Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez has yet to hold a public briefing but has defended his department’s actions, while Arredondo hasn’t spoken since brief statements early last week. Arredondo was sworn in as a city council member on Tuesday, after Mayor Don McLaughlin had said the ceremony would be delayed to focus on the victims. Arredondo, an Uvalde native, won an election early last month.
“Out of respect for the families who buried their children today, and who are planning to bury their children in the next few days, no ceremony was held,” McLaughlin said in a statement Tuesday. “Our parents deserve answers, and I trust the Texas Department of Public Safety/Texas Rangers will leave no stone unturned.”
On Monday, McLaughlin said Arredondo was “duly elected” and that “there is nothing in the City Charter, Election Code, or Texas Constitution that prohibits him from taking the oath of office. To our knowledge, we are currently not aware of any investigation of Mr. Arredondo.”
Two Department of Public Safety spokespeople told the Texas Tribune that Arredondo had not responded to a request for a follow-up interview with investigators. The Department of Justice has also said it will pursue a federal inquiry into the botched response. On Tuesday, Texas’s largest police union advised its members to “cooperate fully” with the investigation.
“There has been a great deal of false and misleading information in the aftermath of this tragedy,” said the Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas in a statement. “Some of the information came from the very highest levels of government and law enforcement. Sources that Texans once saw as iron-clad and completely reliable have now been proven false.”
A senior government official who conducts school active-shooter trainings told Yahoo News on Friday that the responding officers broke every protocol put in place since the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School in Colorado.
“What they did was pre-Columbine protocol. After Columbine, all this changed — active shooters, you go in, the first guy goes in and neutralizes the threat,” the official said. “They broke every rule in the book. They did everything wrong.”
Authorities said it took time to obtain a janitor’s key to unlock the classroom door, but the official said that 45 minutes likely cost lives.