When Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo arrived to the Robb Elementary School massacre, when 21 people were slain, including 19 children, he apparently did not have his radio with him.
According to the New York Times, which cited a law enforcement person involved with the inquiry, this may have created a delay in Arredondo interacting with police dispatchers.
According to the New York Times, he instead used his smartphone to contact a landline for the district police, informing dispatchers that the gunman was armed with an AR-15. He subsequently said, wrongly at the time, that Salvador Ramos had been apprehended.
It continues the theme of the story regarding the Uvalde School District Police’s attempts to stop the shooter shifting, including a teacher initially blamed wrongly to have left a door open that allowed Ramos to get in. It has since been confirmed by the Texas Department of Public Safety that he entered via an unlocked door.
It was revealed last week that the Uvalde Schools Police Department ignored several protocols from their own active shooter training drills, which they had practiced just two months ago.
Arredondo has spoken to the Texas Rangers, who are handling interviews on behalf of the state’s department of public safety investigation into the massacre.
During a bombshell presser in the wake of the shooting, Texas Department of Public Safety head Steven McCraw slammed Chief Pete Arredondo for failing to engage 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, mistakenly believing the teen had finished his killing spree and was hiding out from cops.
‘With the benefit of hindsight, from where I’m sitting now, of course it was not the right decision. It was the wrong decision, period,’ McCraw said.
The assertion from the state safety official comes as the the school district’s police force continues to face scrutiny for their handling of the shooting.
McCraw revealed that 911 calls had been made by students while locked in the classroom with Ramos, as Arredondo and his men waited outside the room for more than an hour.
Eventually, Border Patrol agents who rushed to the scene after hearing the incident unfold on scanners, breached the locked classroom door, with one fatally shooting Ramos.
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 the municipal council just days before the slaughter, had a routine police career.
In 1993, he began his law enforcement career as a 911 dispatcher for Uvalde’s municipal police department, and over the next 20 years, he rose through the ranks to become the agency’s assistant police chief in 2010.
After that, he worked at the Webb County Sheriff’s Office in Laredo, a tiny Texas town about 100 miles from Uvalde, in a variety of capacities. He subsequently joined United ISD, the city’s school district police department, which has 88 sworn peace officers.
Arredondo had the opportunity to return home in March, during the early days of the epidemic, when he was given the post of school district police chief in his hometown of Uvalde.
When Arredondo accepted the job, he told the Uvalde Leader News, “It’s good to return back home.” Arredondo has family in the small, rural community.
Four policemen, one police chief, and a detective make up the department, which exclusively oversees the town’s seven-school system.
‘We’re all on a group text,’ Arredondo said at the time, adding, ‘They’re highly knowledgeable, and I urge them to offer suggestions.’
‘Of course, my title is significant, but having a solid group is equally crucial,’ Arredondo continued, adding, almost prophetically, ‘If you don’t have a decent group, you can certainly fail.’
During Friday’s news conference, state director McCraw clarified information supplied by Arredondo’s department on Thursday, stating that the gunman entered the facility uncontested, contradicting previous claims that one of their officers exchanged fire with Ramos before the gunman entered.
In fact, when the shooter huddled behind a car outside the building, investigators said the officer had passed by Ramos while hurrying to the incident.
Arredondo was not there for the news conference and it is unclear whether he was even inside the school at the time of the incident.