The former chief of the Uvalde school district police and a former officer have been indicted on charges of child endangerment for their roles in the bungled police response to the 2022 massacre at Robb Elementary School, in which nineteen fourth-graders and two teachers were killed. A Uvalde County grand jury indicted then-Chief Pedro "Pete" Arredondo and then-officer Adrian Gonzales on charges of abandoning/endangering a child, a state jail felony, the San Antonio Express-News reports. They are the first criminal charges against law enforcement officers in connection with the May 24, 2022, incident, the deadliest school shooting in Texas history.
The law enforcement response to the shooting has been widely condemned as an abject failure. At least 380 officers from two dozen local, state and federal agencies went to the scene, but none forced their way into the classroom to confront the shooter until 77 minutes after he began his rampage. In January, the U.S. Justice Department released the results of an exhaustive investigation that found that leadership failures caused needless delays in neutralizing the gunman while children lay bleeding in their classroom. State Sen. Roland Gutierrez, a Democrat whose district includes Uvalde, expressed outrage that only Arredondo and Gonzales were indicted. He noted that nearly 400 law enforcement officers from two dozen agencies, including the Texas Department of Public Safety, responded to the shooting. "If they're going to indict those two officers, they need to indict the 13 DPS troopers in that hallway," Gutierrez said in an interview. "That's very disturbing to me."