‘I heard it reset’: Former school police chief Uvalde says he prioritized rescuing children in other classes

UWALDE, Texas. Uvalde High School police chief Pedro “Pete” Arredondo told investigators he was more concerned about rescuing students in other classrooms than trying to stop a perpetrator who had already shot children and teachers.

An interview with investigators the day after the May 2022 Robb Elementary School massacre shows Arredondo speaking directly about his memories of the events. CNN obtained footage of a previously unreleased interview where some of Arredondo’s responses contradict his limited public statements.

This was the only meeting about his role with the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS). He stopped cooperating with the DPS investigation after his director named him as the commander of the incident and blamed him for the decisions that resulted in the children being dead, dying and injured with the gunman for over an hour while the officers waited in the hallway outside.

The critical moment in the decision, according to Arredondo, came when he saw children in other classes.

“Once I realized what was happening, my first thought was that we needed to evacuate. We kept him – and I know it’s terrible, and I know it’s [what] our training tells us to do it, but … we keep it, there will probably be some dead, but we don’t need anything else from here,” Arredondo said.

His decision to treat the shooter as a barricaded subject and not confront him effectively resulted in the death of all the students and teachers in Classes 111 and 112. This was one of the many times he did not follow the active shooter’s rules and regulations.

Arredondo stuck with that choice for over an hour, even when he thought he heard the shooter reload, and after that was confirmed, the kids were trapped—wounded and alive, and dead—along with the shooter.

CNN tried to contact Arredondo for this story. His lawyer, George Hyde, said he was not authorized to respond to media inquiries. “I have informed him of your request and from there it will be up to him,” Hyde wrote in an email.

Arredondo did not contact CNN. His previous phone number has been disabled.

CNN also briefed the victims’ families on this coverage of Arredondo’s interview. Relatives have repeatedly complained that they only get their information through CNN’s work.

“I need a lot of firepower”

Arredondo, chief of the tiny Uvalde Unified Independent School District police force, was one of the first officers to reach Robb Elementary School, minutes after a gunman entered the building through an unlocked door on May 24.

He told investigators that he heard gunshots as he ran to the school and saw shell casings still rolling on the floor when he entered. He described a corridor full of gunshot smoke and saw Lieutenant Javier Martinez of the Uvalde Police Department retreat after being shot at through the classroom door.

Arredondo, who dropped the school and police radio as he got out of the car, called 911 to give them an update. The call was recorded at 11:40 a.m., seven minutes after the shooter entered the school. CNN obtained the full audio recording of the conversation, which was previously read by DPS Director Colonel Stephen McCraw.

“This is an emergency,” Arredondo told the dispatcher. “I’m inside a building with this man. He has an AR-15. He fired a whole bunch of times… He’s in the same room. I need a lot of firepower, I need this building to be surrounded, surrounded by as many AR-15s as possible.” , as much as possible”.

Arredondo confirmed to investigators that he only had a pistol and needed rifles. This is one of many cases where Arredondo’s decisions go against active shooter training and protocols.

Recordings provided to CNN DPS show that Arredondo received the required active marksmanship training at least three times, including in December before the massacre. The specific course he took then instructs the officers to “isolate, distract and neutralize” the attacker. It reminds officers, “First responders to an active shooting scene are usually required to put themselves in danger and show extraordinary courage to save the innocent.”

Even when Arredondo called for assault rifles, it is now known that by 11:40, Robb had officers with long guns at the other end of the corridor. Without a walkie-talkie, he said, Arredondo contacted another group of officers by phone, calling a colleague from another unit he knew well.

Arredondo also said he ignored his phone when “everyone in the world” started calling. According to the recording, he gave the 911 operator specific instructions. “Call me when SWAT is set up. I’ll turn on the vibrator, so call me twice if you need to,” he said.

“Time is now on our side”

Arredondo, who was fired as school police chief in August, said he never considered himself the commander of the incident. He refused to speak to CNN several times in the days following the massacre, including outside his office on June 1 after being accused of being the officer in charge whose disastrously misjudgment led to a bad response.

In his only extensive public comments since then, he told The Texas Tribune, “I didn’t give any orders … I called for help and asked for an extraction tool to open the door.”

Arredondo’s interviews with investigators less than 24 hours after the tragedy and footage from surveillance cameras and body cameras show he gave many directions.

