Aug 24, 2022
RawNews1st – The Uvalde School District Board voted to terminate schools police Chief Pete Arredondo at a special hearing Wednesday after he faced intense scrutiny over the response to the May school massacre that left 19 kids and two teachers dead.
The Uvalde Independent School District’s board of education will hold a special meeting Saturday to discuss the “termination for good cause” of Chief Pete Arredondo “
The board voted unanimously to oust Arredondo from his job as top school district cop during an over hour-long closed session.
Arredondo has been chastised for being the person at the helm of the flawed police response to the May 24 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Officers waited for more than an hour to engage the 18-year-old shooter and tend to injured victims who later died at or on the way to hospitals.
“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 report stated.
“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.”
A special tactical team eventually entered the classroom where the victims were shot and took out the gunman, Salvador Ramos.
The 50-year-old school district chief, who has been on unpaid leave since June 22, did not attend his termination hearing — which his attorney called an “illegal and unconstitutional public lynching” in a 17-page statement released shortly before the hearing.
Parents and family members of the 19 fourth-graders who were killed in the shooting called Arredondo a coward during the hearing and said he was disrespectful for not showing up at the hearing.
Arredondo has disputed being the commander in charge 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.
The families, who wore orange shirts with “The unheard voices march & rally” and the number 21 written across them, called on the board to fire him and shared memories of the victims during the hearing.
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