Former Uvalde school district police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo and former officer Adrian Gonzales have been indicted on child endangerment charges for their roles in the flawed police response during the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting, as reported by the San Antonio Express-News.
A Uvalde County grand jury charged Arredondo with 10 counts of abandoning/endangering a child and Gonzales with 29 counts—one for each of the 19 children killed and one for each of the 10 survivors who suffered physical or psychological injuries.
These are the first criminal charges against law enforcement officers related to the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
Arredondo, the incident commander during the shooting, turned himself in at the Uvalde County Jail and was released on bond. Gonzales is expected to turn himself in.
State Sen. Roland Gutierrez expressed outrage that only Arredondo and Gonzales were indicted, pointing out that nearly 400 officers from various agencies responded to the shooting. He argued that more officers, including 13 Texas Department of Public Safety troopers, should also face charges.
“If they’re going to indict those two officers, they need to indict the 13 DPS troopers in that hallway,” Gutierrez said in an interview. “That’s very disturbing to me.”
The police response to the shooting has been widely criticized. Despite the presence of numerous officers, none entered the classroom to confront the shooter until 77 minutes after he began his attack. A January Department of Justice report on the shooting concluded that the entire police response to the shooting was a “failure” and that lives could have been saved if the police had responded appropriately to the situation.
The shooter, armed with a high-powered rifle, entered Robb Elementary at 11:33 a.m. on May 24, 2022, and began firing in interconnected classrooms 111 and 112. Arredondo and Gonzales arrived shortly after but did not take immediate action.
According to an investigation conducted for the city of Uvalde, at 11:55 a.m., Arredondo decided not to enter the classrooms, opting to clear the rest of the building and attempt negotiations, a decision that “overrode” the Uvalde police officers’ plan to storm the classroom once they had bulletproof shields.
In the aftermath, the school district fired Arredondo and replaced the entire school police force. Former Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr. echoed this sentiment, calling for a broader investigation into the actions of all officers present that day.
“If you’re going to indict those (two) officers, then we need to look at the other agencies that had officers there because all these reports seem to gloss over their involvement,” he told the San Antonio Express-News.
