Pete Arredondo, chief of the Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Department, has signaled that he will be stepping down from a separate, elected position as the district continues to grapple with the tragic loss of more than a dozen elementary school children and two educators.
“After much consideration, I regret to inform those who voted for me that I have decided to step down as a member of the city council for District 3,” Arredondo said in a statement provided to the Uvalde Leader-News. “The mayor, the city council, and the city staff must continue to move forward without distractions.”
Arredondo was appointed to the Uvalde City Council on May 7 and was sworn in on May 31, a week after the shooting at Robb Elementary School. His resignation comes shortly after the city council denied his request for an extended leave of absence amid public scrutiny.
“I feel this is the best decision for Uvalde,” he added.
The embattled police chief has been on administrative leave since June 22 due to a pending investigation and a “lack of clarity” surrounding his role on May 24, Uvalde CISD superintendent Hal Harrell wrote in a memo last month.
Arredondo, the highest-paid law enforcement official in Uvalde, has remained tight-lipped about his exact actions during the mass shooting. However, the police chief did assert he did not view himself as the on-scene commander for the incident.
Just last week, Texas DPS Director Steve McCraw informed a state Senate committee that Arredondo, the state-identified incident commander, “decided to place the lives of officers before the lives of children,” despite possessing enough officers “to isolate, distract, and neutralize the subject.”
“There's compelling evidence that the law enforcement response to the attack on Robb Elementary was an abject failure and antithetical to everything we've learned over the last two decades since the Columbine massacre,” McCraw told the Texas Senate Special Committee to Protect All Texans, referencing the mass murder of 12 students and one teacher in Columbine, Colorado, back on April 20, 1999.
Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin has pushed back against McCraw’s comments, telling city council members that McCraw was placing the brunt of the blame on Arredondo to deflect and shirk his department’s responsibility in the matter.
“Col. McCraw has continued to - whether you want to call it - lie, leak, mislead or misstate information in order to distance his own troopers and Rangers from the response,” McLaughlin said last month. “Every briefing he leaves out the number of his own officers and Rangers that were on-scene that day.”