Pete Arredondo, the former chief of the school district police in Uvalde, Texas, was indicted and arrested over his actions during the police response to the 2022 school shooting in which a gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, the Uvalde County sheriff said on Thursday.
“Mr. Arredondo is currently in our custody,” the sheriff, Ruben Nolasco, said in a text message, adding that Mr. Arredondo was being held on the charge of “abandoning/endangering of a child.”
The indictment, which comes more than two years after the May 24 massacre at Robb Elementary School, is the first set of criminal charges stemming from the shooting and suggests failures in the police response beyond poor decision-making.
A second former officer was also indicted over his actions that day, according to two people briefed on the grand jury’s decision but who requested anonymity to share the findings before they were made public. The second officer, who worked under Mr. Arredondo at the school Police Department, was not in custody as of Thursday evening, Mr. Nolasco said.
Christina Mitchell, the district attorney for Uvalde, and lawyers for Mr. Arredondo, who was in charge of the six-person department with jurisdiction over Uvalde schools, did not respond to requests for comment.
Even before the grand jury began convening this year, the police response had been the subject of overlapping investigations, including by the U.S. Justice Department, a committee of the Texas Legislature and an investigator hired by the city of Uvalde. Each found serious flaws in the actions of officers who responded to the shooting at Robb Elementary School.
Ms. Mitchell conducted her own investigation and presented evidence to the grand jury.
Jesse Rizo, an uncle of one of the victims who recently won a seat on the school board, welcomed news of the indictments on Thursday.
“I hope it sends a message to the people in law enforcement that you just can’t exercise immunity and allow people to get massacred,” Mr. Rizo said. “I hope that this is just the beginning and that other officers will get charged.”
The indictments were a major development, particularly for families in Uvalde who had sought accountability. But a conviction is far from assured. In Parkland, Fla., a former sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson, who failed to confront the gunman in the 2018 mass shooting there was charged with child neglect and other crimes but was ultimately found not guilty by a jury last year.
The Uvalde indictments were first reported by The San Antonio Express-News.
Mr. Arredondo was among the first officers to arrive at Robb Elementary, just minutes after the gunman entered the school through an unlocked door and began firing at children and teachers in a pair of connected classrooms with an AR-15-style rifle.
He and other school district officers, along with others from the local Police Department, moved toward the sound of gunfire. But as they reached the classrooms’ doors the gunman fired at them and they retreated to a safe place down the hall.
What took place next has been the subject of months of painful questions, argument and moment-by-moment investigation. Information and video emerged showing officers massing in the hallway or outside the building, at times standing around without apparent direction, leadership or urgency.
After the initial burst of gunfire, including the bullets directed at the police, there was a long pause and only a few times did the gunman fire again before the final confrontation with the police. Those subsequent bursts of gunfire were heard by other officers, but even then it took them roughly another 30 minutes to breach the classrooms.
The assembled group included officers from more than a dozen agencies, including tactical units from the Border Patrol, agents from the state police and sheriff’s deputies. A Border Patrol unit, along with a sheriff’s deputy from an adjacent county, ultimately entered one of the classrooms and killed the gunman more than 77 minutes after the shooting began inside the school.
The head of the Texas state police, Steve McCraw, has blamed Mr. Arredondo for the slow response. He said it went against the training that police officers have received for decades, since the deadly school shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado in 1999, to immediately engage any gunman shooting inside a school.
The U.S. Justice Department, in its 600-page report, also largely focused on actions by Mr. Arredondo, finding that his decisions delayed the response.
Mr. Arredondo, who left his radio behind in his car as he rushed into the school, has said that he did not believe he was in charge at the scene and that he took steps to evacuate other parts of the building to save more lives.
“Once I realized that was going on, my first thought is that we need to vacate,” Mr. Arredondo said in an interview with investigators recorded a day after the shooting. “We have him contained — and I know this is horrible, and I know it’s what our training tells us to do — but we have him contained. There’s probably going to be some deceased in there, but we don’t need any more from out here.”
Mr. McCraw has called Mr. Arredondo the incident commander and said he made “the wrong decision.”
An analysis by The New York Times found that Mr. Arredondo did not appear to have acted as the commander at the school during the shooting, and that other officers who arrived at the scene, including heavily armed tactical officers from the state police and also from the Border Patrol, similarly waited to confront the gunman.
Mr. Arredondo did not appear to have made the decision for Border Patrol agents to breach the classrooms.
Source Agencies
