John Jefferson
Inset: Peter Arredondo (Uvalde County Sheriff’s Department). Background: Reggie Daniels pays his respects a memorial at Robb Elementary School, June 9, 2022, in Uvalde, Texas, created to honor the victims killed in the school shooting. (AP Photo/Eric Gay).
The former Uvalde police chief blamed for the slow law enforcement response in the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School has asked a judge to dismiss the criminal charges against him.
Pete Arredondo was indicted in June for 10 counts of child endangerment. On Friday, Arredondo’s attorneys reportedly filed a motion to quash the charges stemming from the massacre that killed 19 students and two teachers.
As the school police chief, Arredondo has been tabbed as the incident commander of the scene, although he denies that claim. It took more than an hour for anyone to confront the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, during the massacre. Ramos was eventually shot and killed by Border Patrol officers.
Attorney Paul Looney in the motion called the indictment “vague, uncertain and indefinite,” according to the Associated Press. Looney argued that any “imminent danger of death” was caused by Ramos, not Arredondo. Looney said Arredondo didn’t have proper training or the resources to confront the shooter.
“He is being charged with a crime that is not a crime in Texas. It’s illegal to prosecute him with the circumstances of that day,” Looney told to Houston CBS affiliate KHOU.
Family members of victims blasted the sentiment.
“How can he even utter the words?” Jesse Rizo, the uncle of 9-year-old victim Jackie Cazares, told the TV station. “I don’t see how he can come to that conclusion if he looks at the video. He was negligent. He was irresponsible. The job he was trained to do, he didn’t execute that job. He let the children stay in the room with that monster for 77 minutes.”
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As Law&Crime previously reported, prosecutors allege Arredondo failed to determine there was an active shooter even after there were shots fired and was alerted that a teacher and children had been injured. Prosecutors say he instead wasted precious minutes by calling for a SWAT team and issuing evacuation orders instead of responding to the shooter on the scene first.
Arredondo, prosecutors allege, let an active shooter “who was hunting and shooting” children continue his carnage repeatedly and ignored his active shooter training by “deciding and declaring to others to delay breaching a room occupied by a gunman at Robb Elementary School until classrooms were evacuated,” the complaint states.
He is also accused of failing to determine if a classroom door was locked, adding more delay. He allegedly didn’t provide keys or other “breaching tools” for classrooms that were locked. Prosecutors say he established no “command center” while the shooting was ongoing, something that would have been of significant assistance to the Border Patrol agents who showed up to Robb Elementary School without clear information or direction.
The grand jury indicted Arredondo in May but the records were not made public until June 28. He was put on administrative leave shortly after the 2022 shooting and then fired after the Uvalde School Board voted unanimously for his termination.
An attorney for former Uvalde school police officer Adrian Gonzales Nico LaHood told previously Texas ABC affiliate KSAT that it is his position that he did not violate any school district policy or state laws but otherwise said it would take time to evaluate the allegations and underlying facts in evidence.
The grand jury was first convened in January.
In addition to Arredondo, former school police officer Adrian Gonzales has been named in the criminal indictment too and similarly faces child endangerment charges.
A scathing incident review report by the U.S. Justice Department was published on the massacre at Rob Elementary School that same month.
Arredondo and Gonzales are the first officers to be criminally charged in connection to the shooting.
Brandi Buchman contributed to this report
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