As the pressure mounts on Uvalde Schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo, he’s now being probed for possibly not having a police radio on him when he ordered his officers to stand aside while Salvador Ramos massacred 19 students and two adults.
Arredondo, a former 911 dispatcher who had just recently been elected to Uvalde’s municipal council, may have used it as a reason for holding his cops back despite 911 calls from pupils inside the school pleading for help.
The New York Post quoted a source as saying, ‘That’s going to be essential.’ ‘If the police or the incident commander were informed of those 911 calls.’
The source says that investigators are still trying to determine whether Arredondo had a radio.
‘If they were being relayed, it also raises questions as to why it was not treated as an active shooter situation.’
According to a law enforcement official who anonymously spoke to The New York Times, the agents had been puzzled as to why they were being told not to enter the school and engage the gunman.
McCraw asserted that Arredondo, identifying the district chief by title and not by name, made a miscalculation assuming the active shooter situation had become a barricade event.
Arredondo, 50, become the focus of backlash from parents wondering if their children could have been saved.
Arredondo, who was born in Uvalde and was elected to city council just days before the massacre, has had an unremarkable career as a cop.
He started his law enforcement career as a 911 dispatcher for Uvalde’s town police department in 1993, and over the course of the next 20 years, worked his way up to eventually assume the role of assistant police chief at the department in 2010.
Afterwards, he worked various roles at Webb County Sheriff’s Office in Laredo – a small Texas town a little more than 100 miles from Uvalde. He then moved to the city’s school district police force, United ISD, which is comprised of 88 sworn peace officers.
In March, during the early days of the pandemic, Arredondo got the chance to return home, when he was offered the position of school district police chief in his native Uvalde.
‘It’s nice to come back home,’ Arredondo, who has family in the small, rural town, told the Uvalde Leader News upon accepting the gig.
The department, which only presides over the town’s school seven-school district, is comprised of four officers, one police chief, and a detective.
‘All four of us are on a group text,’ Arredondo said at the time, adding ‘they are very knowledgeable, and I encourage them to give ideas.’
He went on to assert: ‘Of course, my title is important, but having a good group is also important,’ Arredondo said, adding, somewhat prophetically, ‘If not, you can surely fail.’
During Friday’s presser, state director McCraw corrected information released by Arredondo’s department Thursday that the gunman entered the building unimpeded, contradicting prior assertions that one of their officers exchanged fire with Ramos before the gunman entered the building.
In fact, police now say that the officer had actually passed by Ramos while rushing to the scene, as the gunman crouched behind a vehicle outside of the building.
Arredondo was not at Friday’s press conference to answer questions and it remains unconfirmed if he was even inside the school at the time of the shooting.