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Even though he was fired for cause, Pete Arredondo, the Texas school district police chief terminated for his actions on the day of a schoolhouse massacre last year, won an appeal to remove a blemish from his discharge file, according to a state think tank that studied his case file. The decision does not enable Arredondo to get his job in Uvalde back, but it clears his record in the event he seeks employment at another agency. "The whole point of this … discharge system is to be a red flag for hiring agencies," said Luis Soberon, a policy adviser...

Newly released footage from inside Robb Elementary School during the mass shooting shows more dysfunction and failure by first responders as cops stand around waiting for instructions and Police Chief Pete Arredondo pleads with the shooter to stop. The newly released bodycam footage from May 24, first reported by CNN, shows a stunning lack of urgency among officers as an active shooter ultimately killed 19 children and two teachers. Uvalde Schools Police Chief Pete Arredondo can be heard politely asking the gunman, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, to surrender minutes after the cops hear a burst of gunfire from inside classrooms 111...

Even after the Uvalde school shooter launched a second burst of gunfire inside a fourth-grade classroom, police officers still didn’t try to stop him, video reveals. Salvador Ramos, 18, entered a Robb Elementary School classroom on May 24 and unleashed more than 100 bullets inside the classroom before cops even arrived, video obtained Tuesday by the Austin American-Statesman showed. The first responding officers approached the classroom just three minutes later. Ramos fought them off with a short burst, sending the few officers on the scene scrambling in retreat. Then, they waited. And waited. And waited. More than half an hour...

A teacher at Robb Elementary who was injured in the mass shooting says he hasn't spoken to his cousin, Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, since the shooting. On May 24, a gunman killed 19 students and 2 teachers in Uvalde, Texas. Eleven of those students were in Arnulfo Reyes' 4th grade classroom. During the tragedy, Reyes was first shot in the arm. He played dead for an hour until the gunman shot him again in the back. Speaking with NPR, Reyes said his classroom's doorknob had been broken for at least two years. He said he can't understand...

UVALDE, Texas - A major development this morning out of Uvalde, Texas. The school district's police chief is announcing he's stepping down from his city council position following the Robb Elementary School shooting that killed 19 students and two teachers. This morning, Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo is off the city council. Arredondo writing in a resignation letter, “it is in the best interest of the community to step down to minimize further distractions." Arredondo has been criticized repeatedly for his handling of the Robb Elementary shooting in May that left 21 dead. Community frustration boiled over at...

Embattled Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who’s been blamed for the failed police response to the massacre of 19 children and two teachers and who doubles as a city council member, could lose his seat at the next city council meeting. [cut] Arredondo has already missed two public meetings, claiming he’s had death threats, according to the Texas Tribune. Under a local Uvalde ordinance, a council member who misses three meetings must be removed from office. Since the city council voted unanimously to deny him a leave of absence, Arredondo could be ousted after the next meeting on...

Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arredondo was placed on leave Wednesday, nearly a month after his department botched the response to the Robb Elementary School shooting that left 19 students and two teachers dead. Arredondo was excused of his duties by Superintendent Dr. Hal Harrell after it was found that cops under his command waited 77 minutes to confront gunman Salvador Ramos on May 24. “From the beginning of this horrible event, I shared that the district would wait until the investigation was complete before making personnel decisions,” Harrell wrote in a press release. “Today, I am still without...

After the Uvalde City Council voted against a leave of absence for embattled school district police chief Pete Arredondo on Tuesday evening, Mayor Don McLaughlin harshly criticized Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw for blaming local police in last month's shooting at Robb Elementary School. It came hours after McCraw told a special committee in the Texas senate that there was "a sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject" within three minutes of the shooting, but Arredondo "decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children." McLaughlin told...

Cheers erupted on Tuesday after Pete Arredondo, the embattled police chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District (CISD), was denied a continued leave of absence from his new role as member of the Uvalde City Council. Arredondo, who was privately sworn into the council one week after the mass shooting at Robb Elementary School took the lives of 19 children and two adults, has not attended any meetings since joining the council and has largely remained out of the public eye amid heavy criticism of his actions as incident commander during the massacre. During a city council meeting on...

The Uvalde City Council meeting will be streamed in the video player above. Uvalde City Council members are slated to vote Tuesday night on “granting a leave of absence from future council meetings to Councilman Pete Arredondo,” according to a meeting agenda.

