New Video from Uvalde Shows Chief Trying to Negotiate With Shooter

It has been more than three years since the shooting at Robb Elementary school resulted in 21 people dead. Since then, authorities have refused to release some video from the scene. Yesterday, some of those videos that had been held back were finally released. What they show is that school police chief Pete Arredondo spent time trying to negotiate with the shooter while people trapped in the room with him were dying.

Several new videos released on Tuesday make it clear that Mr. Arredondo, who was the head of the Uvalde School District police force and the first senior police officer on the scene that day in 2022, tried for more than 30 minutes to negotiate with the gunman, who was still inside two connected classrooms with two teachers and 28 students, at least some of whom were still alive.

The video is part of a trove of law enforcement materials that were released on Tuesday, and provides one of the clearest views yet into Mr. Arredondo’s actions in the moments after the shooting. It shows him making urgent pleas to the gunman to give himself up, even as the gunman continued to fire sporadically.

“Individual in room 111 and 112, this is Arredondo, can you please put your firearm down?” Mr. Arredondo is heard calling through the door at 11:59 a.m., about 30 minutes after the shooting had begun. He made similar requests in both English and Spanish, with the gunman making no response.

“We don’t want anyone else hurt, sir,” he said and then, “These are innocent children, sir.”

Regular readers know this is not what is supposed to happen here. The FBI has developed a clear approach for active shooter situations which it teaches to law enforcement nationwide. What police are supposed to do in an active shooter situation is line up, find the shooter and neutralize him. Maybe he surrenders or maybe they kill him, but at no point are police supposed to stop and have a chat with the killer who is still armed and still firing rounds at innocent people. Instead of following that protocol, Pete Arredondo wasted time pleading with a shooter who has already shot dozens of people, most of them children.

Two minutes later, Mr. Arredondo’s voice filled the silence again. “Please don’t hurt anyone. These are innocent children.”…

Gregory M. Vecchi, a retired crisis and hostage negotiator with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, said that based on a partial review of a transcript of the newly released videos, Mr. Arredondo should have followed mass shooting protocols that call for responding officers to neutralize the danger by any means, rather than try to negotiate.

“The protocol is to go in and you go hunting and you take care of that, because he is killing kids,” Mr. Vecchi said. “There is no barricade. There is no negotiation.”

And we know for a fact that Arredondo knew what he was supposed to do because he’d received this training just months before the mass shooting.

Two months before a gunman killed 19 children and two adults at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, the school district’s then-police chief was required to attend a training about how to respond to an active shooter, which instructed in no uncertain terms that an “officer’s first priority is to move in and confront the attacker.”…

“Time is the number one enemy during active shooter response,” a lesson plan for the training said. “The best hope that innocent victims have is that officers immediately move into action to isolate, distract, or neutralize the threat, even if that means one officer acting alone.”…

The records of the active shooter training were included in a trove of documents released by the Uvalde School District on Monday, following a years-long effort to withhold the documents about the school district’s response, security, and police training. After years of requests from the families of victims, the public, and media organizations, including ABC News, the records were released on the eve of the new school year, as prosecutors prepare to bring two former school district police leaders, including Arredondo, to trial…

“First responders to the active shooter scene will usually be required to place themselves in harm’s way and display uncommon acts of courage to save the innocent,” the training said. “A first responder unwilling to place the lives of the innocent above their own safety should consider another career field.”

Arredondo was taught exactly what to do and he did the opposite. Then the school district sat on the evidence for years. Now Arredondo is facing 10 counts of child endangerment in a trial set to start in October. He deserves to spend many years in prison for his cowardice and failure of those kids.

Here’s a report on some of the video that was just released.