(Reuters) – The Uvalde, Texas, school board is expected to decide on Wednesday whether to fire the school district’s embattled police chief for his much-criticized handling of the shooting rampage that killed 19 children and two teachers in the city three months ago.
The Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Board of Trustees will hold a special meeting at 5:30 p.m. local time to consider the employment of Pete Arredondo, a public agenda posted on its website showed. He has been on unpaid administrative leave since shortly after the May 24 shooting.
He has come under scathing criticism for his handling of the massacre at Robb Elementary School in the small town in Texas Hill County about 80 miles (129 km) west of San Antonio.
Parents of children slain and wounded in the deadliest U.S. school shooting in nearly a decade have demanded the school board dismiss Arredondo.
He was forced to resign his seat on the Uvalde City Council on July 2. Three weeks later, the board was scheduled to decide Arredondo’s fate as the school district police chief, but postponed the meeting due to “process requirements” at the request of his attorney.
On Wednesday, the seven-member board was slated again to go into closed session to discuss the matter with the district’s lawyer before voting in open session on whether to terminate Arredondo from his post “for good cause,” the agenda showed.
Arredondo’s attorney, George Hyde, was not immediately available for comment.
According to the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS), Arredondo acted as “incident commander” in charge of law enforcement’s response to the shooting.
DPS officials said 19 officers waited for an hour in a hallway outside adjoining classrooms where the gunman was holed up with his victims before a U.S. Border Patrol-led tactical team finally made entry and killed the suspect.
Arredondo, they said, chose not to send officers to neutralize the suspect sooner, believing the immediate threat to students had abated after an initial burst of gunfire in the classrooms.
Arredondo, who oversaw a six-member police force before he was placed on leave, has said he never considered himself the incident commander and he did not order police to hold back on storming the suspect’s position.
(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Josie Kao)
