in Texas, where Uvalde’s school district police chief Pete Arredondo has resigned from his new position on Uvalde’s City Council before ever sitting in a meeting. Arredondo said he made the decision to, quote, “minimize further distractions.” He has faced widespread criticism over his handling of last month’s school massacre when an 18-year-old gunman shot dead 19 fourth graders and their two teachers. State authorities say Arredondo was the incident commander who ordered officers to wait in the school’s hallway for over an hour instead of confronting the gunman. Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steve McCraw described the local police handling of the shooting as an “abject failure.” Arredondo says he didn’t think he was the incident commander.
Yeah, you’ve really captured kind of the devastating portrait that’s been portrayed by state officials here in Texas. In addition to the question of the — you know, who was in charge of the incident, and again, the crucial discrepancy, Arredondo told us he did not think he was the incident commander, but the radio transmissions and other broadcast that we’ve reviewed suggest that people did consider him in charge.
There’s also the discrepancy of whether in fact the doors were locked. You know, the chief told us that he thought that the doors had been tried and found to be locked, and that the reason for the delay was that they were waiting for a master key to arrive. Now there is a lot of suggestions — there are a lot of suggestions that, in fact, the doors were unlocked all along. There are also other discrepancies. There was talk on the transmissions of a Halligan being available, an ax-like tool that firefighters use to enter the
— source democracynow.org | Jul 05, 2022