stLouISTNew Uvalde Records Reveal How the School District Changed Course on Supporting Police Chief
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After the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary, school leaders in Uvalde, Texas, initially planned to publicly defend district Police Chief Pete Arredondo, but officials instead chose to remain silent as investigations into police actions unfolded, newly released records show. Arredondo is now facing criminal charges over law enforcement’s delayed confrontation with the gunman.
The previously unreported details were revealed in over 25,000 pages of records the district has disclosed over the course of a week since Aug. 26 after a yearslong legal fight with news outlets, including ProPublica and The Texas Tribune, which filed over 70 public information requests for the records in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The documents should have been published in early August when school leaders and Uvalde County originally released requested records following a settlement with the news organizations. Rob Decker, an attorney representing the school district, admitted at a board meeting Aug. 25 that his office made “an error on our side” by only releasing a fraction of the files. Board members, including Jesse Rizo, who lost his 9-year-old niece Jackie Cazares in the shooting, grilled Decker about the firm’s oversight.
“When we use the word ‘error,’ that’s putting it really lightly,” Rizo said. “The word ‘negligent’ comes to mind.”
However, the district’s law firm may have again failed to disclose all of the requested information, according to Laura Prather, one of the attorneys representing the newsrooms in the records litigation. Prather sent a letter Friday demanding the district publish the remaining files, which could include details about the school maintenance issues with doors that failed to lock, Arredondo’s severance and additional communications among officials. Decker, the district’s lawyer, did not respond to requests for comment.
The school district’s repeated disclosure problems mirror the mistakes made by the city of Uvalde last year, when officials there did not include at least 50 body- and dashcam videos in their first records release. They scrambled to disclose all of them months later.
As the district’s law firm began trickling out records last week, another shooting made national headlines when two children were killed and another 21 kids and adults injured at a Catholic school in Minneapolis. The timing only further underscores the importance of releasing the Uvalde records as quickly as possible, said Kelley Shannon, executive director of the Freedom of Information Foundation of Texas.
“A lot of times, governments will think that by stalling or trying to avoid the release of records, they can shirk responsibility and avoid the tough questions,” said Shannon. Doing so only makes it harder to stop similar tragedies from happening and hinders families’ ability to heal.
“Getting information sooner rather than later is the way to go,” she said, “and that’s not what we’ve seen surrounding the Uvalde shooting.”
Though news organizations had previously obtained from sources many of the records government agencies withheld, the newly released documents include undisclosed internal communications that offer deeper insight into the inner workings of the school district. Its leaders have rarely commented on the shooting publicly in the three years since it left 19 elementary students and two teachers dead.
Among the new revelations, the documents show the unraveling of the district’s support for Arredondo as details of the delayed law enforcement response were made public in the weeks after the shooting.
School leaders have long attributed their silence and refusal to release these records to the multiple local, state and federal investigations into the law enforcement response to the massacre. That included a criminal probe by the Uvalde district attorney that eventually led to child endangerment charges being filed against Arredondo and another school officer last year. Both have maintained their innocence ahead of the trial, scheduled for later this year.
Arredondo initially received the bulk of the blame for the response, though an investigation by ProPublica and the Tribune later found that officers across state and local agencies wrongly treated the shooter as a barricaded subject, rather than an active threat, and failed to take control of the response.
Three days after the tragedy, Steve McCraw, then head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, announced at a press conference that Arredondo was responsible for law enforcement’s failure to confront the gunman until 77 minutes after he’d entered the school.
Hours later, district spokesperson Anne Marie Espinoza emailed then-Superintendent Hal Harrell a press release that defended Arredondo, stating, in part, that his action isolating the shooter helped students and staff escape the building. The statement cautioned that the district could only provide limited information due to the ongoing investigations but said it was “appropriate timing to share these clarifying details.”
The school district, however, never published that version of the press release, allowing McCraw’s narrative to continue circulating undisputed. The internal communications released so far don’t explain why. None of the district’s leaders involved responded to the newsrooms’ questions in recent days.
The district instead published a press release the following Wednesday that made no mention of Arredondo but said the school would not comment on the shooting until all state and federal agencies completed their review.
Emails also show that during the week after McCraw’s press conference, the district’s law firm drafted paperwork to place Arredondo on administrative leave.
