UVALDE, Texas — For months since the May 24 school massacre in Uvalde, Texas, attention and blame have been focused on the chief of the tiny school district's police force. That man, Pete Arredondo, was first suspended and then fired as investigators pointed to him as the incident commander who failed the students and their teachers by failing to act to stop the carnage.
But records that are still being kept confidential and interviews with officials familiar with the most sensitive aspects of the investigations shed new light on the events of that day and raise questions about another ranking law enforcement official who has, thus far, avoided nearly all scrutiny."We're looking at him," one law enforcement official said of Nolasco.
Families of the victims, meanwhile, want to know more about his role on the day catastrophe struck Uvalde. He said he had given interviews to state and federal investigators leading the official probes into the massacre.Soon after radio calls for assistance went out on May 24, scores of police from an array of different agencies poured into the neighborhood around the Robb campus on Old Carrizo Road while the massacre was unfolding inside two adjoining classrooms.
"Captain Betancourt said he was getting his information from Uvalde County Sheriff Nolasco because he had operational control," Garcia wrote in his report."Captain Betancourt said he did not know if anyone was in charge inside the building. Captain Betancourt relayed a story where at one point he started towards the door to the school and the Sheriff stated there were too many people inside there already, insinuating for Captain Betancourt not to go inside the building.
Arredondo and his attorney did not respond to requests for comment for this story. In his only news interview after the shooting, Arredondo said he did not view himself as the incident commander.In a statement issued just before being fired from the school district in August, Arredondo's attorney also made it a point to remind the public that the school attack first began as a shooting at the Diaz Street home of gunman Salvador Ramos where Ramos shot his grandmother in the face.
"In a desire to put this issue to rest, and to foreclose the suggestion that earlier reporting of the attacker's assault on his grandmother could have led to an earlier law enforcement intervention, the committee has requested records from Sheriff Nolasco's mobile phones to confirm that he was not contacted directly for assistance on Diaz Street," the committee wrote in a footnote to its July 17 report."The committee has not yet received these records.
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