General
Two Uvalde Police Officers to Enter Pleas Over Shooting Response
A grand jury charged the officers with abandoning and endangering the children who were left holed up with a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Texas.
Two years after one of the nation’s deadliest school shootings, one of the two police officers who face criminal charges over the delayed police response was scheduled to be arraigned in court on Thursday.
Adrian Gonzales, who was one of the first officers to arrive at the scene of the May 2022 shooting in Uvalde, Texas, was expected to enter a formal plea to charges stemming from his failure to confront the gunman before backup arrived.
Pete Arredondo, the former school district police chief, who was identified in various investigations as the effective incident commander, waived his right to attend the hearing and entered a plea of not guilty in court filings.
The two officers — among more than 370 who were involved to some degree or another in the police response that day — were indicted by a grand jury on charges of abandoning and endangering a child, the first criminal charges to stem from the shooting and its aftermath.
The shooting occurred on May 24, 2022, when a teenage gunman armed with an AR-15-style rifle made his way into two connected classrooms at Robb Elementary School and terrorized fourth-grade students and their teachers. Meanwhile, police officers from a variety of agencies waited outside in the hallway. Some 77 minutes elapsed before a tactical team, led by federal Border Patrol agents, confronted and killed the gunman.
Mr. Arredondo has said that he had considered the gunman to be no longer an active shooter but a barricaded subject, and that he had focused on safely evacuating nearby classrooms until a team with sufficient armament could storm the gunman’s location.