Harrell waited several more weeks before taking that action.
The documents reveal Arredondo was increasingly anxious to discuss his side of the story. In an email exchange with a reporter from The New York Times shortly after McCraw’s press conference, Arredondo wrote that he wished he could speak publicly: “It’s extremely difficult not to be able to respond right now.”
The police chief said he could not comment due to the ongoing investigation at that point.
About two weeks later, as the investigations continued, Arredondo gave the Tribune an exclusive interview sharing his experience of the shooting response and maintaining that he was not the incident commander.
He told Harrell, the superintendent, the article was coming about two hours before publication.
The superintendent’s emails indicate he met with the district’s law firm the next day to discuss drafting an agreement for Arredondo that barred him from making any more public statements unless he received written permission from Harrell. The instructions emphasize that the district will remain silent about the shooting to “ensure the integrity of the pending investigations,” indicating public comments could be considered interference.
“Any failure to comply with these directives may result in adverse job action, up to and including termination of your employment,” stated the agreement.
On June 15, the police chief informed the superintendent that he needed time off to attend a hearing at the Texas Capitol the following Tuesday and to prep with his counsel the day before.
Arredondo testified behind closed doors for five hours in front of the state House committee tasked with investigating the shooting on June 21. The same day, McCraw provided a searing condemnation of the law enforcement response in a separate state Senate hearing that was open to the public. He claimed police could have stopped the shooter within three minutes had it not been for Arredondo’s indecisiveness.
The next day, Harrell placed Arredondo on administrative leave.
In a draft of the press release announcing Arredondo’s leave, then-Assistant Superintendent Beth Reavis suggested saying that district leaders had not received any information about the response ahead of the hearing.
“Yesterday, like you, I saw the released information for the first time,” she suggested to Harrell and the district’s attorney, then said they should add, “Something like ‘Pete’s on leave, blah blah blah’” in an email.
The district ultimately published a press release stating Harrell initially did not intend to make personnel decisions until after the investigations into the shooting were concluded, but due to the uncertainty of when they would be done, he decided to place Arredondo on leave.
Arredondo’s attorney, Paul Looney, said he wasn’t surprised when the district walked back its support for their police chief or when he found out from the news organizations that the district had drafted a letter requesting Arredondo’s leave weeks before giving it to him.
“It’s obvious that their initial reaction was the truth and then they decided to shelve the truth and join DPS on cover-your-ass politics and Pete was expendable,” Looney said. “The truth is that Pete did a good job that day.”
The majority of the documents disclosed in the latest batch were pulled from Harrell’s email inbox. In the hours and days after the tragedy, leaders and survivors of other school shootings offered support. But many parents, educators and law enforcement across the country called for him and the police force to resign.
Harrell often emailed himself to-do lists that included reminders like “funerals,” “security we can get done” and people he needed to call. The former superintendent received backlash during a June 9 press conference where he declined to answer questions about law enforcement investigations. The next day, he included “retirement plan” and “transition plan” on his emailed to-do list. Harrell, who did not respond to the newsrooms’ interview requests, retired later that year.
The latest batch of emails also raised additional questions. The release, for example, included a chart that showed 13 threats made to schools in the district that year, including one to Robb Elementary, but did not provide details on how leaders handled them or exactly when they occurred.
Once the school district completes its release of records, DPS will be the last agency sued by the newsrooms that continues to shield materials related to the shooting from disclosure. Prather, the newsrooms’ counsel, said the state law enforcement organization’s documents are especially important because the agency led the investigation into the shooting and maintains a 2-terabyte file with the most extensive accounting of the event.
The newsrooms won an initial ruling in 2023 and the judge ordered DPS to publish its records, but the agency appealed the decision. The appellate court has yet to make a ruling after oral arguments last October.
The state agency did not respond to requests for comment for this story, but it has long argued that publishing documentation of the shooting could interfere with ongoing investigations and eventual prosecutions.
“You’re talking about a situation where people have experienced the most horrible tragedy and loss they could possibly imagine and they already distrust those who are supposed to protect their children,” Prather said. “Then to further fight for three years to get answers about what happened that day and to have that information trickle out, only after you’ve been told by a court over and over to produce it … it’s like a death by a thousand cuts.”
Jessica Priest and Alex Nguyen of The Texas Tribune contributed reporting.