The Uvalde college district police chief, Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, who authorities say erroneously ordered officers to attend outdoors the Robb elementary classroom the place a gunman killed 21 final week, has been sworn into the Texas group’s metropolis council.
Arredondo, 61, gained a seat on Uvalde’s metropolis council on 7 Might, 17 days earlier than 19 college students and two lecturers have been shot useless at Robb’s campus. A swearing-in ceremony for him and different elected members of the council had been set for Tuesday however the public occasion was cancelled “out of respect” for households burying slain family members, although Arredondo and the others privately took their oaths of workplace, Uvalde’s mayor, Don McLaughlin, mentioned in an announcement.
McLaughlin’s assertion mentioned the oaths needed to be administered by Tuesday underneath metropolis regulation.
The orders given by Arredondo to officers responding to the 24 Might bloodbath at Robb elementary have come underneath intense scrutiny. Officers have mentioned college students and lecturers begged 911 operators for assist as Arredondo instructed greater than a dozen officers to attend in a hallway outdoors the classroom the place all of the murders occurred, believing the gunman was barricaded in an adjoining classroom and now not actively endangering college students or lecturers.
After greater than an hour, border patrol brokers confronted the gunman and killed him.
Ready “was the incorrect choice”, the Texas division of public security’s chief, Steven McCraw, has since instructed reporters. “Clearly … there have been youngsters in that classroom in danger.”
After repeated mass killings nationwide in current many years, police have been skilled to combat energetic shooters and neutralize them as rapidly as doable as a substitute of cornering them and ready for backup. Arredondo had taken a number of programs aimed toward dealing with school-based energetic shooter eventualities earlier than the slayings underneath his watch, in response to CBS Information and different media shops.
Arredondo didn't reply to a message looking for touch upon Tuesday and has been principally quiet since offering the media with an preliminary account of the varsity capturing.
On Wednesday, nonetheless, he instructed CNN that he's speaking each day with Texas division of public security investigators, contradicting claims from state regulation enforcement that he has stopped cooperating.
“I’ve been on the telephone with them each day,” Arredondo mentioned.
“Our mother and father deserve solutions, and I belief the Texas division of public security [and] Texas Rangers will go away no stone unturned,” McLaughlin’s assertion added. “Our feelings are uncooked, and hearts are damaged.”
The US justice division, at McLaughlin’s request, can be conducting a evaluation of the police response to the shootings.
After his election to the town council, Arredondo instructed the Uvalde Chief-Information that he was “able to hit the bottom operating” on behalf of his constituents within the principally Hispanic city of fewer than 16,000 residents.
“I've loads of concepts, and I positively have loads of drive,” Arredondo instructed the outlet.
Earlier than changing into the chief of the Uvalde college district’s police power in 2020 after almost three many years in regulation enforcement, he served as a captain at a faculty district police power in Laredo, Texas, and labored for Uvalde’s municipal police division.
He gained his council seat with 126 votes, or almost 70% of the ballots solid within the election.
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