Former Uvalde School District Police Chief Charged Over Shooting Response

The former chief of the Uvalde School District police and a former officer were both charged over their response to the 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School that left 21 people, including 19 children, dead.

A grand jury indicted Chief Pete Arredondo on ten counts of child endangerment and Officer Adrian Gonzales on 29 counts of child endangerment.

The slow response to the shooting left many outraged as hundreds of officers descended on the scene but waited 77 minutes before engaging the shooter, who barricaded himself inside a classroom while he murdered the students inside.

A "critical incident review" conducted by the Department of Justice blamed Arredondo for treating the shooting as a barricade situation instead of an active shooter. Instead of storming the classroom to take down the shooter as quickly as possible, the officers waited, even as parents tried to force their way past the police and into the school to look for their children.

"Had law enforcement followed generally accepted practices in an active-shooter situation and gone right after the shooter to stop him, lives would have been saved, and people would have survived," U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland said .

A report by state lawmakers also came to a similar conclusion, blaming "systemic failures and egregiously poor decision-making" on the part of the responding officers.