Inset photo: Peter Arredondo, Uvalde County Sheriff’s Department.Background: Reg Daniels pays respects at a memorial honoring the victims of the school shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, on June 9, 2022. (AP Photo/Eric Gay).
The former Uvalde police chief who has been criticized for the delayed police response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School shooting has asked a judge to dismiss criminal charges against him.
Pete Arredondo was indicted in June on 10 counts of child endangerment. On Friday, Arredondo’s lawyers reportedly filed a motion to dismiss the charges stemming from the massacre that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
School police chief Arredondo, who was named commander on the scene but denies the allegations, waited more than an hour during the massacre to confront the shooter, 18-year-old Salvador Ramos, who was eventually shot and killed by Border Patrol agents.
According to the Associated Press, attorney Paul Rooney said in the motion that the charges were “vague, uncertain and inconclusive.” Rooney argued that the “imminent threat of death” came from Ramos, not Arredondo. He also said Arredondo lacked the proper training or tools to confront a shooter.
“He’s being charged with a crime that is not a crime in the state of Texas. It would be illegal to charge him under the circumstances that existed on that day,” Rooney told CBS affiliate KHOU in Houston.
The victims’ families denounced these sentiments.
“How could he utter those words?,” Jesse Rizzo, uncle of victim Jackie Cazares, 9, told the TV station. “When you watch the video, I don’t know how he came to that conclusion. He was negligent. He was irresponsible. He didn’t do the job he was trained to do. He locked his children in a room with that monster for 77 minutes.”
More from Law&Crime: ‘Failed on all fronts’: Family of Uvalde shooting victim files $500 million lawsuit against officers
As Law&Crime previously reported, prosecutors allege that Arredondo failed to determine there was a shooter despite warnings that gunfire had rang out and that teachers and students had been injured. Rather than responding first to the shooter on the scene, prosecutors say Arredondo wasted valuable time by calling in a SWAT team and ordering an evacuation.
According to the lawsuit, prosecutors allege that Arredondo repeatedly encouraged the shooter, who was “hunting and shooting children,” to continue the massacre and ignored his shooting training by “deciding and announcing to others that he would postpone entering classrooms occupied by the shooter at Robb Elementary until the classrooms had been evacuated.”
He is also accused of causing further delays by not checking to see if classroom doors were locked. He allegedly did not provide keys or other “tools of entry” to locked classrooms. Prosecutors say he did not set up a “command center” while the shooting was ongoing, which would have been of great help to Border Patrol agents who showed up at Robb Elementary without clear information or instructions.
A grand jury indicted Arredondo in May, but records were not released until June 28. He was placed on administrative leave shortly after the 2022 shooting and then fired when the Uvalde School Board voted unanimously to terminate him.
An attorney for former Uvalde School Police Officer Adrian Gonzalez Nico LaHood previously told Texas ABC affiliate KSAT that his position is that LaHood did not violate school district policy or state law, but that he would need time to evaluate the allegations and the facts of the case.
The grand jury first convened in January.
In addition to Arredondo, former school police officer Adrian Gonzalez is also named in the criminal complaint and faces child endangerment charges as well.
That same month, the U.S. Department of Justice released a scathing investigation report into the mass murder at Robb Elementary School.
Arredondo and Gonzalez are the first officers to face criminal charges in connection to the shooting.
Brandi Bookman contributed to this report
Any tips we should know? (email address protected)