‘DIFFICULT’

Embattled Uvalde Chief Was Demoted Years Before Botched Massacre Response, Report Says

Pete Arredondo “couldn’t get along with people,” according to a sheriff he worked for at one point.

Pete Arredondo, the Uvalde school district police chief under national scrutiny for his part in the bungled response to May’s mass shooting at Robb Elementary School, was demoted from a high-ranking position in another law enforcement department nearly a decade ago, according to a report from the San Antonio Express-News. Arredondo was relegated from assistant chief to a commander in the Webb County Sheriff’s Office in October 2014, Webb County Sheriff Martin Cuellar told the newspaper. The reason, Cuellar said, was that “he couldn’t get along with people.” Colleagues, particularly in the upper echelons of the sheriff’s office, found Arredondo “difficult to get along with,” the sheriff explained, adding, “The basic thing I want to say is he just didn’t fit the qualifications or the work that I set out for him.” Cuellar said that Uvalde CISD had never called him for a reference after Arredondo applied to the department. If they had, the sheriff told the Express-News, “I would have said, ‘I don’t think [Arredondo] was capable of running even a small department.’ But they never asked.”