Jury clears former Uvalde police officer of child endangerment or abandonment charges
CNN
By Eric Levenson, Matthew J. Friedman, Shimon Prokupecz, Rachel Clarke, Amanda Jackson, CNN
(CNN) — A jury has acquitted a former school district police officer of all charges based on accusations he failed to act during the Robb Elementary shooting in Uvalde, Texas – in only the second prosecution of its kind.
Adrian Gonzales, a former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District police officer, was the first member of law enforcement to get to the school while the 18-year-old gunman was still outside. He was found not guilty Wednesday of 29 counts of child endangerment or abandonment in what was the first criminal case stemming from the tragedy.
The May 2022 shooting left 19 children and two teachers dead. Gonzales, who pleaded not guilty to all counts, did not testify in his own defense.
The prosecution in the case claimed Gonzales failed to “follow and attempt to follow his active shooter training” and did nothing to stop the gunman in the early moments of the shooting, despite having enough time and information.
The defense argued Gonzales did not see the gunman when he arrived at the school and worked to evacuate students from classrooms.
Hundreds of police rushed to the school to respond, but it took 77 minutes for them to confront and kill the shooter – a lengthy time period that has led to years of investigations and finger-pointing about the delay.
Gonzales declined to speak directly to the victims’ families in a news conference after the verdict.
“No, not right now,” he said when CNN asked if he wanted to say anything to them.
The criminal case against Gonzales raised difficult legal questions about the responsibilities of police officers and who can be held accountable for a mass shooting: It was the second case ever brought against a school police officer accused of failing to act during an active shooter situation.
In the first such case, a Florida jury acquitted the school resource officer who stayed outside during the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, after his attorney had argued the officer couldn’t tell where gunfire was coming from.
Judge Sid Harle read the verdict in court after the jury deliberated for just over seven hours, before thanking the jury for their “close attention” and patience during the trial. Gonzales would have faced six months to two years in jail and a fine of up to $10,000 for each count if convicted.
“I know it was not easy for you,” Harle said to the jury after Gonzales was acquitted. “I know everybody was drafted, nobody volunteered.”
The Texas jury began deliberations Wednesday, three weeks into Gonzales’ trial.
Moments before the verdict was read, family members of the victims were seen shaking their legs nervously. When Gonzales was acquitted, bereaved family members silently sobbed while others were seen holding their faces and wiping tears.
Three members of Gonzales’ family were seen standing and holding each other while crying, and the former officer was also emotional and in tears as he was cleared of all charges before hugging his defense lawyers.
As families of the victims left the courtroom, Jesse Rizo, the uncle of a 9-year-old killed in the tragedy, said the verdict, “sends a signal that you entrust a school system, a school police officer to do what is right, and yet they have failed over and over.”
“I respect the jury’s decision but what message does it send? Wait for everybody to be killed? Slaughtered? Massacred? Is that the message that you send today?” Rizo told reporters.
What attorneys said before and after the verdict
In closing arguments Wednesday morning, special prosecutor Bill Turner told jurors their verdict would send a clear message.
“If it’s appropriate to stand outside, hearing 100 shots, while children are being slaughtered, that is your decision to tell the state of Texas,” he said. “And by the same token, if that is not appropriate, that is not how we expect officers that are charged with the duty of protecting children to act, that will also go out from this courtroom.”
In response, defense attorney Jason Goss said a guilty verdict would send a different message to law enforcement: If you take some action in response to a shooting, you could similarly be sitting in court as a defendant.
“What you’re telling police officers is don’t react, don’t respond,” he told the jury. “We cannot have law enforcement feel that way. That if they’re not perfect, if they don’t make a perfect decision, then that’s where they go.”
Prosecutors called 35 witnesses, including teachers, parents, law enforcement officers and medical experts, as they sought to prove Gonzales learned about the gunman’s movement and heard gunshots but did not attempt to stop the attack.
The defense called just two witnesses over two hours Tuesday. They focused their energies instead on cross-examining the prosecution’s witnesses, probing for inconsistencies, raising questions about what Gonzales knew and when he knew it and challenging the actions and inactions of other officers on scene.
In 2024, Gonzales and former Uvalde Consolidated Independent School District Police Chief Pete Arredondo were indicted on criminal charges related to the delayed response. Arredondo has pleaded not guilty, and a trial date has not been set.
After the verdict, lead defense attorney Nico LaHood told reporters that members of the jury “were saddened” knowing families of the victims are still in mourning, but indicated there were “gaps in the evidence.”
