Former Uvalde Officer Adrian Gonzales Found Not Guilty of Endangering Children in Mass Shooting

Adrian Gonzales had faced 29 charges for his actions in the 2022 shooting, in which 19 children were killed by a gunman at Robb Elementary School in Texas.

More than three years after a gunman massacred 21 people at Uvalde’s Robb Elementary in one of the worst school shootings in U.S. history, a former school police officer was found not guilty of abandoning or endangering children.

Adrian Gonzales, the first officer to arrive at the school, was facing 29 counts of abandoning and endangering children, 19 for the dead, 10 more for survivors, after seven hours of deliberations Wednesday.

The verdict delivered a devastating blow to families of the victims and survivors who have clamored for accountability for the delayed police response on May 24, 2022.

During the three-week trial, prosecutors argued that Mr. Gonzales, 52, failed to stop the gunman despite a witness alerting him to his whereabouts moments before the assailant stormed two connected classrooms.

Defense lawyers persuaded the jury that Mr. Gonzales had done the best he could with the information he had and that at least three other officers had arrived seconds later and also failed to stop the gunman. They also presented evidence that Mr. Gonzales had rushed into the building minutes after arriving, but retreated with the other officers after shooting began.

Some members of the victims’ families cried and shook their heads in disappointment in the courtroom after the verdict was read, but did not otherwise react. Mr. Gonzales hugged defense attorneys after he learned of his fate and wiped tears from his eyes.

Bill Turner, a special prosecutor, told the jury during closing arguments of the much-anticipated trial that Mr. Gonzales had failed to act within the first two minutes of the attack, which is the time he believed most of the children and teachers died. Some of the children were shot more than a dozen times, some at close range, an expert for the prosecution testified.

“You can’t stand by when a child is in danger,” Mr. Turner told the jury during closing arguments. “Police officers have a special duty.”

“Stop the killing. Stop the dying, even if you are the only one there,” he added.

During his closing arguments, Jason Goss, a lawyer for the defense, argued that Mr. Gonzales was singled out for the inaction of many other officers that day. “He was acting. He was trying. None of those officers are in that chair,” Mr. Goss said, pointing at his client.

The mass shooting took place at around 11:30 a.m., days after the gunman, Salvador Ramos, just shy of his 18th birthday, purchased two AR-15-style rifles and more than 1,700 rounds of 5.56-millimeter hollow-point bullets. He made his way to two connected classrooms, 111 and 112, and unleashed a barrage of gunfire while some victims repeatedly called 911 for help.

A tactical team, led by federal Border Patrol agents, eventually confronted and killed the gunman.

Two teachers were also killed in the attack but Mr. Gonzales did not face charges in connection with their deaths.

The Uvalde police response has become a lesson in what not to do during active shooter situations. Police departments in Texas and elsewhere have revised their training, including more aggressive tactics that ask officers confronting an active shooter to risk their own safety to protect civilians.

In all, about 370 officers were involved in the police response that day in Uvalde. Dozens crammed into a school hallway, near the two classrooms under siege, but most officers remained outside the campus. Only two officers have been charged, though others were fired or left their jobs.

Leaving the courtroom on Wednesday, Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece died in the massacre, said that not only was the gunman a monster, but Mr. Gonzales was, too, for failing to stop him. “They failed us over and over,” he said.

An emotional Mr. Gonzales spoke briefly after the verdict, thanking God and his lawyers. “He put them on my path,” he said, holding back tears. He said he was not ready to address the families of the victims.

The convictions of officers who fail to follow protocols for mass shootings are a rarity. A jury in Parkland, Fla., in the trial of a former sheriff’s deputy, Scot Peterson — who was also charged with child neglect and other crimes for not confronting the gunman who killed 17 people at a high school in 2018 — also found him not guilty.

Mr. Turner called at least two witnesses to the stand who testified that Mr. Gonzales had received active shooter training and was also a co-instructor of a similar course.

A second officer, the former school police chief Pete Arredondo, is expected to face trial later this year on similar charges as Mr. Gonzales did. Mr. Arredondo is accused of treating the incident as one involving an assailant barricaded inside, which meant trying to negotiate a surrender, and not an active shooter situation, which requires a more immediate and aggressive response. He has pleaded not guilty.

Earlier in the trial, the prosecution played a long video of an interrogation of Mr. Gonzales that took place a day after the massacre. In it, Mr. Gonzales described following the sounds of gunfire and finding a distressed school employee who told him that a man in black was headed toward Robb Elementary.

Mr. Gonzales told the investigator that in the moments after he arrived at the school, he focused on the woman under duress and not on the gunman’s movements.

“It was my mistake, but it’s just the adrenaline rush going and, you know, shots fired and stuff like that,” he told the investigator.

In the video, Mr. Gonzales said he waited for three other officers to enter the school, but all of them retreated after the gunman shot two of them from inside the classrooms.

“Everybody flew back, you know, so I think he got hit,” he said of one of the officers. “We kind of moved back.”

“Never went in until I got coverage,” Mr. Gonzales said, referring to police backup. He did not shoot at the gunman, he said, because he “never saw him.”

He then described breaking windows to help children evacuate.

Melodye Flores, a teacher at Robb Elementary at the time, told the jury that she was outside when she alerted an officer she assumed to be Mr. Gonzales of the gunman’s location.

“I said that he was heading into the fourth-grade building, and we needed to stop him,” Ms. Flores told the jury. “We needed to go in and stop him before he went in.”

“He just stayed there,” she said of the officer.

Nico LaHood, another lawyer for the defense, poked holes in Ms. Flores’s recollection of the events, including that she mistook the assailant’s rifle for a handgun. She also told investigators that Mr. Gonzales was wearing khakis and a white shirt and had a beard. He was cleanly shaven that day and wore a blue school police uniform.

Mr. LaHood maintained that Mr. Gonzales, with only a handgun, was insufficiently armed to challenge a gunman wielding a semiautomatic rifle, and that he did not have a “line of sight” to shoot the gunman, even after he was told of his movements. Putting himself in harm’s way would have distracted the responding officers, not the gunman, Mr. LaHood told the jury.

“If you are injured or killed, you’re no good to people that you’re trying to help,” he said.

Some family members attending the trial became emotional listening to the harrowing testimony and seeing crime scene images and their children’s autopsies. The judge overseeing the case, Sid Harle, asked officers to remove the sister of one of the teachers killed, Velma Lisa Duran, after she burst into screams on Tuesday afternoon.

The trial got off to a rocky start, after a former teacher disclosed information during testimony that had not been shared with the defense. The revelation threw the case into legal chaos, with the judge overseeing the case, Sid Harle, ordering the jury to disregard her testimony.

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