Uvalde school board fires police chief for fumbled response to mass shooting

The Uvalde, Texas, school board has fired police chief Pete Arredondo after months of angry calls for his ouster over a hesitant response to a shooting that killed 21 people in the city three months ago.

In a unanimous vote on Wednesday, the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District’s board of trustees terminated the contract of Arredondo in an auditorium of parents and survivors of the 24 May massacre.

His firing came three months to the day after a teenaged gunman took the lives of 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary, in one of the deadliest classroom shootings in US history.

The police chief, who has been on leave from the district since 22 June, has come under the most intense scrutiny over the hesitant and fumbled response by law enforcement to the mass shooting.

State police and a damning investigative report in July criticized the police chief of the roughly 4,000-student school district for failing to take charge of the scene, not breaching the classroom sooner and wasting time by looking for a key to a likely unlocked door.

Heavily armed law enforcement personnel arrived at the school within minutes of the attack, but police did not breach the classroom and confront the gunman for more than an hour.

The law enforcement response has been criticized as a failure to enact the “active shooter” protocols developed in the wake of the 1999 Columbine school shooting.

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Arredondo didn't attend the meeting on Wednesday, but his attorney issued a 17-page press statement, arguing that a more aggressive approach to the shooter inside the classroom could have resulted in a “gunfight with officers” and a hail of bullets that might have left “20 or 30 children across the hall” dead, including some potentially killed by police bullets.

"Chief Arredondo did the right thing,” he wrote.

In a hearing before the Texas Senate on June 21, the director of the Texas Department of Public Safety called the police response an "abject failure."

The director, Col. Steven McCraw, placed blame for the failure on Arredondo.

The Texas department of public safety, which had more than 90 state troopers at the scene, has also launched an internal investigation into the response by state police.

Some community members in attendance-- including Cross, the uncle and guardian of one of the victims, Uziyah Garcia, said firing Arredondo now would be "too little, too late."

The school police force is one of several law enforcement agencies whose officers’ conduct during the shooting has been called into question.

Inquiries are underway by the City of Uvalde into the actions of the acting police chief on that day, and by the Department of Public Safety into how its own officers responded at the school.

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