LaHood acknowledged the pain and grief of the victims’ families.
“We understand that their separation from their loved one is going to be felt as long as they walk on this earth,” he said. “We don’t ignore that.”
The case serves as a “wake-up call” for law enforcement to be aware that their training could later be used as a basis for criminal prosecution, said defense attorney Goss.
It “wasn’t right” or fair for prosecutors to use Gonzales’ training against him, Goss continued, as the former officer was “putting his life at risk to try to help those children.”
“We know there were failures” in the police response, Goss said, adding: “But it wasn’t because they wanted to fail. It’s because they were trying to do what they thought was right.”
What happened at the trial
The prosecution’s case primarily relied on emotional accounts of the shooting from school employees, parents and police officers, as well as Gonzales’ own words and experts on active shooter response protocols.
Teacher’s aide Melodye Flores provided the only firsthand testimony about what Gonzales did in the first few minutes after the shooting began. She testified she told the officer two or three times where the shooter was headed.
“I just kept pointing. ‘He’s going in there. He’s going into the fourth-grade building,’” she said. “He just stayed there,” she said of the officer. “He was pacing back and forth,” Flores said she could hear shots being fired.
LaHood questioned Flores about inconsistencies in her statements, including descriptions of the officer and his patrol car that do not match Gonzales or his vehicle. He suggested she may have misremembered or misunderstood other aspects of what she experienced.
“There’s a lot going on in your mind at that time, right?” LaHood asked Flores. “You testified that (Gonzales) was just kind of pacing back and forth,” he said. “But he was getting out. He’s assessing you because you’re yelling things at him, right?”
Another key piece of evidence was Gonzales’ own words in a recorded interview with a Texas Ranger and an FBI agent the day after the shooting.
In the interview, first reported by CNN before the trial began, jurors heard Gonzales admit he made a mistake when he arrived on campus and encountered a teacher’s aide who told him the gunman was dressed in all black and was trying to enter the school’s fourth-grade building.
“Now that I can sit back, I went tunnel vision, like I said, with the lady that was running,” Gonzales said in the hour-long video interview played for the jury. “That was my mistake.”
Gonzales also described in the video waiting for cover from other arriving officers and offered that as the reason he didn’t immediately enter the school and find the shooter.
In closing arguments, Turner said Gonzales had a legal responsibility to try to stop the attack and failed to do so, choosing instead to wait for backup.
“If you have a duty to act, you can’t stand by while a child is in imminent danger,” Turner said.
The defense’s first witness was Claudia Rodriguez, who testified that she saw the gunman hide from Gonzales as he arrived at Robb Elementary. Rodriguez recounted seeing the shooter duck between cars in the school’s parking lot as Gonzales drove past.
The defense also called retired San Antonio SWAT officer Willie Cantu as an expert witness. He testified about the stresses of responding to an active shooter situation in what he called “inattentive blindness.” He said there was missing context about what Gonzales was seeing and hearing, which made it difficult to judge whether his response was appropriate.
The defense’s closing arguments, meanwhile, noted that Gonzales did actually act by racing to the scene, entering the school hallway and taking fire from the gunman.
“He didn’t just stand by, he acted, except (prosecutors) just ignore all of his actions,” Goss said.
He said prosecutors had “twisted” the evidence in the case to pin Gonzales as a scapegoat.
“Those kids are not served, the memories of those children is not honored, by an injustice in their name,” Goss said.
Emotions were high in the courtroom
Throughout the trial, the one constant in the courtroom’s gallery was the presence of bereaved family members of Robb Elementary victims.
At one point, Velma Duran yelled toward the defense table where Gonzales was sitting. Her sister, Irma Garcia, was shot and killed in Room 112 of Robb Elementary School as she tried to protect her fourth-grade students, some of whom survived.
Duran shouted from the back of the courtroom following tense defense questioning of a sheriff’s deputy about policies and procedures, such as how to avoid a “fatal funnel,” where a stack of officers could theoretically be shot by one attacker.
“You know who went into the ‘fatal funnel’? My sister went into the ‘fatal funnel,’” she said loudly and clearly as Harle began to admonish her.
“Did she need a key? Why do you need a key? Wasn’t it locked?” she cried out in an increasingly distressed voice as she was taken from the public gallery. “Y’all saying she didn’t lock her door. She went into the … she went into the ‘fatal funnel.’ She did it! Not you!”
The judge told the jury to disregard the outburst, and later admonished the gallery, including the family members present.
This story has been updated with additional information.
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CNN’s August Phillips and Emma Tucker contributed to this report.
