After the Uvalde school board convened a ‘joke’ of a meeting to address the shooting rampage at Robb Elementary School, outraged parents are demanding action.
They expressed their dissatisfaction with the Texas school system for failing to address safety practices or sanction the police chief who declined to send cops into the school while gunman Salvador Ramos, 18, killed children.
After Uvalde Superintendent Hal Harrell said the district was ‘excited’ for the results of multiple investigations into law enforcement’s response to the horrific shooting, residents expressed their displeasure.
The investigations were begun after it was discovered that Ramos had been inside the school for 77 minutes before police broke in and killed him.
Pete Arredondo, the school police chief, has come under fire from the public for not dispatching a team quickly enough to put an end to the gunman’s heinous rampage.
Congressman Joaquin Castro, who argued it was ‘odd and disturbing’ the school board didn’t take action against the chief, has now asked the FBI to take the lead on the investigation, alleging ‘it’s clear that the state and local officials now are not cooperating with each other.’
Parents left Friday’s school board meeting with growing rage after Harrell refused to answer their questions about school security.
‘We want answers to where the security is going to take place. This was all a joke,’ Uvalde parent Angela Turner told CNN. ‘I’m so disappointed in our school district.’
Turner, a mother of five, lost her niece, 11-year-old Miranda Mathis, during the May 24 massacre.
She said the shooting has left her own children fearful to attend school, claiming her six-year-old told her: ‘I don’t want to go to school. Why? To be shot?’
Dawn Pointevent, who also attended the meeting, echoed Turner’s concerns, arguing that her seven-year-old son is now ‘deathly afraid’ to go to school next year.
Turner encouraged parents and community members to put pressure on the school board, saying: ‘These people will not have a job if we stand together, and we do not let our kids go here.’
During the school board meeting, which was the first held since the shooting, Harrell announced the district had declined to fire Arredondo, despite the agenda having allowed the board time to do so.
Harrell said he was ‘eager’ for the investigations into the shooting to ‘run their course,’ implying the school could take disciplinary action against the cop in the future.
He told the concerned parents he had few updates to provide, but assured them students would ‘never’ return to Robb Elementary School, The Texas Tribune reported.
The superintendent also expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and hailed the slain teachers, who reportedly stood in the line of fire to protect their students, as ‘heroes’.
On Saturday, Rep. Castro questioned the district’s response to the incident, arguing it was unusual the school board didn’t ‘at least put the chief on administrative leave while everything is sorted out.’
‘Nobody’s been disciplined for this. There’s been no repercussions at all for what many have described as one of the worst law enforcement failures in American history,’ the Democrat told CNN.
‘We, the people of the United States, have now seen the story and the version of the story change four or five times.’
Castro, like the Uvalde families, wants to discover where the mistakes were made on the day of the shooting.
‘When I talked to the relatives in Uvalde, they wanted answers about why this occurred to their children in their community,’ Castro added.
Despite the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas requesting their members to assist in the investigation, the Congressman accused officials of ‘not complying’ with the investigation.
‘In the aftermath of this tragedy, there has been a significant deal of incorrect and misleading information,’ the union stated in a statement earlier this week. ‘Some of the information came from government and law enforcement officials at the highest levels.’ It stated that “sources that Texans formerly thought were ironclad and fully credible have now been proven untrue.”
Castro said the FBI, which has been partnering with state and local officials on the investigation, told him ‘it was kind of split up.’
He has asked the bureau to take full lead of the probe, in hopes of getting answers soon. 
On May 24, Ramos invaded Robb Elementary School with an AR-15 rifle and fired over 100 rounds, killing 21 people. A total of seventeen people were hurt.
The adolescent had been inside the school building for 77 minutes when cops arrived with a key and executed the crazy lunatic.
Arredondo, who was the acting incident commander during the slaughter, refused to send cops into the building because he believed the shooting had morphed into a hostage situation, according to Texas Department of Public Safety Director Steven McCraw.
McCraw admitted during a press briefing last Friday that waiting to take Ramos down ‘was the wrong decision.’
The legislator said the fact that the calls were going to the city police but were not communicated to Arredondo was a ‘system failure’ and claimed the school police chief was not given all the necessary information when he opted against an immediate confrontation with Ramos.
Authorities have not yet disclosed how Arredondo, a Uvalde local, was communicating with other law enforcement officials at the scene.
On May 24, Salvador Ramos, 18, invaded Robb Elementary School with an AR-15 rifle and fired over 100 bullets, killing 21 people. The teen had been inside the school building for 77 minutes when officers arrived with a key and killed him.
Arredondo was not carrying a radio throughout the massacre and was never notified that children were dialing 911 from within the building, according to State Senator Roland Gutierrez, who has openly criticized law enforcement’s response to the horrific killing.
‘Uvalde PD was the one receiving 911 calls for 45 minutes while officers sat in a hallway, while 19 officers sat in a hallway for 45 minutes,’ Gutierrez said at a press conference on Thursday.
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In 2020, he was appointed to command the school district’s police unit of a half-dozen officers. The force is in charge of providing security at district campuses, manning sporting events, and dealing with drugs investigations.
Arredondo formerly worked for the Webb County Sheriff’s Office and the United ISD Police Department after graduating from Uvalde High School in 1990.
He has yet to speak publicly about the massacre and has declared that he will not share any additional information while the funerals are still taking place.
On Wednesday, the school police chief told CNN, “We’re going to be respectful to the families.” ‘We’ll do it eventually,’ says the narrator. We’ll obviously do that once this is completed and the families have stopped grieving.