The school board for the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District will vote Saturday on the termination of the district's police chief, Pete Arredondo. The superintendent recommended firing Arredondo earlier this week.
"I'll never be able to bring back what we lost, absolutely will not," Superintendent Hal Harrell said at a Uvalde CISD board meeting this week. "I pray each night for the families, but I do lie awake at night thinking about how we can do better, how we can improve and how we can secure our campuses for your children and regain that trust."
Some parents who spoke during the meeting called for Arredondo's termination.
"If he's not fired by noon [Tuesday], I want your resignation and every single one of you board members because you all do not give a damn about our children or us," one father said as the crowd cheered. "Stand with us or against us because we're not going nowhere."
The recommendation for Arredondo's termination followed a report by the Texas House Investigative Committee on the Robb Elementary Shooting. The report provided a timeline and found 376 officers were on scene that day, but the first officers to arrive waited 76 minutes to breach the classroom.
The report says two groups of officers arrived at the school and saw smoke coming from darkened classrooms.
"Chief Arredondo made similar observations of smoke, and he also saw spent casings on the ground" when he arrived, according to the report. The report says Arredondo heard no more gunfire and could see bullet holes in the sheetrock.
Arredondo told the committee although the case had started as an active shooter, he thought the situation had evolved to a "barricaded subject."
"We have this guy cornered. We have a group of officers on … the north side, a group of officers on the south side, and we have children now that we know in these other rooms. My thought was: We're a barrier; get these kids out -- not the hallway, because the bullets are flying through the walls, but get them out the wall – out the windows, because I know, on the outside, it's brick," Arredondo said, according to the committee's report.
The report says Arredondo's testimony was "consistent with that of the other responders to the extent they uniformly testified that they were unaware of what was taking place behind the doors of Rooms 111 and 112." Arredondo said the response continued as a barricaded subject because officers could not see injuries or the threat themselves.
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