Uvalde Officers Indicted For Not Doing The One Damn Thing They Were Hired To Do
Two cops faces negligence charges for their actions during the 2022 shooting that killed 21 people, mostly kids.
Good news! A public servant is being held responsible for his allegedly criminal actions in a relatively prompt fashion! Two public servants, in fact!
Ha ha, no, it is not Donald Trump, do we live in Narnia or something?
No, we’re talking about Pete Arredondo, former School District Chief of Police in Uvalde, and a school police officer named Adrian Gonzales. This week a grand jury returned indictments against the two men on charges of being a couple of pants-pissing chucklefucks during the massacre at Robb Elementary School in May of 2022.
Of course “pants-pissing chucklefucks” is not a recognized term under the Texas legal code, so the grand jury had to go with “child endangerment and known criminal negligence,” according to CNN. A distinction without a difference, in our opinion.
Arredondo, who was charged with 10 criminal counts, surrendered to the Texas Rangers on Thursday and was booked and released on bond. There is not yet word on how many charges Gonzales faces. The indictments will be officially released to the public when both men have been booked and processed.
The indictments come a few months after the Justice Department released a scathing 600-page report on the shooting and law enforcement’s response to it. The DOJ concluded that officers arriving at the scene after the first 911 calls failed to follow just about every best practice in the book for a mass shooting, which led to most of them standing around, thumbs jammed so far up their asses they could tickle their own larynxes, for 77 actual minutes while 19 students and two teachers bled out in the classroom where they were trapped with the gunman.
You may recall that Arredondo spent weeks after the shooting denying he was even in charge of the response at the scene despite the fact he was, you know, the local police chief. Almost 400 officers from many different agencies had rushed to the scene! It was very confusing! Maybe some random Border Patrol agent took over? Who could say!
Then bodycam footage emerged of Arredondo giving orders at the scene and other officers saying, almost verbatim, Arredondo is in command. So he might have not considered himself top dog, but he and everyone around him sure acted as if he was.
Gonzales’s role in the shooting response is less clear — we can’t find much on Ye Olde Google, and his name does not appear at all in the DOJ report — though one report says he was one of the first officers to enter the building after arriving on the scene. Perhaps he then stopped in the cafeteria to score a Sloppy Joe before moving on to investigating whether a teenager was still walking around the building shooting children with an AR-15, we don’t know. But that would be as good an excuse as any. Which is to say, it would not be any kind of an excuse at all.
There also is no word on whether or not other charges are coming for other officers. One Texas politician, however, thinks there damn well should be:
State Senator Roland Gutierrez told CNN Thursday he believes the Texas Department of Public Safety also bears substantial responsibility for the failed law enforcement response and should have been included in the indictments.
“This is nothing but a whitewash of the most tragic mass shooting in our nation’s history – one of them at least – and certainly the worst officer-involved response to a mass shooting in our nation’s history. And all of it falls in the hands of the Department of Public Safety and (its director) Steve McCraw.”
McCraw had said after the shooting that the response was “an abject failure” and that all of his officers’ actions would be investigated, which is a little like closing the barn door when the horse is already halfway across the continent.
Of course the other thing America could do is stop fetishizing guns and gun culture and all that rugged individualism horseshit, but the Supreme Court, which is now the executive as well as the judicial branch, probably won’t let us.
[CNN / DOJ Report]
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OT: SCOTUS is fucking *wilding* out. This is what everyone warned the progressive left about, watch the courts, and they still took their balls and went home in 2016 because Hillary was [insert some Karl-Rovian-talking-point they had ingested like the tastiest soporific treat].
And now we're dealing with people who will take their ball and go home in 2024 because Biden is "old" or the situation in the Middle East is not being handled exactly they way they arm-chair quarterbacked it...How do you convince people, this is not just about the man atop the party; that the "Presidency" is also about the people they surround themselves with- and if you cannot see the difference between the adults in the Democratic Party and the Biden Administration, and the outrageous monsters behind Project 2025 and in the Trump fold, there is something deeply, catastrophically wrong with you.
Of the many horrible things about Uvalde, the one that haunts me the most is the cop who wanted to rush in because his wife had been shot and he needed to rescue her, and was ordered not to.
So his wife was allowed to die while he remained outside doing nothing.