The former police chief of the Uvalde, Texas, school district who oversaw the response to a 2022 elementary school shooting that left 21 people dead, including 19 children, has been taken into custody on a charge of child endangerment, the Uvalde County Jail said Thursday.
Pete Arredondo, 52, was brought in by law enforcement and is accused of abandoning and endangering a child, the jail said.
The indictment was first reported by the San Antonio Express-News.
Uvalde Prison confirmed Thursday afternoon that Arredondo was being held at the facility.
Early this year, the Department of Justice released a 600-page report that found poor coordination, training and implementation of “active shooter” protocols among Uvalde officers who responded to the Robb Elementary School shooting on May 24, 2022 , led to a “failure” in their response.
Instead of continuing to engage the 18-year-old gunman — who was trapped in a classroom with 33 students and three teachers — officers retreated after an initial burst of gunfire and did not “immediately and continuously push forward to eliminate the threat,” the police department said.
The officers were wrongly taught that active shooters — or shooters defined by federal authorities as someone who “actively” kills or attempts to kill others — “can easily escalate into a hostage crisis,” the report said.
More than 70 minutes passed between the time officers first arrived at the school and the time the shooter was confronted and killed. In addition to the 19 students, two teachers were fatally shot and 17 others were wounded.
Texas state lawmakers previously reached a similar conclusion as the Justice Department, with a 2022 report saying the law enforcement and school district response was plagued by “systemic deficiencies and egregious poor decision-making.”
Arredondo, described in the Justice Department report as the de facto commander of the incident, was among the officers who received administrative punishment for the response.
Arredondo was fired by the Uvalde School Board last year. His attorney at the time described the former chief as a victim of the shooting and said his firing was an “illegal and unconstitutional public lynching.”
This story first appeared on NBCNews.com.
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
