The Uvalde campus chief of police has come under fire for his reaction to the gun massacre at Robb Elementary School.
He is now claiming he was never the event leader on the site and that he did not announce orders directing responding officers to step aside.
What He Had to Say
Pete Arredondo was talking about the first shooting to the Texas Tribune, with his lawyer.
“Not a single deploying cop ever wavered, even for a second, to sacrifice their lives to save the kids,” Arredondo said on the website.
“We reacted to the knowledge we had and then had to adapt to whichever situation we found ourselves in. Our goal was to save as many civilians as possible.”
“The extraction of pupils from classrooms by everybody engaged rescued almost 500 Uvalde students and instructors before we were able to obtain access to the gunman and neutralize the threat.”
Miah Cerrillo, an 11-year-old who survived the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, by smearing herself in a classmate’s blood and pretending to be dead, will testify on Wednesday at a House hearing on gun violence.https://t.co/teiDBrg4gV
— The New York Times (@nytimes) June 8, 2022
Since the tragedy, authorities have been bombarded by public questions about why they did not approach Ramos earlier.
Responding cops didn’t confront the gunman right away, according to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw.
However, Arredondo, the Uvalde Unified Independent School District’s head of police, told the Texas Star that he never regarded himself in that position while the incident unfolded.
“I didn’t give any commands,” Arredondo claimed, adding that he, “asked for help and requested an extraction device to open a door” to the class where Ramos was.
According to the New York Times, the team of US Border Patrol officers, who eventually murdered Ramos, was warned not to enter that classroom over their earpieces at one time.
Arredondo’s attorney told the Texas Tribune that his client never said it, and if it was spoken, he isn’t sure what was said.
What Happened on the Day?
“It’s not like someone ordered, ‘Stand down,'” Arredondo’s lawyer, George Hyde, explained.
“‘Right currently, we can’t go in until we have the tools,’ it stated. “So we’ll do everything we can and save lives.’ What was it, exactly? It aimed to get the children, parents, and instructors out of the classrooms.”
He who gave the order to gain entry also said in the video that he attempted hundreds of keys to get through the door between cops and Ramos, while wearing no body armor.
CBS News: the mom in Uvalde who police handcuffed, and who ran into the school to rescue her children, says that law enforcement called her with a threat: if she talked to the media about the police response she would face an obstruction of justice chargehttps://t.co/AwhtXhUJYf
— Hamza Shaban (@hshaban) June 4, 2022
“Every time I tried a key, I was just hoping,” he told the Texas Tribune, which stated authorities entered the classroom 77 minutes after the shooting started.
Arredondo characterized the classroom door as possessing a steel jamb meant to prevent assailants from pushing their way in from the passageways.
He claimed he was unaware of 911 calls from children and instructors inside the classrooms pleading for assistance because he didn’t have his radio with him; no one in the halls said anything.
