Colonel Stephen McCrow, director of Texas’s public safety department, did not mention the name of the employee at a news conference on Friday, but said he had made the “wrong decision” not to engage with the shooter earlier.
The chief of police in the Uwalde school district is Pedro “Pete” Aredondo.
“It was decided that this was a barricaded topic,” McCrow said of the “thought process” of the commander of the incident at the time.
At the same time, children in classrooms 111 and 112 at Rob Elementary School in Uwalde repeatedly called 911 and asked for help, he said. They were in the middle of the deadliest school shooting since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.
“Of course, it was not the right decision in retrospect, where I am sitting now,” McCrow said of the supervisor’s call not to confront the shooter. “It was the wrong decision. Point. There’s no excuse for that.”
Pressed by reporters as to whether Aredondo was at the scene during the shooting, McCrow declined to comment.
Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said Friday that he insisted on full account of what happened during the shooting at Rob Elementary School in Uwalde, but said he had no right to say whether the school district police chief should be fired.
“As far as his employment status is concerned, this is something that is beyond my control and about which I have no information,” Abbott said. “Any action by all these officials will be known and identified and explained to the public.”
Aredondo did not speak publicly about the shooting after two very brief statements to the press on the day of the tragedy.
CNN tried to contact Aredondo at his home on Friday, but there was no answer.
Aredondo was identified on the Uwalde school district website as police chief and was introduced as police chief at a news conference Tuesday after the shooting at Rob Elementary School.
At the press conference, Aredondo said that the shooter was dead, but provided some other information about the massacre, citing an “active investigation” and did not answer questions from those gathered.
According to the Aredondo school district, he has almost three decades of law enforcement experience and was recently elected to a seat on Uwalde’s city council.
The school district board approved Aredondo to head the department in 2020. The head of the district, Hal Harel, said in a Facebook post at the time that the board was “confident in our choice and impressed with his experience, knowledge and community involvement.” “
Aredondo told Uvalde Leader-News after his appointment that he was happy to return to work in his hometown and wanted to focus on police education and training. “We can never have enough training,” he told the newspaper.
In March, Aredondo posted on Facebook that his department was hosting Active Shooter Training at Uvalde High School in an attempt to prepare local law enforcement agencies to respond to “any situation that may arise.” The event’s flyer, which he published, said the topics covered would include priorities for law enforcement in schools and how to “Stop the Murder”.
Aredondo previously served as a captain in the school district police department in Laredo, Texas, and in a number of roles in the Uwalde Police Department.
CNN’s Andy Rose contributed to this story.
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