Uvalde school police chief Pete Arredondo said Wednesday that he’s still in daily contact with state investigators, countering claims by state law enforcement investigating the response to last week’s deadly shooting.
Mr. Arredondo rejected the suggestion that he had stopped cooperating with the Texas Department of Public Safety in comments to a CNN reporter outside his office in Uvalde, Texas, saying he has “been on the phone with them every day.”
“Just so everybody knows, we’ve been in contact with DPS every day,” Mr. Arredondo told CNN. “I’ve been on the phone with them every day. Just so you know, we’ve been talking to them every day.”
A department spokesperson told reporters Tuesday that Mr. Arredondo had failed to respond to requests for two days, even though other police and school officers have cooperated, in an indication of friction between the chief and state law enforcement.
Mr. Arredondo emerged as the focus of the police response to the May 24 shooting after DPS director Steve McCraw said the school police chief made the call to wait for more than an hour before storming the classroom where the attacker had barricaded himself.
Mr. McCraw called it “the wrong decision” and did not give the chief’s name, but Mr. Arredondo has led the six-officer department since 2020. Before that, he spent 16 years on the Uvalde police force, according to Heavy.com.
Last month, he was elected to the city council with 69% of the vote, or 126 votes. He and the other members were sworn in privately Tuesday with no advance notice.
“Uvalde City Council members were sworn in today as per the City Charter,” Mayor Don McLaughlin said in a late Tuesday statement. “Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held. Our parents deserve answers and I trust the Texas Department of Public Safety/Texas Rangers will leave no stone unturned.”
The swearing-in ceremony had been viewed by reporters as an opportunity to question Mr. Arredondo, who has avoided the public eye since being blamed for delay in breaching the classroom where 19 children and two teachers were killed.
Mr. McCraw said the chief, who was the incident commander, decided that the attacker was no longer an active shooter but a barricaded subject.
Mr. Arredondo declined to address the allegations, saying that his department wanted to be “respectful to the families” as they bury their dead.
“Just so you know, we’re going to do that eventually, obviously and whenever this is done and when the families quit grieving, then we’ll do that,” he said.
The 18-year-old gunman entered the school at 11:33 a.m. through an unlocked back door. He was shot and killed after Border Patrol, police and a sheriff’s deputy breached the classroom at 12:50 p.m.
At Friday’s briefing, Mr. McCraw said a teacher propped open the back door, but the department backtracked Tuesday, saying that she initially wedged the door open with a rock but then returned and closed it after seeing the gunman jump the perimeter fence. The door failed to lock.
“That door when it was finally shut, it did not automatically lock,” Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick told Fox News. “And we put in the funding for schools to do that. This was a different kind of lock that had to be activated apparently.”
• Valerie Richardson can be reached at vrichardson@washingtontimes.com.
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