The Uvalde City Council in Texas will consider imposing a leave of absence on school police chief and councilman Peter Arredondo later Tuesday. Uvalde Mayor Don McGlaughlin is also scheduled to hold a press conference following Tuesday night's city council meeting. The meeting will be the council's first full session since a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers at Robb Elementary School in late May. Arredondo was the on-scene commander for the police response to the shooting, and he has come under intense scrutiny as more details of the response reach the public. Arredondo and other officers responded within...

Speaking at a State Senate hearing Tuesday, Texas Department of Public Safety head Steve McCraw slammed police's response to the May 24 massacre as 'an abject failure,' and that there had been enough cops at the scene to stop the gunman just three minutes into the shooting. 'Three minutes after the subject entered the west hallway, there was sufficient number of armed officers wearing body armor, to isolate distract and neutralize the subject,' McCraw told the committee [cut] In another bombshell revelation, McCraw revealed that the door to the classroom that Ramos had been hiding behind had not been locked...

Why Uvalde Cops Were Too Cowardly to Charge a Mass Shooter American police are taught first and foremost to fear for their own lives. BY RYAN COOPER MAY 27, 2022 To the layman, it might seem strange to read an Associated Press story about how, when a mass shooter invaded an elementary school in Uvalde, Texas, the local police refused to attack him for about 40 minutes despite the urging of nearby parents. “Go in there! Go in there!” one said. The police instead waited for a tactical unit from the Border Patrol (which reportedly got another student killed by...

This is a video clip posted by KENS-5 TV out of San Antonio - pictures from inside the Uvalde school while the shooting was going on are starting to get out to the press. At 0:24, a still from the school security camera system shows officers with rifles holding a corridor... with a full height ballistic shield. YouTube Link

Multiple officers were inside Robb Elementary School with rifles and at least one ballistic shield at 11:52 a.m. the day of the shooting, new video and other evidence shows. They didn’t enter the classroom for another 58 minutes. More soon via @statesman and @KVUE . 1/2

UVALDE, Texas — On Monday, KVUE and its news partners at the Austin American-Statesman exclusively obtained surveillance footage from inside Robb Elementary School on the day of the May 24 shooting. The footage shows that multiple officers were inside the building with rifles and at least one ballistic shield, 19 minutes after the gunman arrived. They didn't enter the classroom the shooter was inside for nearly another hour. Investigators believe this will prove to be a significant development as it indicates they had more than enough firepower and protection to enter that classroom before they actually did. Authorities have since...

Surveillance footage shows that police never tried to open a door to two classrooms at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde in the 77 minutes between the time a gunman entered the rooms and massacred 21 people and officers finally breached the door and killed him, according to a law enforcement source close to the investigation. Investigators believe the 18-year-old gunman who killed 19 children and two teachers at the school on May 24 could not have locked the door to the connected classrooms from the inside, according to the source. All classroom doors at Robb Elementary are designed to lock...

Another issue was the tactical teams were equipped with heavy, cylinder-shaped battering ram agents that are well-suited for breaking through the deadbolt locks on the doors of residential homes — but posed a problem with the classroom doors, according to a current and a former US Customs and Border Protection official who have been briefed on the shooting. Marcus “Sandy” Wall, a retired member of the Houston SWAT team, told the outlet that breaching the outward-opening doors with steel frames is not efficient because first responders need to pry them open instead of ram through them. Memorial for Robb elementary...

The Uvalde School Police Chief widely blamed for the disastrous cop handling of the massacre at an elementary school has revealed he intentionally ditched his radios because he thought they would 'slow him down', and said he didn't know he was in charge of the operation. [cut] Now, in his first interview since the atrocity, he told The Texas Tribune that he gave no such directive or any others - because he didn't think he was in charge. 'I didn’t issue any orders. I called for assistance and asked for an extraction tool to open the door,' he said. He...

Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo, one of the first responders to last month's elementary school massacre, said he intentionally left his two radios behind when he ran into the building to try and stop the gunman, making it impossible for him to be in contact with most of the other officers on the scene throughout the entire situation. In a phone interview with the Texas Tribune, Arredondo said he left two radios outside the school because he believed they would have slowed him down and that every second mattered. One radio had a clip that may have fallen...