Uvalde School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo, who was responsible for the May 24 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, gave the explanation in a new interview with the Texas Tribune where he defended the delayed response of law enforcement for the extermination of an 18-year-old. shooter Salvador Ramos. Arredondo has been harassed by critics, who believe lives could have been saved if police had acted faster and reached the injured faster. “No officer who responded ever hesitated, even for a moment, to put himself in danger to save the children,” Arredondo told the newspaper. “We responded to the information we had and had to adapt to what we were facing.” The door of the classroom where Ramos was was made of steel and he could not kick in, Arereddo told the newspaper. He spent more than an hour on the treadmill trying dozens of keys. “Every time I tried a key, I was just praying,” Arredondo told the Texas Tribune. “The only thing that mattered to me right now was to save as many teachers and children as possible.” People visit memorials to victims of school shootings in Uvalde Town Square on May 26, 2022 in Uvalde, Texas. Getty Images For the first 40 minutes, Arredondo says he waited to receive the set of keys. During this time, he called in a sniper rifle for tactical equipment and avoided the doors, believing he could cause Ramos to shoot. Dozens of keys finally arrived, but none of them opened the door. “My mind was to get there as quickly as possible, eliminate threats and protect students and staff,” Arredondo said. An hour and 17 minutes after Ramos started shooting at students with an AR-15 assault rifle, police finally broke down the classroom door and killed the gunman. Arredondo’s account of the police response is not supported by the Texas Department of Public Safety, which is investigating the shooting and the subsequent police response. The DPS said Arredondo mistakenly viewed the shooting as a suspicious incident with a barricade in which law enforcement is negotiating with the gunman. Instead, he should have treated it like an active sniper situation, where the number one priority for officers is to stop shooting by killing the gunman or taking him into custody. One hour and 17 minutes after Ramos started firing, the police finally broke down the classroom door and killed the suspect. “To its advantage afterwards, where I am sitting now, of course, was not the right decision. “It was a wrong decision, period,” DPS Colonel Steven McCraw told a news conference on May 27. Arredondo tried to talk to the gunman through the wall, but there was no answer, he told the newspaper. The school district police chief also tried to justify his decision not to take his police radios with him to school, believing he needed both hands to shoot down the shooter instead of holding the devices that could have destroyed the school. his position if the gunman listened to them. Arredondo also did not have a bulletproof vest, he told the newspaper. “Our goal was to save as many lives as we could and removing the students from the classrooms of all those involved saved more than 500 of our students and teachers in Uvalde before we could access the shooter and eliminate the threat,” Arredondo said. But Arredondo’s decision not to take his radios with him meant that he did not know that the students were calling 911 through the two ranks targeted by the gunman, begging the police to stop him. He also said that he did not consider himself the commander of the incident and thought that another officer had taken control of the organization of the various police services that responded. A mourner delivers flowers at a memorial at Robb Elementary School to honor the victims on June 9, 2022, at Uvalde.AP “I did not give orders,” Arredondo said. “I called for help and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.” Arredondo says he never told anyone not to break into the building, and at the same time took credit for telling officers to break windows outside so students in other classrooms could be evacuated. Some of the U.S. border patrol officers who responded to the school claim they ignored the order not to enter the classroom, the New York Times reported. Arredondo did not object when the team entered the room. Arredondo did not speak soon to avoid causing more grief to the victims’ families, he said. He has hired lawyer George E. Hyde. The Texas Department of Public Safety did not respond to a request from The Post for comment.
