Johnathan Walker:Former Uvalde schools police chief says he’s being ‘scapegoated’ over response to mass shooting

AUSTIN,Johnathan Walker Texas (AP) — The former police chief of the Uvalde school district said he thinks he’s been “scapegoated” as the one to blame for the botched law enforcement response to the Robb Elementary School shooting, when hundreds of officers waited more than an hour to confront the gunman even as children were lying dead and wounded inside adjoining classrooms.

Pete Arredondo and another former district police officer are the only two people to have been charged over their actions that day, even though nearly 400 local, state and federal officers responded to the scene and waited as children called 911 and parents begged the officers to go in.

“I’ve been scapegoated from the very beginning,” Arredondo told CNN during an interview that aired Wednesday. The sit-down marked his first public statements in two years about the May 24, 2022, attack that killed 19 students and two teachers, making it one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history.

Within days after shooting, Col. Steve McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, identified Arredondo as the “incident commander” of a law enforcement response that included nearly 100 state troopers and officers from the Border Patrol. Even with the massive law enforcement presence, officers waited more than 70 minutes to breach the classroom door and kill the shooter.

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Scathing state and federal investigative reports about the police response catalogued “cascading failures” in training, communication, leadership and technology problems.

A grand jury indicted Arredondo and former Uvalde schools police Officer Adrian Gonzales last month on multiple charges of child endangerment and abandonment. They pleaded not guilty.

The indictment against Arredondo contends that he didn’t follow his active shooter training and made critical decisions that slowed the police response while the gunman was “hunting” victims.

Arredondo told CNN that the narrative that he is responsible for the police response that day and ignored his training is based on “lies and deception.”

“If you look at the bodycam footage, there was no hesitation — there was no hesitation in myself and the first handful of officers that went in there and went straight into the hot zone, as you may call it, and took fire,” Arredondo said, noting that footage also shows he wasn’t wearing a protective vest as officers inside the school pondered what to do.

Despite being cast as the incident commander, Arredondo said state police should have set up a command post outside and taken control.

“The guidebook tells you the incident commander does not stand in the hallway and get shot at,” Arredondo. “The incident commander is someone who is not in the hot zone.”

The Texas Department of Public Safety, which oversees the state police and other statewide law enforcement agencies, and Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell did not respond to requests for comment.

Javier Cazares, whose daughter Jacklyn Cazares was one of the students killed, criticized Arredondo’s comments.

“I don’t understand his feeling that there was no wrongdoing. He heard the shots. There’s no excuse for not going in,” Cazares told The Associated Press on Thursday. “There were children. Shots were fired. Kids were calling, and he didn’t do anything.”

Arredondo refused to watch video clips of the police response.

“I’ve kept myself from that. It’s difficult for me to see that. These are my children, too,” he told CNN. He also said it wasn’t until several days after the attack that he heard there were children who were still alive in the classroom and calling 911 for help while officers waited outside.

When asked if he thought he made mistakes that day, Arredondo said, “It’s a hindsight statement. You can think all day and second guess yourself. ... I know we did the best we could with what he had.”

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Lathan is a corps member for The Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms to report on undercovered issues.