San Antonio Express-News (Sunday)
Report details Uvalde police chief ’s vacation
Uvalde Police Chief Daniel Rodriguez was playing golf with friends in Phoenix on the morning of May 24, 2022, when his phone rang.
It was his civilian administrative assistant, John Guerra, back in Uvalde. An active shooter was on the loose at Robb Elementary School.
Guerra said he could hear gunshots.
“I cautioned John to be careful and stay out of the way of law enforcement’s duties,” according to a log Rodriguez kept of his phone communications that day.
It was 9:43 a.m. in Phoenix, two hours earlier than in Texas, and the news would not get any better.
At 10:11 a.m., the department’s public information officer, Jessica Zamora, called and “informed me that she anticipated there will be several victims,” Rodriguez wrote in the log. Eva Mireles, a beloved teacher and the wife of police officer Ruben Ruiz, had been critically injured, Zamora said. Mireles died soon afterward.
A call at 10:59 a.m. from Lt. Mariano Pargas, the acting police chief in Rodriguez’s absence, confirmed the worst. Pargas “informed me there were numerous deceased children,” Rodriguez wrote. “But he didn’t yet have a count.”
Rodriguez had had no breakfast that morning, only coffee. He “felt helpless and began to try and figure out how to get out of Phoenix,” he recalled months later.
He left his two golf companions, climbed into a golf cart and began trying to find a way home as quickly as possible. He would not get there until it was all over, until 19 fourth-graders and two teachers lay dead.
The chief was a few days into an eight-day Arizona vacation when a teenage gunman armed with an assault-style rifle opened fire on a pair of classrooms at Robb Elementary a few days before summer break.
The police response to the massacre is widely regarded as disastrously ineffective, a portrait of disorder, hesitation and poor leadership. Nearly 400 officers from two dozen local, state and federal agencies converged on the school, but 77 minutes went by before a Border Patrol-led team stormed the classroom where the shooter was hiding and killed him. Children bled to death waiting for police to end the siege, a U.S. Justice Department review found.
Six months later, Pargas resigned from the force to avoid being fired. Pedro “Pete” Arredondo, chief of the Uvalde school district police and the incident commander that day, was fired.
Details surface
Rodriguez, in contrast, was largely spared the storm of recrimination. After all, he wasn’t there, so how could he be blamed?
Rodriguez has said little publicly about where he was and what he did on the day of the massacre. But a recent report by Jesse Prado, a retired Austin police
detective hired by the city to assess the performance of the police department on May 24, 2022, sheds some light on the matter.
Prado’s report focused on the actions of the 28 Uvalde police officers who responded to the shooting. He found that they acted appropriately, at times heroically, obeyed department policy and were not to blame for the confused overall police response.
But five of the report’s 175 pages deal with Rodriguez. Prado interviewed him for an hour and a half on Oct. 31, 2022, with the chief’s lawyer present. Among other information, Rodriguez shared with Prado a detailed log of the phone calls he made and received
that morning. Prado it in his report.
First call comes in
included
After he learned from his administrative assistant about an active shooter at Robb Elementary, Rodriguez’s first call was to Arredondo. There was no answer.
Next, he called Pargas and told him to “get a command post set up” so heads of the various law enforcement agencies could coordinate their actions, according to the chief ’s log.
At 9:51 a.m. time, he called Arredondo again. Again, no answer.
A 10:11 a.m., he learned from Zamora that there were fatalities.
A minute later, Guerra told him “the shooter was inside the school building,” and that Pargas “had requested markers, boards and water for the command post” he had been ordered to set up. No command post ever was established, contributing to the chaos.
At 10:35 a.m., the police chief in Eagle Pass, a border town 60 miles southwest of Uvalde, called Rodriguez to say he was sending officers to assist.
At 10:59 a.m., Pargas called again. “He informed me that the shooter was shot and killed when entry was made into the classroom.” In the same call, Pargas told Rodriguez about the “numerous deceased children.”
‘This is on you’
Rodriguez went to the airport in Phoenix and pleaded with Southwest Airlines for a seat on the next flight to San Antonio, according to Prado’s report. He told airline employees who he was and why he needed to get home. They said they couldn’t help him; the flight was overbooked. Rodriguez had to wait until the next morning.
After he finally landed in San Antonio on May 25, 2022, he rushed to Uvalde. He got there in time to catch the last 10 minutes of a news conference led by Gov. Greg Abbott in the Uvalde High School auditorium.
It was a crowded, raucous affair. Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick was there. So was U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz. Former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who was running for governor against Abbott, confronted Abbott from the audience, yelling, “This is on you,” a reference to the governor’s opposition to gun control.
Cruz told O’Rourke, “Sit down and don’t play this stunt,” and then-Uvalde Mayor Don McLaughlin Jr. said, “I can’t believe that you’re a sick son of a bitch that would come to a deal like this to make a political issue.”
Rodriguez’s attention was drawn to something other than the political theater. He noticed medics surrounding Pargas, who had “nearly fainted” while watching the news conference, Prado said in his report.
‘New chapter’
Rodriguez caught up with Pargas a few days later, by which time he had recovered, and asked him why he hadn’t set up a command post on May 24, 2022.
Pargas replied that he was prepared to establish one at a funeral home across the street from the school, but when he got there, the place was bustling with high-ranking officers from the Texas Department of Public Safety, the FBI and the Border Patrol. According to Prado’s report, Pargas said he assumed DPS “would be in charge.”
Last week, Rodriguez announced that he was stepping down as police chief effective April 6. In his resignation letter, Rodriguez, a 26-year veteran of the department, said he was leaving “to embark on a new chapter in my career.”
He made no mention of the Robb Elementary shooting.