Uvalde Police Sergeant Resigns After Department Places Him On Leave
Uvalde Police Department Sgt. Donald Page resigned a day after the police department announced that it had placed an unnamed officer on paid leave after learning that not all bodycam footage from the 2022 mass shooting was given to the state for investigation.
Page, who joined the Uvalde Police Department in 2006, declined to answer the Uvalde Leader-News’ question on Wednesday about whether his resignation was related to the unnamed officer being put on leave last week. However, the city confirmed to the Uvalde Leader-News on Wednesday that Page was the officer who had been placed on paid leave.
Neither the Uvalde Police Department nor the city immediately responded to HuffPost’s requests for comment.
In a text message to HuffPost, Page said “no comment” when asked about his resignation.
Page was one of the first officers on the scene the day a shooter killed 19 students and two teachers at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022. Nearly 400 police officers were at the school that day, and they waited more than 77 minutes to confront the shooter.
An independent investigation commissioned by the Uvalde City Council found that Page did not commit any misconduct and had acted in “good faith.”
“You knew that it was definitely an AR,” Page said in an interview with investigators after the school shooting, according to the Texas Tribune. “There was no way of going in. … We had no choice but to wait and try to get something that had better coverage where we could actually stand up to him.”
Last month, an Uvalde police officer told Uvalde Police Department Chief Homer Delgado that his bodycam footage wasn’t included in an Aug. 10 release to media outlets of records related to the mass shooting. Delgado immediately ordered an audit of all of the department’s servers, and several additional videos from the day of the shooting were discovered, according to an emailed news release from the City of Uvalde.
Delgado has opened an internal investigation into how the oversight happened, according to the city.
“Upon assuming the role of Chief of the Uvalde Police Department, I instituted the Guardian Initiative which, among other principles, promises full transparency to our community,” Delgado said in a statement in the release. “In the spirit of our ongoing commitment to full transparency, I have ordered an immediate review of all footage collection and storage protocols within UPD and will institute a new process to ensure our department lives up to the highest standards. The Uvalde community and the public deserve nothing less.”
Delgado said in a statement Wednesday that the police department doesn’t think the footage was withheld intentionally, according to the Uvalde Leader-News.
In June, Pete Arredondo, the former police chief for Uvalde schools, and Adrian Gonzales, another former school officer, were indicted for child endangerment and abandonment for their alleged inaction on the day of the mass shooting.
CORRECTION: Due to an editing error, a prior version of this story misstated the year of the Uvalde shooting.
