Uvalde Schools Police Chief Says He’ll Cooperate With Investigation Once ‘The Families Quit Grieving’

Despite the fact that we are constantly told the only way to prevent crime is to have more and better-funded police, 19 children and two teachers were killed in a Texas elementary school while police officers stood outside doing nothing. Actually, “doing nothing” is a generous reading of their behavior, given they also reportedly worked to keep desperate parents from acting, including handcuffing, pepper spraying, and pinning them to the ground.

Texas Department of Public Safety has launched an investigation to try to find an explanation for the extreme delay in action from the Uvalde police and the school district police officers. Then this week, those police departments abruptly stopped cooperating without explanation. As it turns out, those departments would have done better to leave things unexplained. Because the reasons they’ve now offered are so much worse than anything we could have imagined they’d say.

CNN reporter Shimon Prokupecz confronted Uvalde school district police chief Pete Arredondo, who has reportedly been avoiding the media as well as the official investigation. Prokupecz basically ambushed Arredondo at his office and asked why he decided to stop cooperating with the DPS. His response was that he would release more information about the devastatingly botched response to the shooting “once families quit grieving.”

Now, there are a lot of different ways to read that quote so in terms of tone, it should probably be noted, Arredondo did not sound antagonistic or derisive, like the families are grieving too much. Rather, he tried to frame this as being “respectful” of those families’ grief and the grief of the community, saying once that grief has passed, then that would be the appropriate time for the investigation to proceed. You can watch the exchange here:

Arredondo said he would release information about the shooting “eventually.” When pressed on when that would be, he said, “Whenever this is done, the families quit grieving, then we’ll do that, obviously.” That is absurd.

First of all, if Arredondo is waiting for the grief of parents to pass following the murder of their children, he will likely be waiting forever. I don’t know what timetable he thinks grief works on but this isn’t it. Furthermore, many of these families must be demanding answers. I cannot imagine their anger and their pain, and Arredondo needs to provide those answers for his and his officers’ inaction. To claim that his refusal to do so is for the good of those families and their community is incredibly insulting to everyone grieving.

Since Prokupecz’s interview, the Uvalde school district police have doubled down on their efforts to avoid having to speak to the media, including bringing in armed officers to keep reporters off school district property, which includes police offices:

The county district attorney has also reportedly issued a gag order on the investigation:

None of this is what any reasonable person would call “respectful.”

(image: Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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