Officials say Uvalde Schools Police Chief Peter Arredondo, who reportedly waited to confront the gunman at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, had completed an active shooter course in December.
According to NBC News, Arredondo had completed an eight-hour "Active Shooter Training Mandate" course on Dec. 17, 2021. Arredondo had also completed an active shooter course a year prior, on Aug. 25, 2020, the same year he became a police chief.
Steven McCraw, the head of the Texas Department of Public Safety, said that "it was the wrong decision" to not let 19 officers rush in as the 18-year-old gunman opened fire for at least an hour, killing 19 children and two adults.
But McCraw said that Arredondo believed the shooter had barricaded himself in the school and that the children were not in immediate danger.
A New York Post report asks whether Arredondo had a police radio on him at a time when students from inside the school were calling 911.
"That's going to be key," an anonymous source said. "If those 911 calls were being communicated to the officers or the incident commander."
Arredondo was the highest-ranking officer and among the first to arrive at the scene.
"We're still trying to determine if he had a radio on him, if he was monitoring the communication channels," the source added. "If they were being relayed, it also raises questions as to why it was not treated as an active shooter situation."
Despite reports mentioning Arredondo had held officers back, one cop who was there says Arredondo is being wrongly blamed.
"It's a lie that Arrendondo told everyone to stand down. It's a lie. And we're all getting death threats. It's a f*****g nightmare," the officer who did not want to be named said.
An officer who supervised Arredondo when he worked at Laredo's school district, Ray Garner, called Arredondo an "excellent officer" and stated that "down here, we do a lot of training on active-shooter scenarios, and he was involved in those. We train [officers] to go straight for the shooters and neutralize them."
But in regards to the shooting "the problem right now is," a source says is that "there's so much confusion," about who was on the scene. The source notes officers from multiple agencies rushed to the school once 911 calls started coming in.
© 2026 Newsmax. All rights reserved.