Former police chief and Uvalde school official face first criminal charge for failure to respond to 2022 mass shooting

CNN
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A grand jury has indicted two former Uvalde School Police officers over the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School that left 19 children and two teachers dead, two sources in Texas state government familiar with the prosecution told CNN on Thursday.

Former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former school police officer Adrian Gonzales were named in the indictment, the first charges brought in connection with the school massacre.

Arredondo turned himself into the custody of the Texas Rangers in Uvalde on Thursday, a Texas Department of Public Safety official told CNN. The former police chief was arrested on 10 counts of child endangerment and known criminal negligence, according to a Uvalde County Jail official.

According to prison officials, Arredondo was subsequently released on bail.

The indictments against the two officers were not immediately available at the Uvalde County District Court’s office.

Arredondo and Gonzales face charges of child abandonment and endangerment, Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell told the Uvalde Leader-News.

Family members of the victims have met with prosecutors to discuss the results of the months-long grand jury investigation, said Brett Cross, the guardian of 10-year-old Uziyah Garcia, one of the fourth-graders killed in the shooting.

Earlier this year, the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing report concluding that police officers had many opportunities to reconsider their flawed response to the May 24, 2022, shooting at Robb Elementary School.

Gunshot wounds, the report that a teacher had been shot, and the desperate call from a student who was trapped with the shooter could have – and should have – led to action much earlier to stop the bloodshed, the report said.

Instead, it took 77 minutes, from the moment the 18-year-old gunman entered Robb Elementary School until he was stopped. The carnage remains one of the deadliest episodes in America’s ongoing plague of campus shootings.

In its 575-page report nearly 20 months after the massacre, the Justice Department cited serious leadership errors by certain police officers who rushed to Robb Elementary School.

Arredondo was fired in August 2022 for his role in the failed response. In May, his successor, Joshua Gutierrez, submitted his resignation and his last day of work was Wednesday, according to a school official.

Officials, school employees and victims of the shooting testified before the grand jury

Several law enforcement officers who responded to the shooting, including members of the Texas Department of Public Safety, have been called to testify before the grand jury, CNN previously reported.

School officials and victims of the shooting began testifying before the grand jury in March, shortly after the Uvalde City Council released an independent report that cleared all local officials of any wrongdoing.

The independent investigator hired by the city reported his findings to a packed city council meeting and said all Uvalde Police Department officers called to the school acted in good faith and should be exonerated.

The findings have sparked anger among many of the victims’ parents and community members, who have been demanding for nearly two years that some of them should not be acquitted. Less than a week after the report was released, Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez abruptly announced his resignation, effective April 6, saying it was time for “a new chapter” in his career.

The Justice Department report rejected the original official account of brave rescue workers saving lives that day, stating that “many victims said this added to their pain during this difficult time.”

The report found that numerous problems continued to arise even after the shooter was killed – from rescuing students from school and reuniting them with their families to the way grieving parents were told their children were dead, releasing information about what happened and providing therapy.

The report describes the rapid arrival of police officers, who ran in the direction of the gunfire and then stopped almost immediately when they got close to the classrooms where the gunman killed fourth-graders and teachers.

This decision contradicted the generally accepted response protocol in the event of a shooting, which instructs law enforcement to approach and eliminate any threat.

Instead, the intensity decreased as officers initially viewed the situation as a barricaded suspect incident that did not require immediate intervention, even as additional officers arrived and signs of ongoing danger increased.

This was “by far the most serious tactical error,” said the team from the Justice Department’s Office of Community Oriented Policing Services.

In May, 19 families of students and teachers killed or injured in the mass shooting said they had reached a $2 million lawsuit with the city and announced plans to sue 92 Texas Department of Public Safety officials, the school district and individual employees.

The city confirmed the agreement in a statement.

“It has been two unbearable years,” said Javier Cazares, the father of nine-year-old victim Jacklyn Cazares, at a press conference in May. “We all know who took the lives of our children, but on May 24 there was an obvious systemic failure. The whole world saw it.”