CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas — A Texas jury on Wednesday acquitted a former Uvalde school district police officer of all criminal child-endangerment charges stemming from the botched law enforcement response to the 2022 Robb Elementary School massacre that left 19 students and two teachers dead.
Adrian Gonzales, 52, faced 29 counts of felony child endangerment over what prosecutors said was his failure to act against the gunman in the first minutes of one of the deadliest school shootings in U.S. history. Each count carried a potential sentence of up to two years in prison.
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The Corpus Christi jury deliberated for more than seven hours before returning not guilty verdicts on all counts. Gonzales buried his head in his hands as the verdict was read, while his attorneys patted him on the back. In the gallery, parents and siblings of victims appeared stunned. Some wiped away tears; others stared ahead in silence.
Gonzales was among the first of more than 400 law enforcement officers to respond to Robb Elementary School in Uvalde on May 24, 2022. Police waited 77 minutes before entering the classroom where the 18-year-old shooter had barricaded himself with children. The gunman, a former student at the school, was shot dead by police when a tactical team finally breached the room.
Prosecutors alleged that Gonzales failed to confront the attacker after arriving in his patrol car following reports of an active shooter. “You can’t stand by and allow it to happen,” Special Prosecutor Bill Turner told jurors during closing arguments.
The defense countered that investigators and the public were seeking a scapegoat for a sweeping failure. “They have decided he has to pay for the pain of that day and it’s not right,” defense lawyer Jason Goss told jurors. Gonzales testified that he could not see the shooter during the first chaotic minutes and denied freezing while the gunman was outside the school.
The nearly three-week trial was moved to Corpus Christi, about 282km southeast of Uvalde, after the defense argued that intense emotions in the small Hill Country city of roughly 16,000 would make it impossible to seat an impartial jury.
Gonzales is one of only two people criminally charged in connection with the police response in Uvalde. Former school district police chief Pete Arredondo is expected to face trial later this year on similar child-endangerment charges. He has pleaded not guilty.
State and federal investigations concluded that officers delayed confronting the shooter even as children and teachers were trapped inside the classroom. The Department of Justice’s 2024 report found officers weighed options in the hallway while the gunman remained inside with students and staff. By the time a tactical team led by Border Patrol agents entered, the toll had become among the worst in modern U.S. school shooting history.
Former U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland, presenting the federal report earlier this year, said lives would have been saved if police had immediately engaged the gunman.
The verdict is likely to deepen anguish and debate in Uvalde and beyond over accountability for the 77-minute delay, which has come to symbolize systemic breakdowns in training, communication and command. It also lands amid a national argument over firearm policy; in the United States, where school shootings are a recurring trauma, there are comparatively few restrictions on gun ownership relative to other industrialized nations.
For the families of the 21 victims, the criminal cases have represented one pathway to answers in a process that has stretched more than two years and included multiple investigations, firings and lawsuits. With Gonzales acquitted and Arredondo’s case still pending, the contours of legal responsibility for the law enforcement response remain unsettled even as the facts of that day are broadly established.
By Abdiwahab Ahmed
Axadle Times international–Monitoring.
