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-Lurid Crime Tales-

Insult to injury: Disgraceful moment cops pin down grieving Uvalde father after court hearing about their mass shooting failures

2024-12-21

Sure.
Now they take action.

[DM] A grieving Uvalde father was tackled by police and pinned to the floor as he was escorted out of a court hearing on the 2022 school shooting.

Brett Cross and his wife Nikki were at the courthouse on Thursday to attend the hearing of former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo and former UCISD officer Adrian Gonzales, who are accused of child endangerment for their response to the Robb Elementary shooting.

Footage of the incident shows Cross telling officers to 'get the f**k off him' as they lead him out of the courthouse and then pin him to the ground.

His wife then tries to intervene and gets surrounded by cops before she falls backward as four officers continue holding Cross down.

Cross is eventually seen back on his feet, continuing to argue with the cops.

He was the legal guardian of Uziyah 'Uzi' Garcia, one of the 19 children killed in the massacre in Texas.

'We weren't even allowed to make it into the courtroom. My wife and I were assaulted by the sheriff's dept,' Cross later said on X.

'We are currently at the doctors, having our wounds tended to.'

During Thursday's hearing, the judge refused to throw out criminal charges accusing the former Uvalde schools police chief of putting children at risk during the slow response to the school shooting, while a lawyer for his co-defendant said they want to move the upcoming trial out of the small town where the massacre occurred.

Judge Sid Harle rejected Pete Arredondo’s claim that was he improperly charged and that only the shooter was responsible for putting the victims in danger. Nineteen children and two teachers were killed in the shooting on May 24, 2022.

Harle also set an October 20, 2025, trial date. An attorney for Arredondo’s co-defendant, former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales, said he will ask for the trial to be moved out of Uvalde because his client cannot get a fair trial there. Uvalde County is mostly rural with fewer than 25,000 residents about 85 miles west of San Antonio.

'Everybody knows everybody,' in Uvalde, Gonzales attorney Nico LaHood said.

Both former officers attended the hearing.

Nearly 400 law enforcement agents rushed to the school but waited more than 70 minutes to confront and kill the gunman in a fourth-grade classroom. Arredondo and Gonzales are the only two officers facing charges — a fact that has raised complaints from some victims’ families.

Both men have pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of abandoning or endangering a child, each of which carry punishment of up to two years in jail. Gonzales has not asked the judge to dismiss his charges.

A federal investigation of the shooting identified Arredondo as the incident commander in charge, although he has argued that state police should have set up a command post outside the school and taken control.

Gonzales was among the first officers to arrive on the scene. He was accused of abandoning his training and not confronting the shooter, even after hearing gunshots as he stood in a hallway.

Arredondo has said he was scapegoated for the halting police response. The indictment alleges he did not follow his active shooter training and made critical decisions that slowed the police response while the gunman was “hunting” his victims.

It alleges that instead of confronting the gunman immediately, Arredondo caused delays by telling officers to evacuate a hallway to wait for a SWAT team, evacuating students from other areas of the building first, and trying to negotiate with the shooter while victims inside the classroom were wounded and dying.

Arredondo’s attorneys say the danger that day was not caused by him, but by the shooter. They argued Arredondo was blamed for trying to save the lives of the other children in the building, and have warned that prosecuting him would open many future law enforcement actions to similar charges.

'Arredondo did nothing to put those children in the path of a gunman,' said Arredondo attorney Matthew Hefti.

Uvalde County prosecutors told the judge Arredondo acted recklessly.

The massacre at Robb Elementary was one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, and the law enforcement response has been widely condemned as a massive failure.

Nearly 150 Border Patrol agents, 91 state police officers, as well and school and city police rushed to the campus. While terrified students and teachers called 911 from inside classrooms, dozens of officers stood in the hallway trying to figure out what to do. More than an hour later, a team of officers breached the classroom and killed the gunman.

Within days of the shooting, the focus of the slow response turned on Arredondo, who was described by other responding agencies as the incident commander in charge.

Multiple federal and state investigations have laid bare cascading problems in law enforcement training, communication, leadership and technology, and questioned whether officers prioritized their own lives over those of children and teachers. Several victims or their families have filed multiple state and federal lawsuits

Posted by:Skidmark

#5 Next time, set a hand sanitizer station up.

Posted by: swksvolFF 2024-12-21 11:16

#4 Arredondo caused delays by telling officers to evacuate a hallway to wait for a SWAT team, evacuating students from other areas of the building first, and trying to negotiate with the shooter while victims inside the classroom were wounded and dying.

What was learned (and subsequently unlearned) at Columbine was to attack immediately, do not delay. The police action in Nashville shut down the potential for greater violence.

Posted by: Procopius2k 2024-12-21 10:56

#3 It used to be that small city and town police forces could languish under poor leadership without real consequences. Now every town is potentially on the front lines.

Posted by: Super Hose 2024-12-21 10:18

#2 As a long time supporter of the Police, it seems that all too many have been infected with the tyrannical virus, they care way more for the establishment elite than the people.

Posted by: alanc 2024-12-21 09:29

#1 "The police are not there to stop disorder. They're there to maintain disorder."-Richard J. Dailey, Mayor of Chicago, 1968

Posted by: ed in texas 2024-12-21 08:44

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