Why did they wait? Uvalde anger grows over bungled police response

Ruben Ruiz, a school district police officer in Uvalde, Texas, was standing in a hallway outside the classroom where his wife taught fourth-graders a couple of days before summer break. His wife, Eva Mireles, had just called his cellphone, begging for help after an intruder had shot her and her students.

News about the 21 children and teachers killed at the elementary school in a small town of 16,000 mostly Latino residents near the Mexican border was traumatic enough for a nation where deadly mass shootings occur with alarming regularity.

Yet revelations in recent days about the exact number of well-equipped officers who essentially stood in place for more than an hour while an intruder murdered his victims have made the tragedy ever tougher to comprehend.

Residents who had recently elected Arredondo to a city council seat were hoping to subject him to a recall election because it would have required fewer than 50 signatures. Yet laws prevent them from taking such a step until February next year.

And legal precedent affords little hope that parents could sue authorities in Texas to collect civil damages for their failure to limit the carnage at Robb elementary despite a prime opportunity to do so, according to experts. It all made for a week that seemed to prove that, even with the unthinkable, it can always get worse.

Police who respond first to so-called active shooters have been trained for at least two decades to confront the attackers as immediately as practical rather than wait for reinforcements, a painful lesson learned through countless mass killings across America over the years.

But at that point, Arredondo had officers wait while he called the municipal police force for reinforcements.

Cellphone videos from the parking lot around that time showed officers holding back onlookers urging the cops to charge into the school, other parts of which were being evacuated.

In any event, 50 minutes after the transmission about letting the local police lead, Arredondo told officers to storm the classroom where the intruder was when ready. Officers did and killed the intruder.

Yet the prospects for a resounding civil lawsuit over the police failure to protect the victims seem unlikely. Ominously for the potential plaintiffs, in late 2020, a federal court of appeals left in place a lower court ruling that found police officers were not liable for various failures to protect students during the 2018 shooting that killed 17 at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas high school in Parkland, Florida.

So some of those in Uvalde still deep in their grief went to a Tuesday night meeting of the city council, the second in a row which Arredondo had missed.

The council was considering a leave of absence for Arredondo, which would protect him from being possibly dismissed from the panel if he missed a third consecutive meeting. But residents spoke out against cutting Arredondo any sort of break, and the council voted the measure down.

One of the speakers, Kim Hammond, said there was palpable momentum for a petition to make Arredondo face a recall election for the seat he won on 7 May. Because his election had quite a low turnout, such a petition would only need 45 signatures, or 25% of the total votes cast for the contest.

But the law protects him from such a petition for the first eight months in office, and Hammond implored the council to make Arredondo either start attending meetings or risk losing his seat.

The grandmother of 10-year-old Amerie Jo Garza, one of the students killed at Robb, implored the council to dismiss Arredondo if he missed the necessary number of meetings.