He described how the officers were lined up in a “pyramid” on one side of the corridor to avoid crossfire if the shooter stepped out of the door.

And when he tried the handle of the door to another classroom and found that it was not locked, but that there were students and a teacher inside, he made an important decision: first save the others.

“We’re going to clear this building before we breach it,” Arredondo told officers in the hallway around 12:08 p.m., as heard on body camera footage. “Once they clear this room, I’m going to check what’s freed up guys before we start breaking in.”

He continued, “Now time is on our side. I know we probably have children, but we have to save the lives of others.”

Again, active shooter training for law enforcement argues otherwise. After the Columbine shooting in 1999, when the local police waited outside for a SWAT team, the emphasis was on speed – any officer could immediately go to the sound of gunfire and stop the shooter.

Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the Uvalda massacre and more were injured. At least three of the dead – two children and one teacher – were alive during the 77-minute siege. Other students and teacher Arnulfo Reyes are injured and are waiting for help. One of them, 4th grade student Maya Zamora, required over 20 surgeries and spent two months in the hospital after she was rescued.

“I heard it reboot”

In the hallway, body camera footage shows that Arredondo demanded a lockpick, but at least initially the intention was to open nearby classrooms and get people to safety rather than go where the shooter was.

Have we got the master key? he asked during a phone call, his side being captured by a body camera. “I need to make sure this west wing is completely free.”

Arredondo continued this plan even as the police radios blared around 12:12 p.m. with the news that a child was calling from a “room full of victims”. This did not change after the salvo of shots from the class at 12:21. He attempted to speak to the shooter, which is another violation of the active shooter’s policy. The shooter never answered. Instead, Arredondo told investigators, “I’m sure I heard him reload.”

Throughout the answer, Arredondo said he did not know that classrooms 111 and 112 had an internal connecting door. He told investigators that he believed the corridor door was locked, but he never tried to open it.

Doors and locks were at the center of his interviews with DPS and FBI officials. He told them that he regularly found classroom doors unlocked when he made his rounds, and indeed, he opened at least one other door to help evacuate students that day. But still, he thought that he would not be able to get inside the premises where the shooter was.

“I know I can’t grab that door. This is my idea,” he said. However, he told The Texas Tribune in June that he and a police officer tried to open doors 111 and 112 and both were locked. There is no evidence that this happened. McCraw testified at a Texas Senate hearing in June that no one touched the doors before the classrooms were stormed, and he didn’t believe they were ever locked.

“I didn’t know what was going on outside”

When he saw people he thought were border patrol officers arriving at the other end of the corridor, Arredondo said that he thought they were there to infiltrate where the shooter had taken cover.

“I let them know that we are taking these children first. First we need to keep everyone around him alive,” he told investigators.

The chief said he had requested a sniper and ordered the officers outside to make sure the shooter hadn’t escaped through the roof. But he didn’t know what was going on away from where he was.

“We’re right there, I didn’t know what was going on outside,” he said.

Outside, chaos reigned without a leader.

Arredondo was never asked who led the response during his nearly hour-long interview with investigators. It was a key moment in changing the government officials’ narrative as the story went from a heroic law enforcement response lauded by Gov. Greg Abbott the next day to a “terrible failure” as DPS Director McCraw called it in June.

“The only thing that kept the loyal officers from entering rooms 111 and 112 was the on-scene commander who decided to put the lives of the officers ahead of the lives of the children,” McCraw testified before a select committee of the Texas Senate.

In interviews, investigators were respectful and sympathetic to Arredondo, who responded by being chatty and sometimes cheerful, describing how he planned to poke a colleague who failed to run past him on his initial approach to the classrooms.

“We will be carefully checked, I expect this. We are being carefully screened as to why we didn’t go in there,” Arredondo said before reiterating his case.

“I know what firepower [the shooter] had, judging by the fact that I saw the shells, holes in the wall of the next room. I also know that I had students who were not in immediate danger, other than those that I know were in immediate danger, and the preservation of life around, everything around him, I considered a priority, ”he explained. “Because I know that there are probably casualties out there, and from the shots I heard, I know that maybe someone will die. I know it’s not like that,” he said of the people in the classes without the shooter.

Asked what advice he would give to the next department in dealing with a school shooter, he named three critical areas, all of which are now known to have been flawed in Uvald.

“Never neglect training, never neglect equipment, and never neglect communication.”

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