HE SPEAKS

Uvalde School Police Chief Intentionally Ditched Radio During Shooting

Pete Arredondo also told the Texas Tribune that the police response to the school was delayed by a set of roughly 20 to 30 keys.

In his first interview since the Robb Elementary School shooting, the man widely seen as responsible for the delayed police response told the Texas Tribune that it had been a deliberate decision to abandon his primary tool of communication with dozens of other officers before entering the school building on May 24. The choice to ditch his radio, Uvalde school district police Chief Pete Arrendondo said, was tactical—he believed carrying his radios would slow him down or hit him as he ran. “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life,” police tactics expert Steve Ijames told the Tribune, explaining that officers are trained to take their radios everywhere. In the interview, published a day after The New York Times offered the first confirmation that Arrendondo had known that there were children alive and trapped with the shooter, he claimed that he had not known that he was the incident commander on the scene, and also explained that he had been foiled by a locked door, wasting time “praying” as he tried upwards of two dozen keys. Arredondo explained his 16-day silence following the shooting as a desire not to compound collective grief or cast blame.