The U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s refusal to testify has stalled the final criminal trial in the bungled law enforcement response to the 2022 Robb Elementary shooting, according to the defense and prosecution.
Local prosecutors have been fighting the federal agency for agents’ testimonies for nearly a year. Attorneys for Pete Arredondo, the former Uvalde schools police chief at the center of the criminal case, said they think they have found a better way to resolve the issue and kick-start the trial: suing CBP themselves.
Filed on March 12, Arredondo’s federal lawsuit says that he needs the testimonies of 19 CBP employees who responded to the shooting to rebut allegations that he personally delayed the response of other law enforcement officials. His legal team had previously sent a formal request to the agency over the matter, but CBP denied the demand, arguing in a February letter that the requested information could be obtained from other sources.
“They’re all witnesses of what Pete did, right?” Paul Looney, his attorney said. “We’ve got to have them. We can’t have a fair trial without them.”
Looney also said Arredondo has a constitutional right to these testimonies. He expects the lawsuit to take a few months to resolve.
“We’ve got a better case than [local prosecutors] do,” Looney said.
CBP and the Department of Homeland Security, the overseeing agency, didn’t respond to comment requests. In its February denial letter, CBP had also argued requesting agents’ testimonies would reveal “confidential law enforcement techniques and procedures.”
Uvalde County District Attorney Christina Mitchell, whose office is prosecuting Arredondo, said she is pleased about his decision to launch his own legal fight. She filed a federal lawsuit last May to compel CBP agents’ testimonies, saying that the information is significant to both the case’s prosecution and defense. According to that ongoing lawsuit, CBP has refused, similarly claiming that some of the information that Mitchell is seeking could also be obtained from other sources.
“It is unfortunate that the state and the defense have had to engage in formal litigation to obtain necessary evidence in such a horrific case as a mass shooting,” Mitchell said in a statement to The Texas Tribune. “My intention has always been to obtain all necessary and correct information and evidence to properly assess, under the laws of the state of Texas, the crimes, if any, that occurred in the Robb Elementary mass shooting.”
Arredondo is currently facing 10 counts of child endangerment in connection to the botched response to the May 24, 2022 shooting, which killed 19 students and two teachers. More than 370 officers from local, state and federal agencies were at the scene — 188 of them CBP personnel — but they waited 77 minutes to confront the gunman. CBP agents were the ones to eventually take down the shooter. The Justice Department subsequently found that delays were the result of “cascading failures of leadership, decision-making, tactics, policy and training.”
Besides Arredondo, former Uvalde schools police officer Adrian Gonzales was the only other responding officer to be indicted. Gonzales was then acquitted of all 29 counts of child abandonment and endangerment in late January following a trial that lasted nearly three weeks in Corpus Christi.
“It’s very, very difficult to understand how they’re being prosecuted,” Looney said. “I don’t have any reasonable expectation that we’re facing a conviction.”
In the meantime, Arredondo’s criminal trial has not been scheduled. It has also been relocated from Uvalde to Corpus Christi, according to Looney.
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