure," McCraw said Tuesday. Based on his investigations, the security forces had a sufficient number of agents in that scene to stop the gunman Salvador Ramos within three minutes of entering the building. His neutralization did not occur until 77 minutes after his access to the building.
McCraw assured that the head of the operation was Pete Arredondo, who "chose to protect the lives of his men instead of that of the children." The delay in intervention has become a key issue. There were several children and a teacher, all survivors, who were waiting for help all this time, while the question arises as to whether an immediate intervention could have saved the lives of some of those who died. A teacher and three children died on the way to hospital.
McCrawn's words add to the recognition that a uniformed officer had Ramos shot before he entered the building, but he preferred not to shoot for fear of injuring any of the children who were out there and the consequences that this could lead to. the. The gunman had already demonstrated his intentions at that time, since he opened fire outside against the neighbors and those first policemen who arrived at the scene.
Investigators say that Arredondo misinterpreted that it was a hostage situation and that it could be negotiated. Ramos sowed the tragedy as soon as he entered the interior of the school and the agents outside knew that because they received calls from the interior of children asking for help.
Don McLaughlin, mayor of Uvale, argued Tuesday that the school must be demolished, so that no child or teacher has to face the trauma of going back to those classrooms.
