The Uvalde school district board voted unanimously to fire Pete Arredondo, who was in charge of the police operation at the school where the massacre occurred. He had already been suspended after the May 24 bloodshed.
After the outcry caused by the police response to the attack launched three months ago by an 18-year-old gunman at the school in the city of Uvalde, Texas, USA – in which 19 children and two teachers lost their lives – the chief of police in the school district.
The Uvalde school district board voted unanimously to fire Pete Arredondo, who was in charge of the police operation at the school where the massacre occurred. He had already been suspended after the May 24 bloodshed.
Arredondo did not attend the meeting. His attorney, George Hyde, sent an emailed statement in which he spoke of threats against his client’s life and emphasized that no efforts had been made to provide him with the slightest protection.
Pete Arredondo has been heavily criticized for his handling of the gunman’s attack at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, a small Texas town about 80 miles west of San Antonio.
Parents of children killed or injured in the deadliest attack at a US school in nearly a decade have asked the board to fire Arredondo. He had been forced to resign from his position on the Uvalde city council on July 2. His fate as the school district’s police chief was to be decided three weeks later, but the hearing was postponed at the request of his attorney.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Arredondo acted as a police response officer to the shooting. 19 police officers waited for about an hour in the corridor outside the school hall where the gunman had taken refuge, before special forces men finally broke in and killed the killer. DPS officials said Arredondo chose not to direct officers to confront the gunman, believing the immediate threat to the students had subsided after an earlier barrage of gunfire.
Pete Arredondo, who was in charge of a six-man police force, maintained that he never believed he had the overall command of the operation and that he never ordered officers not to raid the room where the gunman had taken refuge.
RES-EMP
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