A former school police officer was found not guilty of abandoning or endangering elementary school students during the 2022 mass shooting in Uvalde, Texas, in which 19 kids and two teachers were killed.
The jury's unanimous verdict came after seven hours of deliberations, capping a two-week trial that focused on whether Adrian Gonzales failed in his duty to act as a police officer and abandoned or endangered children during the massacre. Gonzales was one of the first officers to respond to the scene and one of two officers charged over the response.
Gonzales pleaded not guilty to 29 counts of child abandonment or endangerment — 19 for the children who died and 10 for those who survived.
Wearing a blue suit and flanked on either side by his attorneys, Gonzales cast his gaze downward and sat back down in his chair as the verdict of not guilty on all counts was read Wednesday night. Appearing emotional, he later got back up and hugged his lawyers.
Family members of victims were also in the courtroom, some stoic and a few in tears after the judge announced the verdict.
Speaking to reporters following the verdict, Jesse Rizo, whose 9-year-old niece, Jacklyn Cazares, died in the massacre, said the decision sends the wrong message to law enforcement.
“Now the message is clear," Rizo said. "You’re an officer, you don’t have to do anything. You stand back and wait for the Army, for the Marines, everybody. You show up. No one takes accountability.”
Prosecutors had argued that the facts in the case were damning.
They alleged that Gonzales waited for three minutes outside Robb Elementary School before he set foot on campus and that the gunman fired 117 rounds before Gonzales launched his own attempt to neutralize the attacker.
Despite being aware of gunfire and having been told of the shooter's general location, Gonzales did not follow his training and failed to engage, distract or delay the gunman or even try to take those actions until after children had been shot, special prosecutor Bill Turner told the jury during closing arguments Wednesday.
About 77 minutes passed from the time authorities arrived on May 24, 2022, until a tactical team was able to get into a classroom and kill the shooter.
“If you have a duty to act, you can’t stand by while the child is in imminent danger," Turner said. "If you have a duty to protect the child, you can’t stand by and allow it to happen.”
Turner pointed to testimony from various teachers, telling the jury that despite the chaos of gunfire, they still acted to protect the students.
“In that stress, teachers put their kids first,” Turner said. “In that stress, kids made ways to try to defend each other. In that stress, kids comforted teachers. In that stress, kids came first. Adrian Gonzales had a duty to put the kids first.”
Gonzales' lawyers argued that his prosecution was based on emotion and that the real culprit was the gunman.
“The monster who hurt those kids is dead. That monster is dead," defense attorney Jason Goss told jurors during closing arguments.
Goss did not deny that Gonzales had a duty to act, but he said his client never saw or was in the presence of the shooter. Gonzales did try to take action after the gunman had entered the school, Goss said, and was one of the first people to reach a "hallway of death" as the shooter fired round after round from his AR-15-style rifle.
“The evidence showed that not only did he not fail, but he put himself in great danger,” Goss told reporters after Wednesday’s hearing.
Gonzales' prosecution was not an attempt at justice, the defense attorney said; instead, it was born out of pain and frustration that the gunman, who was eventually killed, could not be tried for his horrific crimes.
“The government, the power of the state, has decided that he has to pay for the failures of that day, for the mistakes that were made that day and for all the pain," Goss said.
The defense had requested a mistrial after a teacher changed her account in surprise testimony, saying she saw the gunman in an area where Gonzales was staged, contrary to a statement she gave as part of a state legislative review of the attack. But state District Judge Sid Harle instructed the jury to disregard the testimony.
A Texas House interim report found that 376 federal, state and local officers responded. The report indicated Gonzales helped evacuate children and called for a SWAT response, though the head of the Uvalde police SWAT team was already in the school.
Gonzales’ defense was granted a change of venue to Corpus Christi, about 200 miles from Uvalde, after it expressed concerns over his ability to receive a fair trial in Uvalde County, the location of intensive national media coverage in the wake of the attack.
The other officer charged over the response to the shooting is Uvalde schools police chief Pete Arredondo. His trial on 10 counts of abandoning or endangering a child has yet to be scheduled.
