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According to US media, the widely criticised police officer in charge of the response to the Uvalde, Texas school shooting that killed 19 children and two teachers was fired on Wednesday.
According to the Texas Tribune, the Uvalde school board voted unanimously to terminate district police chief Pete Arredondo’s contract.
Arredondo had previously been accused of putting “the lives of officers ahead of the lives of children” and making “terrible decisions” while managing the crime scene, according to the state’s public safety chief.
On May 24, a teen gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 students and two teachers in America’s worst school shooting in a decade. Police eventually killed the shooter.
Since it was revealed that more than a dozen officers waited for more than an hour outside a pair of adjoining classrooms where the shooting was taking place and did nothing while children lay dead or dying inside, local police have been under intense scrutiny.
Arredondo, who was suspended in June pending an investigation, asked for his suspension to be lifted in a statement issued by his lawyer earlier on Wednesday, criticising his treatment since the shooting.
The lawmakers described the situation as “chaotic” because of the 376 officers on the scene’s “lackadaisical approach” to apprehending the gunman.
During the massacre, no other officers offered to assist or replace Arredondo, they claimed.
The time between the arrival of the first officers and the death of the shooter was 73 minutes, which was deemed a “unacceptably long period of time.”
Local media reported that Uvalde police lieutenant Mariano Pargas had been suspended following the release of the Texas lawmakers’ report, while the city investigated his role in the shooting response.
In recent months, the United States has seen a string of brutal gun massacres, including at a grocery store in a predominantly Black neighbourhood in New York state and at an Independence Day parade in Illinois.
Less than 24 hours after the Supreme Court bolstered the constitutional right to bear arms, US lawmakers broke a decades-long stalemate on firearms control, passing the first major safety regulations in nearly 30 years.
