By Brad Brooks
(Reuters) - The police chief of Uvalde, Texas, where a gunman in 2022 invaded a school and killed 19 children and two teachers, said on Tuesday that he was resigning.
The resignation, effective April 6, of police chief Daniel Rodriguez, who was not in Uvalde the day of the shooting at Robb Elementary school, comes just days after the Uvalde City Council released an independent investigation into the shooting it commissioned that exonerated responding officers.
Previous reports by the Justice Department and Texas lawmakers offered scathing accounts of officer wrongdoing in the response at Robb Elementary, including that responding officers did not immediately confront the 18-year-old gunman. They left him in a set of adjoining classrooms with students and staff for 77 minutes until he was killed by a police tactical team.
Rodriguez said in a written statement that he was not forced to resign, saying that "I believe it is time for me to embrace a new chapter in my career."
Mayor Cody Smith said in an emailed statement that Uvalde was grateful for Rodriguez's service. He said that assistant chief of police Homer Delgado would be named as interim chief as a search for a full-time replacement begins.
"Nothing is more important than the safety of our community, and we look forward to working together to identify the best candidate to serve the people of Uvalde," Smith said.
In the city council report released last week, independent investigator Jesse Prado, a retired Austin police detective, wrote that responding officers followed the Uvalde Police Department's policies and he found that they had all acted "in good faith."
That characterization infuriated the families of the dead children, who heard the results of the investigation from Prado during a city council meeting last week.
(Reporting by Brad Brooks in Longmont, Colorado; editing by Donna Bryson and Josie Kao)
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